 Starship Simulator is an indie title being created by UK developers Fleet Yard Studios. The game's design features Humanity's first truly fully crewed Starship exploring a one to one scale recreation of the Milky Way Galaxy. You can download the tech demo for the Unreal Engine game right now on Steam and already explore the proto version of the Galaxy. When finished, Fleet Yard are promising procedurally generated scientific gameplay, Xeno archaeology, biology and botany and even communication and potentially conflict with alien civilizations in single and multiplayer. It's a bold and ambitious title for sure but it's also unique and very exciting. I recently sat down with the game's developer and designer Dan Govia for a tour of the Magellan class exploration vessel that is featured in the Sim while he explained his vision and Fleet Yard's future plans for the game. Yeah, and it doesn't seem to matter what I start off making, it ends up as a Starship. And it just doesn't matter. I could be modeling something out of clay and it will end up being a Starship. I seem to just have it ingrained within me. Really? Part of your DNA? It really is, yeah. So in the late 90s I became really obsessed with Quake and very quickly transitioned to using the BSP tools to make new maps for Quake and that then of course because of my weird obsession devolved into let's build a Starship and I had these old Star Trek blueprints. I can't even remember now which ship it was but it was either the refit or the TNG one. And I started building the interiors and everything and very quickly could I realize that no, Quake can't do that. And then fast forward a decade or so I discovered Minecraft and I saw this amazing video where someone was building the 1701D in Minecraft as a mega build and this whole concept of mega builds was this whole new us word. I thought, ooh, I need to get in on that. So I started building the refit being my favorite ship of all time. It's a glorious one, yeah. It is indeed, yeah. Yeah, you can't beat the Wrath of Khan Enterprise. That's the best one. Absolutely gorgeous. Yeah. Absolutely gorgeous. So yeah, so I set about building that and quickly became frustrated by the one meter cube resolution that you're stuck with in Minecraft. So I moved on to CAD software and then I thought, right, okay, let's build it in CAD. And then I had this cool idea of, okay, so what if I really build it in CAD? And then I think about what materials would be used and how the structural framework would have been put together and where do the pipes go and knowing the technology in the Trek franchise, how would that fit if you were building it for real? And this led me down this rabbit hole of engineering and how would we build it if we were really building it, which I found fascinating. And that kind of caught the attention of the guys that were building Stage 9. And for anyone that's not familiar, Stage 9 is a one-to-one recreation of the Enterprise D, every room, every deck, wow. And it was a fantastic project and I was super excited to be involved. So I joined them as a developer around about six months before they got a C&D. That was bad timing on my part. So I was just getting into it and then, of course, yeah. Grown-up said no. CBS said no, yeah, so we had to abandon that. But we'd already written some tech and we knew what we were doing. We had the experience. So we actually approached the showrunners for the Orville and we said, would you have a problem if we did what we were doing for Star Trek for the Orville? And they basically said, OK, as long as you're not trying to make a profit off of this thing, great, fill your boots. So we did a bit more forward thinking, isn't it? I can appreciate that. Yeah, they were really supportive. I mean, it was never official in speechmarks. But they said they will allow us to exist as long as we treat it with respect and don't try and profit off of it. So, yeah, I spent a couple of years building the Orville, and that's still available now if anyone wants to take a look. But three years ago, I just had this burning desire to go back to my roots of engineering and realism. And that little itch in the back of my mind about building it for real wasn't going away. So the Orville, sorry, the Orville model that you did, that was that that was much more of a I'm going to use the word game, but it wasn't it wasn't quite the nuts and bolts, cables and and and duty. Yeah, kind of thing that you're doing now. It's it's more of an interactive museum piece. I suppose you could call it. It's it's a celebration of the show. It's not it's not what this is. So so what I wanted to do is I really wanted to go back to that whole idea of how would we build a starship? So so if the human race had FTL technology and we wanted to go out there and explore the stars, then what would we build? And this is kind of my answer to that question. So everything about this ship is how would we do it for real? Right, OK, OK. And and how long is it taking you to get to this point? So this has been just you working on this full time. Is that right? Yes, yes. So I've been working on it full time for about three years. I think we've only just passed the three-year point now. Yeah, and this is how I've got. So obviously, it was just me working on it. It takes longer than I would hope. And everything takes longer than you expect. Yeah. And, you know, I've I'm a bit of an Elon Musk when it comes to deadlines and time scales. So there's a whole whole joke in the in the rocketry community, Elon