Star Trek fans haven’t had a great game based on the franchise in a long time. Well, a mobile release might fix that.
Disruptor Beam, the studio behind the Game of Thrones: Ascent mobile game, is now working on Star Trek: Timelines for mobile and Facebook (it’s currently in beta on mobile). Timelines allows players to create a crew based on characters from across the franchise and includes dialogue trees and spaceship battles.
We got to talk with Jon Radoff, chief executive of Disruptor Beam, about the new game, which gives Trekkies (or Trekkers, if you’re the type to hate the former term) some much-needed hope for the future of Star Trek gaming.
GamesBeat: Is your game just mobile, or is it coming to Facebook, too?
Jon Radoff: It’ll be on all of them. We’re releasing on mobile platforms first, but we intend to ship on Facebook Canvas and our Web server as well.
GamesBeat: How did the decision to go mobile first come about?
Radoff: When you look at product development now, you have to accept that you’ll end up with a higher-quality product if you start with native applications on the mobile platforms, rather than going in the other direction and starting with HTML5 or some other Web-oriented version and bringing it to mobile.
A lot of that is that the gestures, the interaction that people come to expect — the combination of production values, but also just the familiarity of the user-interface mechanisms that are present in mobile. If you don’t start there, people can really tell. There’s a kind of Uncanny Valley effect, taking something that started away from mobile and bringing it to mobile.
That’s what we did with Game of Thrones: Ascent, which we shipped last year. It started as an HTML5 game, and then we ported it to Android and iOS. We decided to go the other way with this game, because we felt we’d end up with the highest-quality product across all platforms. But we do intend to ship on Web browser-based platforms as well.
GamesBeat: It’s daunting to make a Star Trek game nowadays. There are so many different eras and characters to pick from. You guys decided to use a little bit of everything. What’s that prospect like, tapping into that big of a universe?
Radoff: Star Trek is certainly a huge universe of characters and content. We knew that when we took it on, but we wanted to make a product that was really for the whole Star Trek fanbase. People that are out there, whether they’re like me, who started out watching the original series and moved on to The Next Generation and other newer series, or people who just started coming to it recently because of the new movies. We wanted to have the widest range of possible content in there so that everyone could have characters and stories and experiences they could relate to.
We were able to craft a compelling narrative around the game that involves Q [a godlike character with a history of mischief], back from the TNG era, and weaving in aspects of time travel and alternate universes that have always been staples in Star Trek. That allowed us to put together this combination of different characters from all the timelines. So far, people seem to really love it. They’re getting introduced to characters they might not have seen before, but there are tons of characters that they’re familiar with all the way through the movies in the present. There’s this huge vault of stuff for us to turn into gameplay.
GamesBeat: There’s so much you can take from Star Trek for inspiration. What kind of game experience should fans expect from this?
Radoff: The challenge of Star Trek is that it’s inherently a more complex universe. It’s not just about fighting, although fighting happens in it. It’s not just about diplomacy, although diplomacy happens in it. Star Trek is about all the things that explorers in space are going to encounter, whether that’s combat, diplomacy, politics, science, technology, engineering, philosophy, or ethics. All these things are themes within Star Trek. We wanted to try to bring all of that to life.
We brought in some of the narrative elements we used in Game of Thrones: Ascent in the past, such as character-based decision-making and dialogue trees inspired by the BioWare tradition of gameplay. We also brought in some new gameplay mechanics that bring to life the different aspects of the story. There’s combat in the game. You can get in starship battles and fire photon torpedoes. Or, if you’re a Romulan, you can fire your disruptor banks and all that stuff. All that is present. But there’s also a strong element of putting your away teams together, choosing characters that you want to send down to a planet or send off on a mission. During the course of that, you have narrative decisions about whether you want someone to resolve a certain problem using, say, combat, or something that’s more diplomatic. You might use medical, science, or engineering knowledge.
Depending on the choices you make in a different situation, you can get different kinds of outcomes, get different kinds of rewards, and the story will turn out different ways. Of course, time travel and alternate universes are parts of this. A lot of the fun in the game is finding out how you can solve the same mission in different ways, seeing what the different outcomes look like.
GamesBeat: What kind of starships are playable in the game?
Radoff: At launch, we’ll have most of the ships that people are familiar with from all of the series. Whether that’s the Galaxy class, as well as specific named craft like the Enterprise-D. We’ll have Klingon and Romulan ships. A lot of the very popular ships are there. You can run a Borg cube if you want to.
In Game of Thrones: Ascent, we’ve consistently updated the game once a week with new content, treasure, equipment, characters, and stuff like that. We’ll be doing the same thing in Star Trek: Timelines, where over time — if it wasn’t one of the first ships we launched with — we’re eventually going to be adding all the ships anyone could imagine. All the characters, and so on. There’s a lot of them. At last count, there’s 150-ish characters we’re launching with, plenty of ships, and many more [ships and characters] as the game unfolds.