Bringing Stories to Life

Star Trek Online Lead Designer Al 'CaptainGeko' Rivera has penned the latest developer blog leading up to the next expansion, Delta Rising. In this edition, Rivera talks about how stories are brought to life. He reveals that the team decides where the story has been thus far and where it ultimately needs to go.

For Delta Rising, we took a good, long look at Voyager. We all watched and re-watched as much of the show as we could, focusing on key episodes. That brought up more questions. What species did we want to include? What ones did we not want to include and perhaps save for later? What can we do? What makes an interesting enemy or ally? What interesting stories were left untold? What can art and design pull off? What makes sense for our game? At this point in the story planning, we start thinking about the Trek actors. Who do we want for this update? Who can we get? Who makes sense considering its 32 years later? What stories are personal to those characters that translate well into Star Trek Online?

After all that, we make an outline – a map from A to Z. For Delta Rising, this gave us an idea of the story we want to tell. But now we have to fit that story into a production schedule as well as a game cadence. We have to determine how many missions we need to tell this story. How many do we want? Do we want adventure or battlezones? Ground or space? What about patrols, queues and STFs? Does our story work for the type of content we need to create? If not, what do we need to change?

Read the full blog post on the Star Trek Online site.