time. So we very much got Dan time. So I'll say, oh, yeah, I'll have that done in a week. And then a month later, I'm still working on it. That could be game development all over, though. Can't it? It's always more wrinkles to it than. So for anybody who's who's not who's not familiar with this already, can you or hasn't seen we did a video already that kind of tried to explain exactly what it is you're building here. But can you have you got like a kind of a paragraph that you can deliver that kind of describes exactly what you're trying to achieve here? Sure, sure. I mean, I did have a rather succinct elevator pitch, which is what I think I put on steam, but it's so much more than that. So if I can encapsulate it as as concisely as possible, it's it's the human race exploring the stars for the first time. So this is an experimental ship where you go out there and you explore the galaxy. So it is very, very root. This is a space exploration game. OK, and that's kind of the core thrust of it. Now, everything that happens from there, it varies depending on what it is you want from the game, I guess. So you can choose a role aboard the ship. So I have to keep clearing my throat. Coffing fit earlier will forgive you. Yeah, so. Yeah, so this is all about your role aboard the ship, depending on which crew role you choose. So if you're an engineer, there's going to be lots of engineering gameplay. And if you're the captain, there'll be lots of people to order around. But everything in the game starts off with that core concept of exploring the galaxy. Right. So when you arrive at a new star system, we want it to be an unknown from that point. So you don't quite know what it is you're going to discover and what effect that's going to have on the ship and crew and what gameplay will then sort of spawn from that encounter. And for us, if you arrive at a star system and you're a little bit excited and a little bit nervous about what you're going to find, then that's it. That's we fit the nail on the head. That's what we want to achieve. Right. OK. You've got so you'll have no idea what to expect when you get there kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. Everything will be new. Yes, absolutely. And that could be anything from something interesting to discover to something aggressive that's chasing you off. OK, so every every every position that we're looking at on the bridge here and it's a beautiful bridge, by the way, Dan, absolutely beautiful. Every position that we're looking at in here can be can be multiplayered, essentially, so you could have a full complement of of other players on you on your starship, each one performing a specific set of tasks. Yes. Yes. Is it is it will it be workable for single player as well? Will someone be able to come into this and not have sort of, you know, eight friends that they can drag along? Yeah, so the way we're designing it is the ship's going to have a set crew of about 200. If it's just you on your own, that's you and 199 NPCs. OK. And when you when you join the game, you will pick which NPC you're replacing, essentially. So that NPC will disappear and you will take their place. Wow. So in a multiplayer environment, the more players that join, the more NPCs will vanish. And if you log off, that NPC will come back. So it's the game will retain its total crew roster. So, yes, it doesn't end. And again, we want to go down the road of it being a very different game, depending on which role you choose. So if you are an engineer, then you don't need to worry about captaining the ship or flying the ship. You just focus on your engineering tasks and then the NPCs will do the rest for you. So the NPC captain will decide where to go, decide what to explore. And you're just busily working away in engineering. So you've you've mentioned engineering. Well, anybody who again, anybody who might not be familiar with this was this is a lovely bridge. This isn't the only part of the ship, is it? There are plenty of I'm going to say plenty. There are there are other space starship simulations and inverted commas that have a very nice bridge simulation going on. But there is a lot more to this ship than just this bridge. Isn't there? Oh, yeah. So one of the things that really frustrates me in gaming, in general, is locked doors and things that don't do anything. And, you know, I I love ship interiors. Yeah, again, for me, the whole starship experience is the whole starship and I want a whole starship. So every single square inch of this ship is reachable and explorable every room and every deck. And that will all be fleshed out as much as possible within the limits of the game engine. So we should have a complete starship, seven decks, well over 200 rooms, and they should all serve some kind of purpose in one way or another in a one to one scale recreation of the galaxy that's preceded generated. You're not doing this by halves, are you, Dan? No, no. Well, you know, shoot for the stars. Should we have a little look around then? So we'll come back to that. But if we take a trip down the corridor, sure, sure, the first room here is the captain's office. And it's still not quite finished. We're going to get some sort of tea and coffee machines and things in here, maybe a sofa and a bit of a rug, just to flesh it out a little bit. And actually, while we're in here, it's probably worth talking about interactivity. So over here on the window, you've got the ability to turn on scene projections. So if you get sick of a little while you would, but if you