Turncoat Dev Diary: Life in the Turncoat Universe

Since much of the Turncoat Universe's history exists to provide the backstory for a mystery, I'm hesitant to say too much very specific about it, but throughout this series of blog posts, I'll be talking about the process and the motivation that went into building our universe as well as the nuts and bolts of building the actual game. For the former to make any sense, you'll need at least a little context.

The original Turncoat story is set in the late 24th century during a war being fought between Earth and its former scientific colony on Mars. People of Earth call the people of Mars "Seditionists" or "Seds"; they only rarely call them "Martians" and never "Colonists".

This is not a civil war, however. Though no Earth government ever officially recognized Mars' sovereignty, neither had there ever been any attempt to prevent the secession. The two planets had been peacefully coexisting until about thirty years ago. The Mars Colony actually seceded a century earlier during a bloody multi-nation (but fortunately, non-nuclear) conflict on Earth, a conflict that led to the eventual creation of a single, unified Earth government.

Why are Earth and the Mars Colony at war? What started it, and why can't the two planets find a peaceful resolution? Those are some of the bigger mysteries of the Turncoat Universe; the player and the major characters don't know all the forces that are driving the conflict. In fact, most of what they do know is based solely on propaganda from their own side. What the player does know for sure from early on is that the war was started by the Seditionists who launched a surprise attack on Earth using devastating long-range weapons. Why the Seds attacked Earth is the subject of much conjecture, but the real reasons are not known on Earth. Players also find out quickly that the war has been going on for a very long time and shows no signs of ending any time soon.

In the Turncoat universe, there is no faster-than-light travel and there are only a handful of humans who have ever left the solar system. Travel between Earth and Mars is still a danger-frought six to eight week journey depending on the relative positions of the planets. That makes the war difficult and expensive to carry on. Large scale engagements are relatively rare, and only a small percentage of Earth citizens are involved in fighting the war. War happens "out there" and doesn't really affect the day-to-day life of average Earth folk who aren't in the military.

But "out there" is a dangerous place. Ships don't have shields like in Star Trek, nor do they have FTL capabilities. They're operating millions of kilometers away from home with very little in the way of support. When a ships takes a hit from enemy weapons, people die and parts of the ship become unusable.  But these ships have a job to, and if a ship is still able to fight, it stays "out there" and fights.

The player in Turncoat sees events from the point of view of elite Earth soldiers stationed on one of Earth's "Deep Fleet" ships. The Martians are the "bad guys". They're the mostly-nameless and mostly-faceless soldiers who are trying to kill them. At first, we don't even really see them as people. They're represented by enemy ships and mirror-faced space suits that are shooting at the player.

While players don't know much about the culture, history, or internal politics of these faceless enemies, at least at the start of our story, they do start finding out about life on 24th century Earth right from the get-go, so we had to put a lot of thought into what life would be like in our 24th century Earth.

One of the nice things about writing fiction is that you get to decide how things play out. We decided that we wanted our 24th century Earth to be, on whole, better than now. We want to present an optimistic outlook, but one tempered by reality. There will always be problems and conflicts; we do not want to present a utopia. People are still self-interested and petty. There are still rich and poor, and there are still people willing to profit at the expense of others.

But, overall, life is better for most people than in the past thanks to steady advances in medicine and technology and other fields.

Thinking forward nearly four hundred years is not as easy as you might think. If you work backwards that same amount of time, you'd be in the early seventeenth century. To put that in perspective, the early seventeenth century was the dawn of the Age of Sail. Firearms existed, but were not the primary weapons used to wage war. Only one of the American colonies had been founded. It would be nearly two hundred years before the British Empire would outlaw Slavery and over two hundred and fifty years until the American Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation would do the same in the United States. Throughout most of the world women were considered property, without the right to vote or hold title in their own name. People were wildly xenophobic and superstitious. In the early sixteen hundreds, people were still being put on trial and often hanged or burnt at the stake for witchcraft and heresy, and both the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions were in full force.  It would be another two hundred and twenty-five years, give or take, before Darwin’s voyage on the HMS Beagle.

A person from the early seventeenth century would have a very hard time comprehending the modern world. It would be naïve and more than a little arrogant to think we would do any better comprehending life four hundred years from now. Realistically, we can't change our fictional world as much as the real world will actually change by then, and even if we were capable of doing so, we probably wouldn't want to because our player would feel out of place and uncomfortable.

But we need to convey to the player that social mores and culture have, in fact changed. In my mind, to be science fiction, rather than just futuristic fantasy, social mores and cultural standards have to be different from today. Those changes can be for the better or for the worse, but there have to be tangible differences in how people think about the world and how they interact with others, otherwise you're just creating General Hospital in Space. With lasers.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not what we're going for with Turncoat.

