Untold Universe Interview: Voxels in Space! .

We were recently given the opportunity to interview the co-founder of Fenris Lair Studio who are making Untold Universe, a space based voxel game that leaves survival behind to focus on more important matters. Though they have only 9 days remaining in their Kickstarter campaign they have plans to carry on with the MMO which is currently in Alpha.

 

Hello and thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions about Untold Universe. Please introduce yourself and tell us what your role in development is.

Hello! I am Guillaume, lead developer on the client part of the game and co-founder at Fenris Lair Studio. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to speak a bit of our game.

 

Where did you get the idea for Untold Universe?

Initially, we were three developers passionate about many games, and mostly about Minecraft and EVE Online. We wanted to create a new game that would blend together the concepts of building games and space MMOs, to create a new experience featuring the possibility to discover, explore and exploit entire worlds. We wanted to focus on the capacity to land on planets without loading time, and to share and sell user created content like spaceships and factory designs.

 

Untold Universe is a space voxel MMO. I assume this means a large focus will be on building, similar to Minecraft. What will make your project something greater than Minecraft In Space?

First of all, we do not focus on survival like most voxel game. The goal in Untold Universe is to colonize worlds, and gather resources to build fleets and settlements, while protecting your assets from other players rather than NPCs. Which leads to the second main difference with Minecraft, being the PvP part. We want to allow players to fight on ground and in space with a variety of weapons and spaceships using advanced physics, adding a whole new layer of gameplay, focused on fighting efficiency and the capacity to build and manage colonies.

I noticed in your Kickstarter that you don’t talk a lot about classes, but you refer to ships as having classes. Will people have to choose between different pre-made ships or will they make ships that fit into the prior system?

For the player part, we are focusing on an achievement system, meaning that the more you will do something, the better you will be at it. It is close to the system used by Life is Feudal, a sandbox voxel MMO made by an other team of indies.

Ship classes are not pre-made ships. It is about the size of the shipyard in which the ship is built, and the set of modules that you will use. Thus, the class of your ship will both depend on the shipyard you choose, determining the base class, and how you design it, determining the sub-class. Sub-classes are more about meta-gameplay than actual gameplay rules, as they will emerge depending on the choices players will do.

 

Can you tell us a bit more about any of the classes?

As an example, the current Alpha features only one class, being the “Fighter” class. Fighters can be built in a 24x16x16 cubes shipyard that players can build directly on a planet’s ground. We will soon implement the advanced spaceship design that will open new possibilities. The final class of your ship is, as I said before, more an idea that an actual game parameter. Depending on the set of modules and the quantity of cubes you will use to make your ship design, you can either create a heavy, slow bomber able to destroy bases, or a quick, agile interceptor that can take down other ships by landing precise shots. Our goal is to offer enough modules so new classes will regularly emerge, depending on the player needs and the current meta-game.

In the end, we are planning to have at least five different shipyard kinds, offering five different base classes ranging from Fighter to Mothership.

Bigger ships will not be able to land on planets, and smaller ones will always be useful for ground operations, transportation, and precise takedown of particular parts of bigger ships.

 

How much upgrading do you intend to allow per ships? Given your focus, will parts of the game be inaccessible to overly-upgraded ships, as a sort of “level gate” for new players to get started?

The game features two different spaces: the protected and wild spaces. In protected space, PvP is disabled, allowing new players to get started. In wild space, there will be no rules on how much a ship can be strong, and planets will be more interesting in term of resources. Moreover, claiming large territories for a Corporation will only be possible in wild space.

What we want to achieve is to give a role to new players, and to small ships. The game will feature a job system, which will allow old players to push simple jobs to new ones. Thus, new players will play with old ones without having to enter a corporation, and the game will check that the mission has been done. It can range from planets scanning, defense, group bounty hunting or accompanying fleets and transports as mercenaries.

You guys appear to be going the PvP route with this game, focusing heavily on ship combat. What caused you to make that choice over a player-versus-environment scenario?

Well, one of the biggest innovation that our game brings to the space voxel genre is that it is a single-shard MMO. Some good games already offer players the possibility to experience space voxel PvE on small servers. Also, we wanted to focus a lot on player-player interactions, from trading to fighting, offering a new way to experience the voxel concept.

 

One of the features I was interested in was the “infinite universe” concept. Can you tell us a little bit more about how it will work?

Our technology allows us to add new planets to the universe in a few minutes. These planets will be attached by routes to the existing ones, extending the current space size. Our goal is to generate planets constantly depending on the players behavior to always offer new worlds to explore and conquer.

 

I’d love to hear a bit more about the backstory, beyond the small blurb on the Kickstarter. How did the players end up getting started? What exactly happened that launched us into the great unknown?

The backstory is based on a gold rush after the discovery of a new mean of travelling that allowed humanity to reach the universe’s Border. In this realm, physics rules are a bit different, allowing for an easy exploitation of natural resources thanks to the capacity to quickly terraform the environment, as matter is less stable. Valhalla Digital is the corporation that discovered this way to jump to the Border, and started a vast colonization program to exploit the new world. Later on, Vahalla Digital lost its complete dominion on this part of the universe, as settlers became more and more independent, refusing to continue to send all their resources to the company.

When starting a new character, the player will be a pioneer that just arrived in the border hoping to start a new life. He will first travel and train in the part of the Border controlled by Valhalla Digital, known as the protected universe, and will quickly become good enough to move to the wild part of the Border, were planets are rich in resources, lands free of any ownership, and where no laws exists.

Untold Universe is already in alpha stage. If the Kickstarter does not succeed, does the team intend on continuing to work on the game?

Short answer, yes. After weeks of Kickstarter, we did not gather enough funds, and are actually considering changing the way we are doing things. Indeed, Kickstarter might simply have been a bad choice for our game. Being in Alpha actually allows us to let players try the game and have an impact today on the development, while Kickstarter is about projects that will be delivered later. We are currently considering to start offering the possibility to help us by donating on our website, in exchange of lifetime advantages and direct access to the Alpha, instead of donating on Kickstarter for rewards in the future. This way might be more virtuous, and will give our donators direct rewards, while allowing us to continue working on the game at a good pace.

 

Finally, is there anything else you’d like to say about your game to those who are interested?

We are progressing fast, and are always genuinely interested in feedback, opinions and ideas. So do not hesitate to pass by our forums if you want to discuss with us, learn more about the game, and push us some concepts that you would love to see in the game!

 

Thank you for your responses! We appreciate the time you’ve taken to do this interview with us.

Thank you for your interest in our game!