got sick of staring out at the stars, then you could just have a little bit of home. Just to keep yourself grounded. That is brilliant. And then we've been discussing, rather than just using a cube map, which is all this is, actually using a proper 3D scene. So we'll actually have proper moving 3D scenes out there, rather than the rather than the static image should be even cooler. Brilliant. And you can't see it very clearly right now, but we've also got polarisation. So if you're parked in front of a star and we've made the stars purposefully, insanely right, so that the polarisation actually serves a purpose, you do actually need to turn it on. Stars are big, scary things, and we want them to remain big, scary things that you shouldn't go near. Excellent. But yeah, but in terms of interaction, we want something to fiddle with no matter where you are. So I can pick up a cup and litter with my cup. And then we can play with the lights so we can turn the lights on and off. You can play with the dimmer switch. You can play with the. Thanks. We can play with the the kelvin temperature of the lighting. So everything, everything can be fiddled with. And yeah, and you can have cup fights. You can throw cups at people that's brilliant. Most people don't realise this, but when you're holding something, if you press F, you can actually chuck it. Oh, OK. Oh, OK. Cup fight. Yeah. That's the philosophy. So it's probably a good opportunity to demonstrate the chairs as well. So. Yes, chairs are for the mobile. Rene and I discovered this quite early on and spent several hours. We have debated having a chair race set up that you can kind of trigger like a chair racing event. It's completely silly, but I think people will love it. So we'll probably do that. Absolutely, that will happen. Yeah, yeah. Over this side, there's nothing here yet. That was going to be an armory, but we're going to turn that into the sort of a deck bathroom. OK. So the bridge crew can use that to relieve themselves. This is the conference room. And. So this will be used during gameplay, most likely just for mission briefings. So this screen here will have an overview of any current mission that you're on. And generally speaking, that's going to be given to you by people you encounter. So you could rock up to an alien world, contact the people that live there. And in order to sort of gain their favor, there might be things they ask you to do. So those sorts of missions will be available on the screen here, along with other information you discover on your journey. So things like the crew roster could go on this screen. So this is like the main way of accessing all the ships database. OK, OK. So we're moving around the ship on foot here at the moment. Are you planning on having because I know we haven't got to it yet, but this is a damn big ship. So are you sort of talking about having elevators and things as well? Yes, so there's one here. It's not finished yet. It just goes up and down. It will have proper controls, so it works properly. But right now, as a test, it just hopped up and down. I won't hop in it yet. So you have a quick look around here, a couple of seating areas. You can't sit on the sofas yet, but that will be coming. And these don't really serve any any real gameplay purpose, other than just role play and relaxing. They don't need to, though, do they? It would all be a bit sterile, otherwise. That's it. Yeah, so we just run down the stairs. This is the VIP lounge, which isn't finished yet. It's still sort of a work in progress, hence the hovering tables. And but the idea is this is where the the bridge crew and the VIPs on the ship. This is where they'll hang out of an evening or between shifts. OK. We'll flash out the bar and have a working piano. Very nice. It does work. Works in multiplayer. Oh, brilliant. And we're going to have a MIDI component plugged into it as well. So if you've got a real MIDI keyboard, you can actually play the piano. Oh, my word. Oh, my word. So you're going to have people giving concerts and stuff. That'll be amazing. It will. It will. Absolutely. So yeah, we really want it to get people just playing music on the ship. Oh, that's fantastic. So moving on through here, we have what will be the galley kitchen and storage room. This is why it's littered with produce doughnuts. That was day one, I'd imagine. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Sorry, what? I've just done to your storage there. And I'm sorry. That's fine. That's fine. There's actually a ship impact simulation, which I can't remember whether I turned it off. If you press F, do things fly everywhere? No, I did turn that off. And one of the things we're going to have is if the ship takes an impact, anything that is not is going to get knocked off shelves and wobble around. So they will kind of react to the ship taking damage. The whole environment will actually shake around you, kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, bottles will fall over, things will fall off tables. Oh, brilliant. And everything will have physicalised damage as well. So carpets will be ripped, ball panels will be broken. OK. Are you thinking of VR support for this as well, or is that kind of a bit in the future, or? It's not hugely in the future. I have tested it in VR, and it does work. OK. I haven't implemented any locomotion methods or interaction methods yet, but if we look at this panel here, for example, this is one of the many electrical distribution boxes around the ship, which is worth pointing out is