So, what cultural changes did we decide on for our Twenty-Fourth Century Earth?

First, we decided that the entire world had moved to a single-unified government. People are no longer citizens of countries, they're citizens of Earth. Countries are more like states or provinces or maybe even counties in today's world, and the existence of a common enemy has reinforced this feeling of planetary patriotism. To the mainstream twenty-fourth century Earthling, all other affiliations and identitifications are secondary to world citizenship, whether it's cultural heritage, ethnicity, religion, or anything else. Those things still have some importance to some people, but they're almost always of secondary importance.

There are a small number of people in the twenty-fourth century who consider their association with a cultural group, ethnicity, race, or religion to be more important than their citizenship. Those people are called "Traditionalists", and they tend be looked down upon by mainstream citizens, much the way many people today might look down upon uneducated rural people (but more so). There aren't a lot of these Traditionalists, though, and they tend to live in isolated communities far away from population centers.

A world-wide government doesn't come without its problems, of course. There is a lot of bureaucracy and waste in both the civilian government and in the military. Even with four hundred years of technological advancement, logistics are never handled perfectly. Just like today, large bureaucracies mean mistakes get made and change is often slow. Shipments and personnel often arrive at ships completely wrong. A ship might requisition food and end up with parts for equipment that the ship doesn't even have. They might desperately need a repair technician but be sent a trauma nurse instead.

Second, not only has racism been defeated, but few people in the twenty-fourth century outside of historical sociologists would even understand what the term means. Most people in the twenty-fourth century have ancestors from many ethnic backgrounds. It's not uncommon for people to have a surname from one culture, a first name from a different culture, and the physical traits that today we would associate with a third culture. You might have someone, for example, with a Japanese surname and a Portuguese first name,  but who has blue eyes, pale skin, freckles, and red hair. Essentially, there are no rules when it comes to names or physical characteristics. The world has become a true melting pot.

Third, twenty-fourth century Earth has long-sinced achieved true gender equality. Women fight alongside men, and both the civilian and military leadership have nearly identical numbers of men and women at all levels of leadership. We decided to have a little fun with this idea, though. We made that equality almost — but not quite —  universal. We decided, for grins and giggles, to put in one little tiny bit of subtle gender bias in our universe, but in just a single occupation. The job of fighter pilot, in the Turncoat universe, is a job heavily weighted toward women. We thought it would be interesting to reverse the situation of today. We decided to play "what if", and make it so that in the Turncoat Universe, for some reason, women just tend to be better fighter pilots in zero-gravity. We don't go into why — whether it's genetic or cultural or what, but the CAG, LSO, wing commanders, and most (but not all) of the accomplished pilots we meet in the Deep Fleet, are women. In literally ever other job in the universe, though, there is absolute and complete gender equality. 

Fourth, we decided that the world had evolved in terms of sexuality and sexual relations, but that this will be something that's more of a background element rather than something we put right out in front of the viewer. Mainstream Earth citizens have mostly moved beyond caring about things like sexual orientation or sexual identity. Except for Traditionalists, people just aren't uncomfortable with the idea that other people are different than they are. Related to that, the 24th century has no body modesty taboo. The ship's facilities — showers, bathrooms, barracks, and locker rooms — are all mixed gender except for a small portion on some ships that are set aside for "Borderliners" - Traditionalists who have chosen to try and live in mainstream society for one reason or another.

Overall, the citizens of twenty-fourth century Earth are generally rational, literate people. Public education systems are fairly good and most people have at least a basic foundation knowledge of the maths, sciences, and history. Most people are also not overly superstitious. There are some exceptions to that, though. One area where most people are very superstitious is with regards to the Seditionists. People just don't have much hard information about the Martians because it's been over seventy-five years since there was any meaningful communication with the red planet. As a result, there are a lot of rumors, stories, and myths about them, ranging from the plausible to the completely absurd. Almost all of these stores are completely untrue and yet many are fervently believed by some and are given some credence by many.

This view of Earth people towards the Martians is actually inspired by U.S. attitudes about the Soviet Union during the Cold War, especially the Reagan era Cold War. If you look at popular culture back then, you see a lot of examples of "red fear" in movies and television shows. Stories like No Way Out, Red Dawn, and Little Nikita  played on American fears about the threat posed by the Soviet Union and possibility of embedded Soviet "sleeper" spies living in America. While entertaining, these stories were fueled as much by half-truths and ignorance as they were by reality. Earth beliefs about Martians are similar, but the stories are even more dramatic and even more dramatically wrong.

