stars reach

Stars Reach visual upgrades
October 29, 2025November 3, 2025 Game talk, Gamemaking
2 Comments

For months now, we have been working on a big overhaul to the visuals in Stars Reach. This has involved redoing most of the shaders in the entire game, and going back and retouching every asset. We started by redoing all the plant life and flora, and we have hundreds of those assets that had to be redone.

Further, they all need to grow, change in response to seasons, be able to catch fire and burn, freeze, shed leaves and die, and so on. We don’t pre-design our biomes; we derive them on the fly from the simulation based on the environmental conditions. The right plants grow in the right places based on the temperature and the humidity and the soil types. (Yes, we even have a dozen soil types).
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New stuff on the site
October 25, 2025October 25, 2025 Game talk, Misc

I really have been neglecting the blog lately. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been adding content to the site all along. I figured it might not hurt to do a little summary of items that have been added over the last year and a half or more. The last talk I posted up was my GDC talk from 2024!

So, here’s a bit of a catalog…

For folks who are interested in the history of Ultima Online, I finally gathered up the various snippets I have posted about why exactly the original ecology system didn’t survive to release. There’s a theory out there that it happened because players were like locusts and killed everything and caused it to collapse, and that’s not quite correct. Players were like locusts. But the ecology system came out of the game for economic reasons and for performance reasons. So if you’re curious, you can read the answer to “did players destroy the UO ecology?” here.
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Stars Reach doesn’t look like you remember
June 20, 2025October 10, 2025 Game talk, Gamemaking
4 Comments

I’ve been remiss in posting updates on Stars Reach here. I mean, the Kickstarter finished back in March (late pledges still accepted)! Today, though, I want to brag about our awesome AI and proc gen driven worlds.

Over the last few releases, we have been rolling out yet another series of improvements to the look of the worlds. And we’re getting to the point where I think the alien worlds are starting to look like the covers of sci-fi novels (especially with some player help building weird structures):
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One week of Stars Reach Kickstarter
March 3, 2025March 3, 2025 Game talk, Gamemaking
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Wow, it has been an intense six days.

We launched on Tuesday, which feels like an eternity ago. It’s a mad scramble to get everything done, make sure you have all the content ready, to answer the huge inflow of questions, find all the spots where you weren’t quite clear enough… but you just survive on little sleep and keep pushing. And sometimes you get a good result!

Last night we hit the $500k mark on the Stars Reach Kickstarter. This also unlocked our third stretch goal, the Hyugon playable species that you see animating over here. (There’s a blog post up on the website if you want to learn more about them!).
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STARS REACH Kickstarter funded in 1 hour
February 26, 2025February 26, 2025 Game talk, Gamemaking
1 Comment

I can’t tell you how much of a rollercoaster yesterday was. We hoped to see a strong Kickstarter but reaching our goal is less than one hour is just amazing, and a real expression of support from the community. Thank you all so much. (You can check out the Kickstarter here!)

We’re not stopping here. As I write this, we are on track to double our initial goal today! We hit our first stretch goal, for the Hansian species, overnight. Hansians were first mentioned in our lore in the short story “Interdicted,” which we posted up on the website a couple of weeks ago.
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stars reach

Stars Reach visual upgrades

New stuff on the site

Stars Reach doesn’t look like you remember

One week of Stars Reach Kickstarter

STARS REACH Kickstarter funded in 1 hour

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