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General discussionRebel Galaxy: Developer Q&A(105 posts)(105 posts)
(105 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted October 27, 2015
Have questions that only the devs can answer? Join the team behind Rebel Galaxy for a special Q&A session!

The team from Double Damage Games, is here here to answer all your pressing questions about the game, the life behind game development, and their pretty extensive experience in the industry.

Double Damage Games is a two-man indie studio created by the guys who came up with and created the Torchlight series:

Travis Baldree:
Hi! I'm Travis Baldree. I've been a professional game developer for nearly 20 years, and it's been my hobby since I was a kid on my C64. I'm best known for Fate and the Torchlight series. I'm the only person I know who has more CRTs than flatscreens in their office. I stay warm in the nostalgic glow of my A500, IIgs, and C64.
---Rebel Galaxy Responsibilities:
As the only engineer on Rebel Galaxy, Travis did almost everything to make the game work. He was also responsible for the art direction, the sound design, the story and more.
---Notable Previous Titles:
Fate, Mythos, Torchlight, Torchlight 2 (all as Team Lead and Lead Engineer)
--Favorite Games:
Wasteland, Darklands, Ocarina of Time, X-Com, and Just Cause 2
---Weird anecdote from development of Rebel Galaxy:
Most of the character gesture and idle animations were done on the cheap by using a Kinect for motion capture.






Erich Schaefer:
Hi, I'm Erich Schaefer. I've been in game development since about 1990, always starting my own company because I don't deal well with authority. Double Damage Games is my fourth company, and by far the smallest. It's also my favorite!
---Rebel Galaxy Responsibilities:
Erich was the designer and tester. He worked on combat balance, economy, random missions and fed millions of good ideas (and millions of bad ones) to Travis.
---Notable Previous Titles:
Diablo, Diablo II, Hellgate: London, Torchlight and Torchlight 2 (all as Team Lead and/or Designer)
---Favorite Games:
Civ 5, Ultima Online, World of Warcraft, Minecraft and X-Com
---Weird anecdote from development of Rebel Galaxy:
I've been trying to make a space game since pre-Diablo times. I've started and failed at least 3 times significantly. Finally this one took hold!






Now that we’ve gotten introduced to the Rebel Galaxy side, here are some ground rules for this Q&A to work as smoothly as possible:

Not all questions might get answered during the Q&A. This means your specific question might go unnoticed or unanswered, but feel free to read along anyway and hang out with us - it’s gonna be fun anyway!
Be nice. This means no abuse, harassment, name-calling and the like.
Don’t spam or take over the thread to go off-topic. This will help us all keep track of incoming questions and help you get the most out of this event - and keep our guests involved!
Try to look through some recent questions before asking a new one. If the Q&A has been going on for a while, it’s likely your question has already been addressed.
Try to keep it about Rampart. Just kidding, we’re sure the devs have lots of subjects that they’d love to have a chat about with you guys!



Let’s get this show on the road!
Posted October 28, 2015
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Carradice: Thanks for putting your passion into great games. Rebel Galaxy feels like something special.

I would like to ask whether you have thoughts about letting the player carry fighters onboard, eventually. Or maybe it would not click with the rest of the gameplay and detract from it?

Keep up the good work! You made it again.
We considered carrier-style gameplay, but other priorities took us in different direction. There are overlapping issues that never easily resolved themselves, so we didn't get far into the topic. Interesting fodder for the future maybe?
Posted October 28, 2015
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cogadh: Will there be future add-on content/expansions for the game?
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mediumheadboy: We haven't made plans for and future content, yet. We didn't know if it would be popular enough to warrant more (it looks like it is!)
Great to hear it's doing well!

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Ixamyakxim: *edit to add Oh, true or false - the Tennhausen is the most awesome-est, best-est cheapest(est?) ship in the game and nothing is better?
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mediumheadboy: Thanks! But no, Barracuda is best!
I've been so tempted by the Barracuda and its super speed and agility but I just couldn't bring myself to give up delicious, delicious broadsides and the added hold space!
Post edited October 28, 2015 by Ixamyakxim
Posted October 28, 2015
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JudasIscariot: What's wrong with the accents?
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Sachys: Hmmm... well without wanting to derail the thread:

1) typical "limey" accent as usually done by Hollywood. In this case a horrible mash of aussie and mockney sounds.
2) if I remember correctly, you're from the south (and also spent a time in NYC?!). So... if you played a game made by a brit, where 50% of NPCs had a weird mish mash accent of Canadian meets Irish - but pos game as texan... wouldn't you find that very "off" at the least.

(and as a fun comparison)
3) Sean Bean aint no "aussiemockney" - hes a YARKSHER BASTA! - and hes far more famous (I'd guess) than Dot Cotton from Eastenders... so why go with the latter, eh?! O_____k
Ah, I think I get where you're coming from...although "pos game as texan" has me a wee bit flummoxed, to be honest :)
Posted October 28, 2015
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sabledrakon: For the Steam version of the game, are you going to make it so that we can just bypass the launcher? All it does is set graphics options, and most people only do that once. After the first time, it's just another obnoxious button-click between us and the game, and worse for those who happen to use Big Picture and can't really navigate it with a gamepad.
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tbaldree: A quick tip - the launcher is gamepad navigable.
Press A and skip it - the dpad also navigates it, and shoulder buttons change dropdown settings.
But there's no way to just keep it from coming up at all? Because it's starting to get a little annoying, seeing as the launcher only configures graphics settings that are done once. If there was a toggle to disable it and just load the game, it'd be a lot more intuitive. And if you're worried if someone needs to change their settings, Steam does have the ability to invoke such things via a context/RClick menu option. I've seen quite a few games use it and I applaud them for doing so.
Posted October 28, 2015
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JudasIscariot: Ah, I think I get where you're coming from...although "pos game as texan" has me a wee bit flummoxed, to be honest :)
Thats you not looking after your GOGbears again you horse-ranching, cowboy-hat-wearing trailer-worrier! ;D
(yes, you see - heheh!).