In addition to cultural changes, there are also some important aspects of twenty-fourth century Earth that will color the events and decisions made by characters. The most important of these is that Earth is teetering on the brink of overpopulation and starvation. Restrictions on population growth combined with advances in agriculture and genetics, and the use of the moon and several agricultural space stations to grow food mean there's enough sustain Earth's population, but just barely. People on Earth live on a rationed 1800 calorie diet except for the very wealthy, and most of that comes from processed foods. Fresh fruits and produce are relatively rare treats for the middle class and almost unheard of for the poor. Only the very wealthy ever have meat, and it is looked upon by the non-wealthy the way some people today look upon caviar and foie gras: as unappetizing foods the wealthy eat just to show off the fact that they're wealthy.

For the Deep Fleet, keeping everyone fed is a challenge, and it's not uncommon for the ships to go on "starvation rations" of 1000 or 1200 calories a day for days at a time, sometimes even longer. Supply convoys are often targeted by the Seditionists and bureaucratic mix-ups often result in too little food being sent in the first place. There is a thriving (and tolerated) black market in the fleet that uses foodstuffs as the primary currency, and several larger ships have taken to converting unused space into makeshift hydroponics bays.

More than one Earth politician has looked at the sparsely populated and lushly terraformed Mars as an option for alleviating the overpopulation problem once the war has been won.

There's more to the Turncoat Universe, of course. In fact, there's several hundred pages more, but this should give you enough context to play along at home without spoiling anything too important.

Next Up: Finding a Smaller Game in the Backstory
Previous: Origin of the Universe

Turncoat Tool Time #1: The Story Bible and Scrivener

After posting the first Turncoat Dev Diary post yesterday, I received a number of questions from people about what software was featured in the screenshot of our Story Bible. The software we're using to write the Story Bible is Scrivener by Literature and Latte.

We looked around a little bit for apps designed specifically for game design, but nothing we found really jumped out at us as a good tool for what we needed. A few months ago, a program called Articy came out. If it had come out a year earlier and if it weren't Windows only, I might have taken a hard look at it. I'm not bashing Windows, it's just that I'm comfortable and therefor more productive when using a Mac.

But, I had used Scrivener quite a lot and it seemed like an awfully good fit for what we wanted to do, especially since we didn't completely know what we wanted to do. Scrivener is great at collecting and organizing research and it lets you write styled or unstyled text and then easily reorganize what you've written. One of the nicest feature for what we were doing turned out to be something called "Binders".

Binders allow you to organize a subset of your Scrivener project's files, sort of like virtual notebooks (hence the name). We have our big Turncoat project, but then we also have a binder called "Story Bible", which stores all the information about our universe and the characters, but none of our research or game-specific information. We have individual Binders for game concepts we came up with, but also have a binder called "Scripts", which contains all the scripts from all the various game ideas we came up with in order. Items can be in more than one binder and stay automatically in sync, so they're incredibly useful when you have a lot of information that might need to get presented in different ways at different times or to different people.

Scrivener is quite easily one my favorite pieces of software ever. It's like an IDE for writing. It doesn't matter what type of writing you do, either. Whether it's fiction, screenplays, academic theses, or something else altogether, Scrivener can make the process better. I always hated that I was never able to find a way to use Scrivener in Apress' publishing workflow without problems.

If you do any serious amount of writing, you should probably take a little time to check out Scrivener. It's got a bit of a learning curve, but the instructional videos are well done, and once you get over the learning curve, it's a huge help.

My only complaints about Scrivener is the fact that it doesn't have better collaboration tools, and that it can be a little tricky using it with source control. You have to make sure you never, ever commit when the program is open. Those are relatively minor quibbles, though, and I don't think I could write without Scrivener these days. Well, maybe I could, but I wouldn't want to.

Turncoat Dev Diary: Origin of the Universe

Once we decided to make a game, the next thing we had to do was figure out what game we were going to make. That's a surprisingly hard thing to do, not because it's difficult to come up with ideas, but because it's hard to pick just one. We toyed with a few different genres, but both Rob and I kept coming back to science fiction, so we decided to run with that.

The first concrete idea we had for a game was inspired by one part of the book Starship Troopers - an important part that was completely absent from the horrible Verhoeven movie: the drop.