actually live and simulating real electric. It uses Ohm's law and power law. It uses all the actual electrical engineering math. I would. Everything you press is just pressable. So in VR, it's really not a big step to have VR able to press that as well. OK. Everything in the game is sort of being designed with VR in mind. So transitioning to VR shouldn't be a huge difficulty at all. So over this side, we have a storeroom. Yes, this is a Christmas tree. And again, whether the whole realism thing, there will be seasonal decorations aboard the ship, which you can turn on and off. So if you turn on the Christmas decorations, the tree will no longer be in the storeroom. It will be out in the lounge. But it's got to live somewhere. That's brilliant. And that's it. That's the whole point. So building it for real, I'm thinking about if it was real, what storage space would we need? Where would we put the Christmas tree when we're not using it? Absolutely. I'm constantly asking myself these questions. When you're not using it, where does it go? I love the work-in-progress post-it notes that are everywhere. By the way, it's glorious. That was one of those 3 AM ideas. It just works. Yes, so sanitizer and toilet roll. Suggestive that this is going to be the bathroom. All the bathrooms on the ship are going to be unisex, so it's just going to be sink, mirror, toilet cubicles. And the NPC crew will just take themselves off and use the bathrooms. We want it to be somewhat like Sims in space in that regard. So the NPC crew are all going to have various stats, like ladder, happiness, health, all those things. Yes, and they will have their own... They're not routines as such. They are event-driven priorities. So they'll have their role tasks. But if their ladder becomes more of a priority than their job role, then they'll go and do that instead. And you'll be able to... Because they're completely always there on the ship, completely physicalized. The NPCs don't spawn in and out as you're wandering around. They're always there. Sorry, does that mean they've got quarters assigned to them and things like that? Absolutely. And they will go to their quarters. So you'll be able to follow an NPC for their entire day and just watch them while they go about their job and visiting the bathroom and going to sleep. So it's like a stalking simulator. Brilliant. But yeah, it's all about keeping it real. Absolutely. Now I can get that. That's really awesome. So this will be the main crew lift, which just goes up and down between five decks. Okay. So the only deck that doesn't have direct lift access will be the lower engineering deck. And that's just mostly at equipment rooms. So it's not really somewhere the crew goes. Okay. I'll show you one of the VIP quarters. They're all the same. This is the only one that has lighting right now. So this is one of six VIP suites. So this is essentially the captain's quarters. Where we are now, this will be a small lounge area. Sort of wrap around. So for coffee table in the middle, nice views out the window. Very nice. A little office area here. Obviously a bedroom. It'll have a double bed or droves, that sort of thing. And then a sort of a shower and bathroom. It's sort of like a self-contained apartment, really. Nice. Okay. A little kitchen area over here. And again, it'll be packed with interactivity. So lots of things you can pick up and fiddle with and make drinks for yourself and that sort of thing. And eating and drinking will be a thing in the game. We don't want to make it sort of a hardcore survival game. It could be a difficult one to balance that, can't it? It can, yeah. So it will be sort of survival light. So as long as you eat and drink once per day, that's sufficient. It just gives people a reason to go to the mess hall and to actually use that stuff. So the science labs or C-deck rather is all science labs. This is where all the science takes place. None of them are built out yet. As you can see from all the empty bare framework. They are perhaps a little on the large side, but we also do need a fair bit of storage for all the things that you bring up from planetary services. This is probably a good time to talk about what the point of that is. So when you're out exploring, doing science is one of the main ways you'll drive the upgrade path for the ship. So every component is going to be upgradeable in some way. So even the wires, you'll be able to upgrade to sort of lower resistance, higher quality, there's better wiring that doesn't damage as easily. And obviously you need new and better materials in order to 3D print these new wires. So the science teams will be involved in researching those new materials. So if you arrive at a planet, you find an unknown mineral. You can then bring that aboard the ship initially via a probe until we do planetary landings, which are the future. But initially it's going to be five probes. It will come back. Even just sending a probe that, so you're talking about a probe return mission, right? So it'll go down presumably in real time. Yes. Grab a sample of something for you and then come back. I love that. I find that sort of thing really interesting though. That's really fascinating. Obviously you want to get in a shuttle and we'll talk about that later, but you want to get in a shuttle and fly down to a planet yourself. But even just sending a probe down and then waiting for that probe to come back and then interacting with it when it comes back in and getting yourself, that's fantastic. I love that. Yeah, I'll walk you through how that works. So if we take a jog over to the probe facility, so again this is all work in progress. There's one of your donuts that fell through the floor. It's a phased donut, that one. It's quite rare. So this is at the back of the ship. We're not all the way at the back, but towards the rear. This is going to be the drone handling facility. This is where drones can be 3D printed. So you'll have some storage racks for drones or probes rather. 