And yeah - I could have made it even clearer with another example, but as I said, didnt want to derail.
Posted October 28, 2015
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JudasIscariot: Ah, I think I get where you're coming from...although "pos game as texan" has me a wee bit flummoxed, to be honest :)
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Sachys: Thats you not looking after your GOGbears again you horse-ranching, cowboy-hat-wearing trailer-worrier! ;D
(yes, you see - heheh!).

And yeah - I could have made it even clearer with another example, but as I said, didnt want to derail.
I didn't live in Texas. Sheesh, sounds like someone's got a stereotyped view of the South :P Not pointing fingers or anything :P
Posted October 28, 2015
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JudasIscariot: I didn't live in Texas. Sheesh, sounds like someone's got a stereotyped view of the South :P Not pointing fingers or anything :P
But it was the south, yarp? - apparently thats the same thing according to the weakapedia entry. O_______o?!
Posted October 28, 2015
I did have a game suggestion. when you hover over the stations it gives you data about things it sells and buys. There should be askerisk next to thing you have in your cargo. And also, would be nice to carry more missions. Love the game! played through 2 times already. Im all about the small fast ships and doing everything Risk: Very hard.
Question: what other games you working on?
Posted October 28, 2015
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JudasIscariot: I didn't live in Texas. Sheesh, sounds like someone's got a stereotyped view of the South :P Not pointing fingers or anything :P
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Sachys: But it was the south, yarp? - apparently thats the same thing according to the weakapedia entry. O_______o?!
We'll just continue this line of thought via PM :)
Posted October 28, 2015
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JudasIscariot: this line of thought
o____O

...not sure I'm qualified for that bit!
Posted October 28, 2015
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TheTome56: Something that immediately stuck to to me when I played the game for the first time was the fact that I had no free flight, so I've been wondering:

Why did you guys choose to make the game locked onto a linear grid instead of making it a 6 degrees of freedom space flight game?

Was it a design choice to complement the naval broadside style combat system? Was it because your focus on large capital ships made it too troublesome or slow to do really good 6 degrees of freedom combat? Or was it just because you had a specific control scheme in mind for piloting and didn't want to over-complicate the controls of the game?

I personally imagine it's the second. I've been in big ship battles in EVE Online and the six degrees of freedom just end up slowing everything down, not making it engaging at all.
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mediumheadboy: It was always our intention to do the flattened (non-6 degrees of freedom) model. Mostly because one of our chief influences was the naval battles in Assassin's Creed Black Flag. We thought it would work great in space, sped up a bit, with lots more options.

We never considered 6DoF, or cockpit style combat, because there are lots of games out there like that, and honestly I get a bit fatigued and bored of them after a half hour or so.
Seriously?

The first game I thought of when I starting playing RG WAS Assassin's Creed Black Flag!

Glad to hear you pulled your influences from that. It's a good game and we definitely need more games like it and Rebel Galaxy!
Posted October 28, 2015
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RebelGalaxyFanBoy: I did have a game suggestion. when you hover over the stations it gives you data about things it sells and buys. There should be askerisk next to thing you have in your cargo. And also, would be nice to carry more missions. Love the game! played through 2 times already. Im all about the small fast ships and doing everything Risk: Very hard.
Question: what other games you working on?
Cargo idea is good.

Other games Travis and I have worked on are in the thread intro. For me, the big ones are:
Diablo, Diablo II, Hellgate: London, Torchlight and Torchlight 2 (all as Team Lead and/or Designer)
Posted October 28, 2015
I am loving the game but I find the inability to select just my mining lasers when multiple lasers are equipped, a little annoying so maybe that could be addressed in a patch, it also feels a bad way of making money at the moment (first area but have played 15 hours or so and traded a lot.)


Question: Were there any major features you had to scale back greatly or just drop out altogether and what do you really wish you could've gotten into the game but weren't able to?
Posted October 28, 2015
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tbaldree: At present we don't have any immediate plans to support Linux - we're not native Linux developers and it would probably be a steep hill for us to climb to get a good build of it, and also to be able to support it.
Do you plan to learn Linux development? Since you already develop for OS X, learning developing for Linux wouldn't be that hard. It's also a POSIX system.
Post edited October 28, 2015 by shmerl
Posted October 28, 2015
I liked the fact that hovering the cursor over stations on the map displayed economic information about them, but it got kind of tedious hunting around for the best place to sell my cargo. Would it be possible to implement a UI element in the Cargo Hold screen that displayed prices at various locations when cargo is selected?
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionRebel Galaxy: Developer Q&A(105 posts)(105 posts)
(105 posts)