If you haven't read the book, the troopers in the book (unlike in the movie) wear massive powered armor and are dropped onto planets from orbiting spaceships. The first chapter of the book, and one of its most memorable scenes, describes the anticipation and terror experienced by the main character before a drop. On the very first page of the book, the protagonist, Johnny Rico, tells us:

I always get the shakes before a drop. I've had the injections, of course, and hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can't really be afraid. The ship's psychiatrist has checked my brain waves and asked me silly questions while I was asleep and he tells me that it isn't fear, it isn't anything important -- it's just like the trembling of an eager race horse in the starting gate. I couldn't say about that; I've never been a race horse. But the fact is: I'm scared silly, every time.

The actual drop and the combat that follows are described in quite a bit of detail by Heinlein, but I always found this prelude much more moving. A few pages later, we see Rico in combat and learn that he's a badass. But the very first thing we learn about him is that he's scared. Being Mobile Infantry makes him cool, but being afraid, makes him human and relatable.

From a game perspective, the drop itself seemed to have the potential to make an interesting physics-based game and this human element of fear and anticipation is exactly the kind of thing we want to drive the cinematic portions of our games.

It was a good starting point, but there were some obvious problems. Even if we could obtain the license (unlikely), we didn't really want to work in someone else's universe. We also didn't want to create something overly derivative. Like programming, all stories build upon what came before: Nobody writes in a vacuum. But there's a huge difference between being inspired by something and flat-out copying it. The success of Zynga and GameLoft show that creating blatantly derivative games can be a path to financial success, but that's not a path we're interested in.

So, what we did next was look at what it was about the this idea and the book that appealed to us, not so much in terms of game mechanics, though we may very well revisit the idea of an orbital drop in a game at some point, but in terms of the story and character.

We liked that the protagonist was relatable. He might be a badass, but he's a badass who gets scared, who has self-doubt, who makes mistakes, and who gets nervous around girls he thinks are pretty. He reminds us of real people we've known, or maybe even of ourselves a little bit.

We liked that the characters in Starship Troopers are in serious peril. Rico becomes a non-com fairly quickly because mortality is so high. An awful lot of the people Rico meets along the way die. These folks live in a dangerous universe and they have dangerous jobs. That creates an awful lot of stress, which brings out the best in some people and the worst in others. Both extremes are ripe for creating dramatic tension.

But the danger has to feel real. We don't want to succumb to the Red Shirt cheat. We don't want the viewer to feel like the main characters are safe and we don't want to be afraid, ourselves, to murder our darlings.

We also don't want to be mindless entertainment. We want to, at times, challenge the assumptions of our viewers. There's a nuance to Starship Troopers that's often lost on modern readers. Toward the end of the book, Rico tells another soldier that his native language is Tagalog. That means that the protagonist, Johnny Rico was Filipino. Why does this matter?  Well, the book was written in 1959, and Heinlein was challenging preconceived notions by getting the reader to relate to and like Johnny before revealing his ethnicity. But, there was more to it than that. Heinlein had been a Navy man and he was also challenging something very specific. At the time Starship Troopers was written and, indeed, up until 1971, Filipinos were restricted to a single Navy rating: Stewardsman. In other words, the only job enlisted Filipinos were allowed to have in the US Navy was serving food and cleaning up after meals. This, despite the fact that the U.S. Military had been officially desegregated since 1948. Heinlein wasn't in your face about this point he was making - in fact, many people completely missed it — but, as an author, he was never afraid to challenge preconceived notions.

Frankly, that's what good science fiction does: it challenges you and makes you think a little while it entertains you. A science fiction game should be no different in that regard.

Another thing we really wanted was for the person playing the game to go through a process of discovery about the universe and the characters. We wanted to hint at, but not tell the viewer outright early on, important things that drive the story. We wanted a certain complexity to the universe and we wanted real motivations for the actions of the characters, even if those motivations aren't immediately obvious. We really didn't want the viewer to know at the start very much about the characters, the history, or even the reason they're at war. We almost wanted a murder mystery vibe to it, only without actually having it be a murder mystery.

Once we had identified these goals, our "hook" almost wrote itself. We decided to call the series of games "Turncoat". We didn't know many of the details yet, but we knew that the game would follow the exploits of some kind of military squad. This would be a very loyal, very highly trained group with a lot of esprit de corps. It's a little cliché, but these would be the best of the best: a small elite that does what others can't or won't.

The original idea was that we would create a number of short games. Early on, each game would introduce one new major character. Before each episode, the viewer would be told or reminded of a single important fact: on a specific date, about a year after the events of the first game episode, one of the characters will betray the squad. Each game would have cinematics or cutscenes that would slowly, over the course of many episodes, fill in information leading up to that foretold act of treason.

