The medium of interactive entertainment has frequently proven to be a productive playground for exploring our greatest galactic fantasies. Most space-based gaming experiences are built around the narrative of venturing out into darkness in an effort to conquer or colonize the great unknown. These games frequently require the player to build up a bevy of resources in an effort to tackle a climactic encounter that will ultimately determine the fate of humanity. Typically, it all works out.
Well, that’s not quite what you’ll find in Daedalic Entertainment’s The Long Journey Home - a space exploration RPG set in a procedurally generated universe. Instead of focusing on the freedom of exploration or cosmic conquering made popular in most games, this UE4-powered experience emphasizes the separation your space-faring crew feels from the planet they call home.
I recently had the chance to chat with Daedalic Studio West's Creative Director Andreas Suika about the game’s story, it’s unique mechanics and how their small team leveraged Unreal Engine 4 to bring an out-of-this-world concept to life.
Can you please explain the story and setting of The Long Journey Home?
The Long Journey Home is a space exploration RPG, in which humanity’s first faster-than-light jump in space goes horribly wrong and four mismatched crew members find themselves on the wrong side of the galaxy. It’s your job to get them back, through a procedurally generated universe full of strange aliens and hostile worlds and accidental diplomatic disasters. We like to joke that it’s a ‘reverse RPG’, where at the beginning you’re prepared, tough and ready for anything, only to start falling apart immediately while having to struggle for resources and survival.
How did you land on the game’s rather unique art style?
We knew we wanted The Long Journey Home to have a strong emotional core - it’s about getting lost, about the pull of home. We also knew that however we depicted it, it would need to be a style that a small team like ours could pull off on a reasonable budget - not easy when you have so many races and planet types and encounters. Luckily, Unreal Engine excels at light and effects. When experimenting with models we quickly found that the low-polygon style mixed with cool colour and lighting made for both an attractive and readable aesthetic whether fighting with monsters in space or skimming across the surfaces of alien worlds.
How much impact does your crew selection have on the overall experience?
Plenty! This is their story, so they’re at the heart of it. Each is a specialist in a different field, from archeology to research to botany. Whenever you find an item, those skills kick in. Our corporate executive character for instance, Simon, can guess the price of items, while our researcher, Nikolay, is the expert at turning a piece of alien junk into a functional device.
On a narrative level, they’re also the human face of the journey. As the game progresses you see them talk to each other about life on board, the items you’ve collected and aliens you’ve met, as well as seeing the ship get progressively more cluttered with mess and souvenirs. As the player, you’re effectively the ‘spirit of the crew’ rather than a specific character, but we want you to feel that when the credits roll, you’ve been part of this journey. In particular, it’s crucial that the goal is always ‘get your crew home’, rather than ‘return IASA’s lost property’.
How does actual space exploration work in the game and what mechanics did you implement to keep it compelling throughout?
There’s two halves to space travel - flying the ship, and taking a Lander down to planets. Both are 2D, top down and side-on respectively, with the procedurally generated universe meaning you can never be sure what you’re going to find. Flying through space you meet a huge variety of strange aliens and encounters, such as a distressed trader whose hold is on fire and who desperately wants to sell you the fuel in his tank before it explodes… the idea of flushing it into space being unthinkable! Down on planets, you drill for resources, as well as explore the ruins of ancient civilisations and other points of interest in Choose Your Own Adventure sections that help you build up a picture of the galaxy, its inhabitants, and its background stories.
In both cases, there’s plenty of delicious scripted content to find, along with the gloriously beautiful procedurally generated planets and deep space phenomena. Just don’t spend too long staring at black holes. Our shader programmer made them beautiful, but deadly!
From personality to general appearance and tone, what can you tell us about the diversity of alien races players will encounter?
We used Farscape as our touchstone here, looking to create a world that’s funny, packed with variety and where anything can happen, but which still feels plausible. Each race has its own distinct style and gimmick. The Glukkt traders for instance love to put services on your tab, showing up at exactly the wrong time to collect. The Meorcl are a race of arrogant, tiny, bearded creatures who unfortunately are the most powerful psychics in the universe. They emerged from their planet, discovered everyone obeyed them, and decided that must mean they’re the kings of the universe. And that’s how they act, complete with ‘doth this’ and ‘doth that’, completely oblivious to the fact that everybody hates them.
Every race was built along these lines, to be something players haven’t seen before. Space pirates for instance. Everyone knows they had to show up, but we hope it’s a surprise when they show up talking in rhyme! And this extends to mechanics, especially with our truly alien races - the inscrutable Vine for instance, a sentient plague, and religious energy creatures who deeply regret turning whole civilisations to ash before realising how dangerous they are.
How does the procedurally-generated galaxy enhance the sense of exploration you are hoping players experience in The Long Journey Home?
