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StyleGoals
I'm hoping for Endless Sky to eventually be a collaborative collection of missions, artwork, etc. designed by many different people. This page is a basic description of what sort of "feel" I wanted the game to have.
My goal for the UI was to be as minimalist and distraction-free as possible, yet at the same time to look futuristic and to hint at an underlying complexity. My chief inspiration was the heads-up-display used in the Iron Man movies, as shown here.
The UI is nearly all monochrome except for certain key pieces of information. This meshes well with the human ships (which are also mostly monochrome plus colored fins for identification). But, if you look closely, there are small graphical frills in nearly all the UI panels. These include sets of parallel lines intended to look like circuit traces, tiny, faint text and numerals, and various other geometric shapes intended to be the heads-up-display equivalent of the needlessly complex gears and other mechanisms found in steampunk art.
My goal here was simple: I should be able to use actual NASA images of planets and have them be indistinguishable from the "artificial" planet artwork that I create. Every planet and moon in the "Sol" system is a real image from NASA. The artificial planets need to be relatively subtle, both in their atmospheric effects and in their colors, to match the real images.
Space is very big, and very empty. Some of the most awe-inspiring images from NASA are of nebulae, but they are acquired with exposure times of hours or even days. To the human eye, the Orion nebula would be pretty much invisible even if you were inside it. So, the space background is nothing but tiny stars amid total blackness. (But, the stars have a non-uniform, clustered distribution generated by a random walk, which makes the star field look more interesting and organic.)
Nearly all the landscape images were taken right here on Planet Earth. A few of them have had their colors adjusted to look more alien: blue or purple foliage, bright green skies, etc. My criteria for the landscapes are:
- Actual photo, or photorealistic image.
- Every image includes both the sky and the ground.
- No foreground objects (trees, buildings, etc).
- People edited out (wherever possible).
It's all too common in science fiction to have the central conflict defined in very black and white terms: the noble Rebel Alliance against the evil Empire. The world of Endless Sky is a bit more nuanced. Any faction you join should feel like the good guys at first: noble goals, interesting people, etc. But as you continue to play, each faction should also have clear faults. And as the war gets more and more brutal, NPCs should be ambivalent about fighting and worried about the destruction the war is causing on all sides.
My goal is that whatever faction you side with in any conflict, that faction should have a convincing narrative for why they are the "good guys" and their enemies are the "bad guys." So, the Free Worlds see the Republic as a decadent, corrupt government that only caters to the needs of the rich. The Republic sees the Free Worlds as a communist oligarchy masquerading as a democracy and feeding on poor people's anger. The Free Worlds see the Syndicate as a bunch of heartless, godless capitalists. And so on. Even when it comes to the most advanced species - the Pug, the Drak, etc. - there should be equally plausible narratives for them being benevolent, or not.
The currently playable plot line (the Free Worlds) makes a few attempts at nonlinear gameplay. In particular, there are two different endings: one where you keep working for peace and reconciliation, and one where the conflict takes a more brutal turn near the end. It's nowhere near as nonlinear as I would like, though.
Ideally, each species should have slightly different speech patterns to indicate that they each think differently, so their thoughts sound different when translated into human language. I've done a very bad job of being consistent with that, but my basic goals are:
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The Quarg occasionally use archaic language constructs, to hint that they're an ancient species (who presumably learned to talk to humans thousands of years ago and haven't kept their grammar books up to date since then).
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Some Hai have better command of the human language than others (particularly the Unfettered). They make occasional grammatical errors, particularly leaving out articles or inserting the where they are not needed. (This is to hint that they speak a language like Latin that does not use articles.)
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The Wanderers' language is being translated by a machine, so it occasionally supplies multiple translations for one word when the [meaning, intent] of the Wanderer word cannot be [precisely, completely] mapped into a single human word.
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The Pug should sound airy, haughty, and poetic. (My inspiration was the pike in The Once and Future King: "Now I think it is time that you should go away, young master, for I find this conversation uninteresting and exhausting. I think you ought to go away really almost at once, in case my disillusioned mouth should suddenly determine to introduce you to my great gills, which have teeth in them also. Yes, I really think you might be wise to go away this moment. Indeed, I think you ought to put your back into it. And so, a long farewell to all my greatness...")