This is the point where the project started to take on a life of its own. During the day, I would do my regular MartianCraft work. But, in the evenings and on the weekends, I'd often sit at my computer working on our Story Bible. Periodically, I'd ship what I had over to Rob, and we'd hash out things back and forth, trying to suss out what didn't work and what we should keep. After the universe was sufficiently fleshed out, we started working on individual game ideas and scripts. After more than a year, we ended up knowing an awful lot about the Turncoat Universe.

I still really like this original idea and hope we can do it someday, but for it to work, we realized that the episodes would have to come out relatively frequently to keep players interested. That would mean dedicating a large team to the project, larger than we can currently fund without outside investment. For that kind of undertaking, we don't just need developers and designers. We need concept artists, modelers, animators, voice actors, music composers, musicians, and people coordinating all of the various efforts.

It's a big universe, though, and there are plenty of other stories we can tell from the universe. We just needed to find one that was self-contained, wouldn't spoil the later turncoat story, and that was small enough in scope that we could fund it ourselves.

Next Up: Life in the Turncoat Universe

Previous: New Ventures: The Turncoat Dev Diary 

New Ventures: The Turncoat Dev Diary

At MartianCraft, we've done a lot of work over the past few years under what are called "no-publicity" clauses. That means we can't talk about those projects or put them in our portfolio. In fact, most of the really interesting work we did our first couple years was done that way. That was one of several reasons why, about a year ago, we chose to create a products division. By developing our own software, we're also filling out our portfolio with apps that we can show to prospective clients. Of course, that's not the only reason we decided to write our own software, but the fact that we couldn't talk about our most interesting projects was certainly a factor.

Getting Briefs out the door was a long slog, but it has been a great experience for us. The app has been well received and is being used regularly by an active and engaged community of users. Development has continued unabated since the 1.0 release, with new features being planned and actively developed.

Part of what made Brief's development so hard was keeping the very existence of the project under wraps until a few months before release. Spending nearly a year working on something we couldn't talk about really took its toll on our team.

But Briefs wasn't the only product idea we came up with last year. It's not even the only idea that we began to work on when we decided to create our own products.

We've had a second skunkworks project going from the time Briefs started, but on a much slower burn. For over a year, we've been working on ideas for a series of games. The project has been so secret that most of our staff at MartianCraft know little more about the project than the fact that it exists.

At first, there wasn't a lot of day-to-day work happening on this other project. It was mostly just Rob and me brainstorming ideas for what to do after Briefs. Then it morphed into something that Rob and I would talk about in the evenings, on the weekends or when we just needed a break.

And then it took on of a life of its own.

It turns out that we're both interested in games as a storytelling medium and we both wanted our next project to be a game, preferably one that provides an immersive, cinematic experience for the player. We also realized that we already have an awful lot of the talent in-house needed to create these kinds of games. While we've done a small amount of graphics and game work for clients over the years, we both wanted to create something that we controlled… something that was completely ours.

Over several months, we created a universe and populated it with dozens of characters. We explored the state of technology and the politics of the universe and mapped out a hundred years or so of history. We came up with ideas for several interconnected games set in the universe and wrote scripts for game cinematics. We also wrote scripts and stories that weren't tied to a specific game, but were written to help us get to know our characters and our universe better.

After a year, we had several hundred pages of back story and scripts and we began to realize we would need an AAA game budget to fully implement our vision. We had no way to fund that size of an undertaking without outside investment, so we began looking to carve out a smaller, standalone game that we could bootstrap ourselves, just as we did with Briefs.

Eventually, we picked a piece of our fictional history suited to making a good immersive game that was smaller in scope and not directly connected with the other games we'd mapped out. Then we decided to turn that idea into the game equivalent of a movie short: Polish the hell out of a short game and release it for free.

With Briefs and our non-NDA contracting work, we now can demonstrate the ability to create — soup to nuts — a wide variety of Mac, iOS, web, and Android apps. But when it comes to games, a market that interests us, we don't have anything in our portfolio to show.

We want that to change.

Here's the thing, though: Unlike Briefs, we're not going to develop this project under a veil of secrecy. In fact, we're going the exact opposite route. I'm going to share a lot of the process with you right here as it happens. I'll be blogging at least once a week, and often more frequently, until we ship. I'm going to talk about how we plan and design the app, how we create the assets used in the game. I'm going to show in-progress screenshots and concept art, and even share code. I'm going to talk about the tools we're using and why we chose them, and I will even admit to the mistakes we're going to make along the way, because we will make mistakes along the way.

There will be things about the game we're going to keep secret, but only so you can experience it as it was intended, spoiler-free. And, as long as the spam doesn't get too bad, I'm going to enable comments on these posts and will answer any questions people want to ask about the undertaking.

Wish us luck.

Next Up: Origin of the Universe