Foolish Earth Creatures: March 2025
I've made some progress on Foolish Earth Creatures this month. I've got what I think is a pretty solid outline, and I've written first draft versions of several sections. I've also got a clearer idea of who the player character is.
When I conceived Foolish Earth Creatures, my idea was to have the player choose from a list of characters that embodied sci-fi and videogame character types: the ace pilot, the muscular space marine, the cyborg hacker, etc. While that would be a fun idea for a different game, I realized that for this one it would end up being too limiting: the player would always feel like the best option was the one that corresponded to the character they'd picked.
My next approach was to let the player build their character in a more free-form way by giving them ratings in skills like piloting, combat, hacking, etc., which they'd build up through use and later put to the test. I wrote a section of the game with that in mind, but then realized that I'd end up with the same problem: it would push the player towards only picking options that corresponded to how they'd built their character, effectively limiting how they played the game.
So this month I've done away with the RPG-style stats. Instead I'm using variables to track concrete things about the world state, e.g. whether you currently have a ray gun, whether you've seen the cyborgs fight up close (and can therefore devise tactics against them), whether you've managed to deceive Vorak (so he'll be on his guard against being fooled again), etc.
So, who is the player character? You're a space hero, that's who.
Originating with Buck Rogers in 1929, and later embodied by Flash Gordon, Dan Dare, and dozens of others who have vanished into obscurity, the space hero is what Ursula Le Guin called a “submyth”: a character type that aspires to the status of archetype but doesn't quite make it. The alien super-science villain character type embodied by Vorak is another submyth, one often paired with the space hero as their arch-enemy. These are old-fashioned character types, and modern examples are more likely to be parodies than played straight, but they're still recognizable enough that I think I can rely on the player's genre knowledge to help me tell the story.
The space hero is brave, resourceful, and moral. They're highly skilled, but they're not a superhero, and they're more likely to outsmart their enemies than overpower them. They're usually but not always a member of a spacefaring military or police organization, and their supporting cast might include a plucky sidekick, a love interest, a genius scientist, and a strange but friendly robot or alien.
They're also practically always a white man, but times have moved on since then, so I'm letting the player choose their hero's gender and I'm trying to be vague about their ethnicity. You can type in a name or click a button to get a random name, and I had a lot of fun populating the random lists with space hero names like “Captain Jet Nebula.”
There's still room within the space hero character type to play it in different ways. Will you oppose Vorak's forces in space or on the ground? Will you try to make sure your whole squadron makes it back, or will you sacrifice them if that's what it takes to destroy the invasion ships? Will you sneak around the alien dreadnought's air ducts, or pick up a ray gun and blast your way through?
Giving you options but de-coupling them from game-mechanical stats or character types means I can think “what might a space hero do?” rather than “what would each of these skills/pre-set characters do?”, which gives me more flexibility.
But how can any space hero hope to defeat Vorak, the Master Brain? Learn more in next month's thrilling developer diary!
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In other news, this blog doesn't have a comment section but I've made Discord and Revolt servers for discussion of my games, so head over to one of them if you want to talk about your favourite space hero!