Every run is different. It’s not enough to just scramble some resources and move the stars around, though - they have to feel different. We like to combine our handmade content like the aliens, quests and stories - our Lego bricks, if you will - and combine them with a universe that initially seems overwhelming, but you can learn to first survive in, and then thrive.
We have a lot of rules under the hood to avoid silly combinations, like the aquatic Subbeq race living on planets of molten lava, but that still leaves a universe of possibilities. By sharing the universe’s seed code, players can also recreate the same universe and share it with friends. Every run, for instance, features just four of the eight alien Empires available, plus a few smaller civilisations. A universe containing friendly races like the Glukkt, Wolphax and Reeve is a very different experience to exploring a galaxy of evil slavers and arrogant psychic-kings.
What moral implications are there for making one choice over another?
Firstly, every decision you make is fixed. No reloading old save games. If you sell a crewmember into slavery, they’re gone. If you destroy a populated world, it’s dead. While it’s possible to do an ‘evil’ playthrough though, what interests us far more is the line that players might have to cross to get their crew home. For example, if you’ve rescued a survivor, then you could take them home. But, if you’re floating in deep space and on the edge of death, and you see a slaver buzzing that moon, just maybe you’ll decide that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one. That becomes even more interesting when it’s your own crew’s lives that you’re playing with. Who do you sacrifice on a probably suicidal mission to gather needed fuel? Do you pry into a galactic conspiracy that could have ramifications for the whole galaxy, or decide that it’s none of your business? Whatever you choose, there will be consequences. Our favourite examples are the ones that play out primarily in the player’s head… not to mention what their decisions and alliances mean for Earth, if they do get back.
There are some really unique systems in the game, including general communication with alien life forms. Where did these ideas come from and how, technically speaking, did you implement them?
We started with the idea that communication is often a messy business. It’s easy to forget that in a world of clear, clean multiple choice dialogue trees and the like, but we wanted to create a system with scope for error and mistake. One game in particular came to mind - Captain Blood - which used icons to communicate and forced you to learn languages. We went from there to a keyword system, but one where what you ask isn’t necessarily what the alien hears. “Work” for instance could be “Give me work” or “Tell me about your work” or “Start working!”
We wrote a custom tool for this called LINCOS, which works with .csv files, and it became the core of our encounter logic. Our dialogue and associated flags handles conversation, but also scripts like launching an attack, fleeing, handing over an artifact and so on. It allows simple scripts to handle situations like an alien race that takes offence if you call them without your weapons raised, as well as more complicated things like if an NPC should go about its business after a conversation, or jump away never to be seen again. Scripts also work a little like a ‘switch’ command. If you have this item, the alien says this. If not, it does that, etc.
Unreal Engine has its own CSV importer, and we created our own Blueprint quest class in which we scripted the quest and added the dialogues. The CSV is reimported at runtime when meeting an alien, and can be reloaded at any time, meaning we can edit the dialogue while the game is running - fix a bug, add a cool new idea, reload the scene and give it a try. This is largely how we’re able to have such deep stories and interconnected content in a procedurally generated universe where we have no way of knowing what the player will have seen or done.
Who is your target audience for the game?
We’re hoping a wide range of space fans will love it, from fans of classics like Starflight and Star Control 2 (which the whole team loves) to players hooked on the likes of Kerbal Space Program. Certainly we know they tend to like our space flight system, which isn’t half as complicated as Kerbal’s, but allows for tricks like harnessing gravity wells to get around systems, and learning to safely scoop EM from friendly suns. On top of that, if you like TV shows like Farscape, Star Trek, Red Dwarf, The Expanse… any great SF of the last few decades, you’ll find plenty to like as you write the story of your own Long Journey Home.
Why did you choose Unreal Engine 4 for this project?
We’re a small team, but with a lot of experience. All of us have worked with various engines at different companies, both internal and licensed. Unreal Engine was the obvious choice. It’s flexible, beautiful, and open. We’re somewhat old-school in liking to be able to check the code. Plus, as our coder’s background is C++, adding Unreal allowed for very fast development.
Are there any aspects of UE4 that have been particularly useful throughout development?
Many! On the programming side, we could code directly in C++, and on the design side, prototype much of the game in Blueprints. We used these to create our own object class for quests as a secure area with clean interfaces to the rest of the project. We could also plug in our own custom tools, such as LINCOS, and tailor them completely to our production pipeline.
How big was the development team for The Long Journey Home?
We started with a core team of four - one designer, two coders, one artist. That soon became a team of eight, and then nine, plus two external freelancers - our writer and our musician.
Where can people go to learn more about (and purchase) the game?
We’re out now on both Steam and GOG. You can check out our official website, too. We also have a Discord community hub, which you can join by visiting us here.