3D print beds for printing out new ones and you'll have a sort of a landing pad and launch facility at the back here with its own layout lock. So the idea is on the bridge, the bridge will target the location on the planetary surface where the probe is going to go. That gets sent through to this facility here and whoever is manning this facility will then load the drone or probe into the launching mechanism which will then launch it out. Everyone then waits patiently for it to come back. We won't make that too long, a couple of minutes. And when it arrives, it arrives back here in the airlock and then you'll spray it with some decontaminant or other and then that will contain the sample. So you'll open the probe up and there will be a physicalized sample inside that you can then pick up and handle. So we have our probe sample in hand which could be anything from a plant, a rock, a small alien creature, a bit of pottery, a bit of tech, anything we can think of really. Something that's been retrieved from the surface and the surface targets will be things like a mineral outcropping, an archaeological site, an interesting like cops of trees or whatever. So those will come up on the bridge as target locations. We send down the probe, we retrieve our sample, relevant to that location and then we take our probe, our sample rather and we go to the science lab that will be handling that particular sample. So if you have a look at the wall over here these are just some temporary labels. This will be replaced by a proper wall screen. You can see that one of the ones listed is oceanography. So that probe when it comes back could have a canister of water with some sea life in it or just bacterial life. So if this here, for example, was the oceanography lab then we would put it on some kind of machinery and then the science could take place on that sample. And that sample is physicalised and it now exists on the ship. So when you're done doing science on it it either goes on a shelf or you can take it to your crew quarters or put it in the lounge. You can just do whatever you want with it. So the physicalised objects, whatever they happen to be that you bring up from the surface because it's a big old galaxy that's created procedurally presumably? It is, yes. So there's various procedural asset tools. Unreal Engine 5 actually recently really improved theirs. So the mesh is the physical objects will be procedurally generated and hopefully seeded so they're all completely unique. And part of the thing with actually expanding the team is we want artists that are doing nothing else but just coming up with new and interesting... Coming up with bits. So we can procedurally, you know, LEGO attach them together to make new objects. A bit like No Man's Sky I guess. Sort of like a hyper-realistic version of No Man's Sky so hopefully we won't have any weird, multi-coloured, wonderful things. Not all the time anyway, there'll be some. It's extraordinary actually isn't it that the sort of the technology environment that you and I live in these days that tools like Unreal Engine are now available to people who aren't EA, you know, or Ubisoft or whatever, you know, you can put them in the hands of prosumers and then games like this that would never get greenlit in a boardroom ever. Yeah, it's far too niche. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, you say they're niche but they're not. I'm sure there's a million and one people on the planet. If you pitched this game to them, they'd say, I'd absolutely love to play that. I would adore playing that all day long. Yeah. But a boardroom is never going to take a risk on something like that. They wouldn't see the value in it. But it's just amazing that these kind of things can now be put in the hands of people like you and also like not being a big corporation, being an independent house, essentially. You've got that kind of agility in your design and development where you can identify a hole in your game or a need in the community of people that are playing it and immediately pivot towards it and take care of it. Yes, absolutely. I mean, it doesn't require like, you know, 15 design documents and kind of financial agreement from the boardroom and nobody's got to do projections on where it's going to go or anything like that. You know, you can just go, yeah, that's a good idea. Let's do that. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, operational agility is one of the things we really want to maintain. It can be a blessing and a curse. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, flights of fancy are very much something I'm prone to. So I'll think of a cool idea. I go, ooh, I must implement that. Yeah. And my partner Claire, who is kind of, I call her the gatekeeper of feature group because she goes, no, you have a to-do list. You will stick to your to-do list. We don't need free-headed dogs by Tuesday. Exactly. Exactly. So she kind of keeps me on the straight and narrow. But yeah, absolutely. And we've actually turned down quite a few publisher offers already for that very reason. Yeah. Because we want to retain creative control and creative freedom. And, you know, we don't need external parties dictating time scales or feature lists. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we're keen to retain that independence. Sorry, just back to the drone handling role, by the way, that you mentioned down the hall. Are you pitching that as potentially a player could do that as well? They could be the guy in the drone room. Yeah, absolutely. So that'll be part of the science role. So all these rooms will be part of the science department. And if you choose to play as a player in the science department, then there will be a jobs board with jobs that come up for you to do. And so both you and the NPCs work from the same task sheets. So as the jobs come up on the job board, they just get assigned to whoever's in that team. And there will be two separate roles in each department. So you'll have either just the scientists or the head of the science team. And same with engineering. An engineer or head of engineering. If you choose to be the head of engineering, then you get the additional ability to just assign tasks as you see fit. Right. Whereas if you choose to be just an engineer, then you do what you're told. Right, right. So yeah, so each department will have, though, the command role and just the worker role. Right, OK. Yeah, so continuing along with the surface samples. So if you're going to stand out in the light. So any of these labs, each one will have a specific purpose. And you take your sample to the relevant lab, whatever that lab may be. We haven't yet defined exactly what the list of labs will be. Sure. But we'll go through all the different science disciplines. We'll come up with a list of different things that are relevant to those disciplines. Right. And then that will form the list of sorts of things you can pull up from the planetary surfaces. So it'll all make sense. And it will all be science-based. And as with everything else in the game, we want it based on real-world science as much as possible. Is there a risk that you could potentially bring something up from the surface that you'd rather you hadn't brought up from the surface accidentally? Or is that a feature creepy? No, no, no. That's very much on the to-do list. And that's going to be part of the tactical role. So one of the biggest challenges is having always had something to do on the ship. For some roles, like engineering, it's easy. Or if you're a medical officer, it's easy. You just keep feeding sick bay with sick people. But for things like the pilot or the tactical role, when you're not actually in combat, what's the tactical officer actually doing other than just sitting there twiddling his thumbs? So we need other things happening aboard ship. Like a couple of NPCs could get into a fight and you have to go and sort them out, maybe take one to the brig. But yeah, pulling up an unexpected insect, for example, on a plant, which might seem innocuous, but then breeds exponentially, you could have suddenly your ship is full of unwanted creepy crawlies that the tactical officer then needs to go and deal with. Nice. Okay. I've seen movies about that, Dan. It didn't end well. No. Yeah, I'm a big fan of the Alien series. So some of that might creep into it somewhere. I'm off that day. Okay. I'm on a bound to ask, by the way, because the wife asked me if she wanted to know if there was going to be a camera suite in the game of any description. I know you've got drones that you can steer around. Yes. So if you mean in terms of machinima and making movies? Yeah. Yes. So those little camera drones are just a test of the concept. Okay. But they will be extended to have a lot of different functionality. So right now, you can zoom. You can do depth of field and things with them. And that's decent enough for now. But we want to really expand the feature set of those. And give players the ability to, I guess, turn the game into a recording studio. So I know that fan movies and things are a huge deal. And people really want the playground in order to be able to do that. So we're fully supportive of that. And we will add whatever it is people need. So people tell us what they need. And we will add it. Excellent. Excellent. She will be very happy. Good. Good. And I was talking about Upgrade Path, wasn't I? Yes. Sorry, I saw it like a year ago. That's all right. So the whole point we went and got something from the drone handling facility is because we wanted to upgrade the ship in some way. So let's say that we got a rock. Let's say this is the geology lab. We take the rock to the geology lab. And the science team unlocked the mysteries of that rock. So in doing so, they have themselves gained some skill. And they will have unlocked a technology level in terms of that rock. So now you have access to a new mineral that will unlock certain upgrades for certain things of all the ship. So that particular mineral might be a really good insulator or it might be really highly superconductive. So anything that uses that sort of thing can benefit from being 3D printed using that material. Oh, wow. OK. And that's how things will be upgraded. So you will 3D print. The ship you start with is not the ship you'll kind of end with if you see what I mean. No, no. So you 3D print a new part, remove the old one and replace it with the newly 3D printed one. And that is essentially how the ship's being upgraded. So again, it's one to one. You're physically creating the piece and then putting the