Foolish Earth Creatures: October 2025
This month I've finished rewriting the “Space Interceptors” chapter based on the design guidelines I talked about in last month's dev diary. There's still editing to do, but overall I think it's in pretty much the state that'll make it into the final game.
Notable changes from the playtest version include:
- There are lots of ways to die if you make poor decisions. You'll no longer be captured by Vorak if you fail, it's just a game over.
- The chapter introduces Captain Kraid, Vorak's ace space pilot, whom you can engage in a space fighter duel.
“Space Interceptors” is one of two possible opening chapters that we go to based on a player choice at the start of the game. The other is “Command Ship Lands”, where rather than blasting off in a space fighter to intercept Vorak's commands ship, the hero lets it land and deals with it on the ground. The inspiration for this is the iconic B-movie scene where a flying saucer lands and the army surrounds it with tanks and there's a tense stand-off. (Note that these chapter titles are just my internal names, they won't be player-facing.)
I've been having more trouble working out what to do with this one, and I eventually realised that's because it's in the wrong genre. The game as a whole is a space hero story, where a heroic character goes alone or with a small team into unfamiliar territory and prevails against overwhelming odds. But this one chapter was an alien invasion story, which typically has a large cast of more ordinary characters in a fighting retreat against invaders who've arrived in their own world. There's less scope for an individual hero and hero/villain relationship in the alien invasion story, so it's harder to make work in my game. So I'm thinking about what to do with this chapter, and how I can keep the B-movie-flying-saucer scene but get into space hero mode quickly afterwards.
In the meantime, I've been rewriting a different chapter, one of the possible follow-ups from “Space Interceptors” where your interceptor and the command ship are both damaged and crash-land close to one another. In the playtest version this took place in an unspecified desert region of Earth, but I've decided it would be more space heroic to have the ships crash-land on the moon. As in the “Space Interceptors” chapter I've added a bunch of ways to die, including several that are part of a duel between the hero and Vorak's cyborg champion General Zorg.
Can our writer reconcile the alien invasion and space hero genres, or will he be forced to scrap an entire chapter? Find out in next month's thrilling dev diary!
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Bonus comic recommendation: While doing very important space hero research I learned that the Flash Gordon newspaper strip was rebooted in 2023 by writer/artist Dan Schkade, and you can read it online, and it's excellent. It takes a lot of elements (characters, locations, etc.) from the original 1930s Alex Raymond strips and gives them a fresh modern identity while still feeling true to the original. The archives are kind of awkward to navigate but here's a direct link to the first strip of the reboot.