Project Announcement, Free Demo & Narrative BTS: 'Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes'

 

It's been some time. So it goes (I'm re-reading Slaughterhouse-5, top ten books of all time IMO). But now I have a new project to announce!

Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes is (in my words, not the marketing department's) a narrative-forward TBS with pausable, tactical-scale RTS combat, which takes its cues from FTL, Reigns, Asteroids and, of course, developer Alt Shift's own Crying Suns.

In fact, they have just published a handy narrative BTS over on Steam.

I was consulting on this one through the early design phase, in addition to contributing a handful of text events.

What I argue is cool about Scattered Hopes is the design of the basic systems around the core vibes of the TV show, instead of trying to smash a triangle peg into a quadrilateral hole. Combat aside the core game loop is worker management, but as in the show every decision has potential to trigger a cascading sequence of deeper narrative and mechanical crises, each of which can interact in both directions with the personalities, wellbeing, capabilities and interpersonal dramas of your named crewmembers; not to mention the relative strengths and behaviours of the military, criminal and civilian factions onboard.

I'm proudest however of the Cylon system. I jumped on this design task early doors because it's obviously the coolest thing, and although the final version is most definitely the work of the core team I don't think I lie when I say it bears non-zero similarity to my original vision.

Here's the necessary conditions of an authentic Cylon system I laid out on day one, back in May 2023:

• Discovering a Cylon's identity (or missing important clues) should be a thing

• Cylons are always Cylons, NPCs don't get their histories rewritten when a Cylon event triggers

• Undiscovered Cylons on your ship is bad, discovering them is good/exciting/dangerous

• Interrogating Cylons is a thing

• Not all Cylons are murder-machines, some are smart and strategic, some are friendly to humans

I went on to describe a system wherein 'You can arrest and interrogate an NPC at any time'; 'Connected events can trigger at any stage (the prisoner's lover could break them loose and steal a viper)'; and ultimately:

This system is about gambling insight into an NPC’s trustworthiness against all sorts of unpredictable negative effects[...] but never really knowing who you can trust.

I believe the final system delivers on all of this, albeit in a more implementable form than whatever crazy shit this writer dreamed might be programmable.

Grats to the team at Alt Shift, to writers Martin Ringot and Anthony Jauneaud, and you, the discerning public, for the remarkable achievement of being able to download the demo right this second, and play the full game in Q2 this year.

What's Been Happening 2025 & Other Minutiae

Obligatory two-yearly update.

After crashing out from Subnautica Below Zero (I have a whole blog post just about that, but I'm saving it until I found out of Unknown Worlds is really going to make a Subnautica movie without crediting me for the original story) I took a couple years off, then I took a little consulting gig with a UK indie.

That consulting gig turned into a three year narrative design lead position on the most incredibly exciting FPSRPG set in a Hot Fuzz vibes Welsh farmpunk world tearing itself apart over god and AI (I know, original). 

I loved it, I did so much writing of a flavour and variety I never got to exercise before. I loved my characters. There was a posh boy who can be redeemed or tortured comically, and a hot welsh magic priest who makes you throw up everytime you try top talk to her, and a village defence laser with a targeting system that runs on chickens, and a whole religion based on 1990s computer instruction manuals, and a tough as nails police chief who ever-so-slightly warms to you over time, and so on. I wrote hundreds of thousands of words.

And from the day I took the job I knew it was a 50:50 gamble.

Friends, my gamble did not pay off.

Now I am back to taking my couple of years off.

Aside, naturally, and if it ever occurs, from Talos Principle 3, of which, if it did exist, my small part might begin like this (MID-LEVEL SPOILERS FOR A HYPOTHETICAL ART PRODUCT WHICH DOESN'T YET EXIST AFTER THE BREAK):