piece in place. Wow, OK. And then just recycling the old piece. OK. So given that this is sort of Earth's kind of first deep-splice exploration mission, I am writing that on. Yes. You're still looking at a fleet of ships out in the galaxy or anything. Oh, yeah. Oh, OK. I can hear Claire getting twitchy. Will there be any other infrastructure anywhere else in the galaxy at all, like I'm thinking sort of dry docks or space stations or anything, albeit closer to Earth? So for humanity, predominantly Earth, I think we'll probably do something around Alpha Centauri just because it's right there. Sure. Lore-wise, the FTL wasn't like one day we had it the next day before we didn't. It's going to be the case that it's always been working sort of sub-light so we can get to places like Alpha Centauri in a reasonable time frame, but not fast enough that you can explore the galaxy. So the idea of the engine in this ship, this is the first ship we've been able to build, which is truly capable of exploring the galaxy. OK. So beyond the immediate neighborhood, there's no humanity, no human presence at all in the galaxy. OK. But that doesn't mean there aren't other presences in the galaxy. So aside from the ones we create manually, and there will be some key races we manually create with big empires and things, the rest of the whole galaxy will be procedurally filled out. And I've got lots of different ways I'm going to handle that. In a nutshell, without going into the complexities of it too much, the galaxy is split into 100 light-year cubes, and each one of those cubes is generated in isolation with its own seed. So there's a couple of billion seeds which are completely isolated sections of the galaxy. So within that 100 light-year cube, it will decide whether or not there's one civilization controlling that entire region, or whether there's multiple at war, or whether or not it's all independent civilizations. So it will decide on a sector by sector basis, and we're calling these 100 light-year cube sectors. So each sector will decide what sort of thing is going on there within that region. And then when any planet within that sector generates life, it will reference that sector's plan for that region and generate that life accordingly. So when you enter a new sector, you're not going to know really who's there, whether it's one entire empire or whether or not it's just lots of little independent worlds. And again, that's the joy of the discovery side of it. So at all times we're trying to leverage that joy of discovery and not knowing what you're going to find. And is it going to be good? Is it going to be bad? You don't know until you get there. Right, okay, so a multiplayer game, when you fire up a multiplayer game, that will be your starship, and there won't be any other starships. My wife's starship, for example, won't be sitting next to me or whatever. That's right, yeah. So it's a co-op game. So you're all on the same ship. However, and there is a however, there isn't any reason why we can't have multiple smaller starships. So something that we're going to do at a later point is allow players to have a small fleet of small ships, not something huge like this, because we're getting to sort of engine limitation problems there. So maybe two, three smaller ships, and then you could have two or three separate crews flying off together as an Armada. Wow, okay. But not yet. For now, it's just one ship. So if I go to a particular star system and a particular planet, and there's a civilization there, if my friend was to go to that star system on their ship, will they see a different civilization or is there a chance that they won't see a civilization? Is everybody's galaxy the same, basically, or is everybody's galaxy going to be different? Yes, it's the same for everybody on purpose, because we're really keen for the community to really explore as a community. So if one person finds something really cool, we want for them to be able to share that with their friends in the community at large and just say, you need to go here, it's amazing. And there could be some spectacular planetscapes or there could be a really interesting alien race that's been generated from the mad algorithms. Or the Borg. Or the Borg, yeah. And again, so on that note, I'm a huge fan of Babylon 5. Me too, mate, yeah. I think I would say of all of the various sci-fi series there are, Babylon 5 is probably my favorite. Yeah, me too, mate. Yeah, I love it, love it. And one of the things I love about it is, I guess it's got that mystery to it. It's a lot more mysterious and ethereal in some way than other sci-fis. It's got that unknown. And that's the kind of energy I want from this game. I want there to be mysteries in the galaxy. I want you to come across an alien race that's so far beyond you that you have no hope of understanding who they are, what their motives are, what are they doing. You just don't know, because they're so far beyond you. And because of the procedural generation, those races are going to have a wide spectrum of personalities of how xenophobic are they, sort of thing, how aggressive are they. And that means that you're going to get a perfect storm of a highly aggressive, highly xenophobic, highly technologically advanced race that is out there somewhere, lurking in the dark. And some poor player is going to come across them and not live to tell the tale. But then they'll tell their friends about that place. If you go to Zaha-Doom, you will die. You will die. How do you sort of, I mean, how do you intending to sort of to, well, you need to have like a central database that everybody's game reports back to or will the way the galaxy is created, will it just naturally be the same wherever anybody goes, if you see what it is? Yes. Yeah, the latter. It'll naturally generate the same thing for everyone. Because the seed for the sector is based entirely on its XYZ coordinates. So it's the coordinates of the area that drives the seed. So as long as nothing moves, then everyone will get the same seed for that planet or star system. Right. Okay. Okay. That's very cool. Okay. Should we head down to engineering then? Yes, let's. And you sort of, I guess, if you want the community exploring the galaxy, are you kind of, are you keen for the community? Well, I guess this will happen whether you're keen or not, but sort of for the community to create their own tools and their own databases, essentially. Hello, Eleanor Bennett. Just basically going about our job. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a balance between creating tools within the game and then allowing players to have the creative freedom to make their own tools. So the way we're going to approach this is that we will support players in the creation of their own tools where we can. Cool. So if there's a certain amount of data that they need from the game, we'll work on making it available for them so that they can use that in their tools. Nice. Because I would love to see a community mapping project. To be honest, we've already got some. We've got a guy on our Discord who's started mapping black holes and another rare phenomena in the galaxy. Wow. It's just a spreadsheet for now. Yeah. The snowball has started. Yeah, absolutely. That stuff's really cool. I really like that kind of out-of-game stuff in other games that I've played as well. I really enjoy that aspect of it. Very cool. Okay. Yeah. Okay, so engineering. Wow. Where to start? Let's start at the reactor. So this is... It is pretty. It's going to have a bit of an upgrade at some point because those little yellow bits are sticking out. They're neutral beam injectors and they are going to be consumable. So they will break and wear out. So the little balconies that are sticking out here, this allows you access to that. But I built the reactor before I built anything else. So that just needs just a graphical overhaul. It needs remodeling. It needs to be easier to get to the component tree to replace the broken parts. And the reactor is going to be made of numerous pieces which all work together to form the full reactor heart. Okay. So pieces of the reactor will break and will need to be replaced. Okay. Very cool. If you go downstairs and have a look. So ignore the not fitting UI. This is actually an older version of it. It's also on the latest development build. It's an awful lot bigger and fits even worse. So I'm still working on that. So I've been working on a fluid system for the reactor lately and that's pretty much done now. So that should be coming to a demo build near you soon. So these pipes here they aren't just there to look pretty. They actually do serve a purpose. So in this instance this is the coolant pipes which flow coolant through the magnetic coils on the reactor. Okay. And they will actually be flowing fluid through them to cool the coils. And that's part of I guess the reactor gameplay about keeping it cool and what I was working on last night actually on my live stream. I was working on managing the heating and the cooling as you turn the reactor above 100%. Wow. And it was quite funny actually because it's so organic I found that it was also self-regulating. Because as the temperature was going up the reaction efficiency was going down. So the output was going down which was bringing the temperature back down. So it didn't matter how high I turned up the reactor it kept self-regulating. It's got a mind of its own. That's very cool. Yeah. So I'm having to fix that so that it doesn't self-regulate quite so much. So that it's problematic. Yeah, you need it to be a problem. So this is when you sort of end up in engineering this is where you for me anyway you really start to get this is where the simulation really comes into it because when you're sitting on the bridge and you're steering a starship around you can do that in pretty much a whole bunch of games. But you're mentioning the fluid cooling system on your live stream last night you were talking about I'm going to get the chemicals wrong Guterium and HE3 was it? Yes, yeah. So those are the two sort of fuel components that drive the reaction that generates the electricity all of which is simulated to power the faster than light drive and that's one of the things I suppose that's real hard to get across to people who might just casually look at this absolutely full of cables and wires and all of which I guess in the right scenario could take damage or fail or and it all has to be managed and maintained I suppose. Yeah, absolutely. At the last measurement it was something around about five kilometers of cabling end-to-end which is madness but if you look at the cables here you can see that they all got names on them and those are real cable names they're named for a reason because they need to be because yeah exactly right now they're just sticking out the side because they're not modelled but all of these cables when I've actually got around to modelling them properly you will be able to follow them from their source to their destination every single one of them and when a cable fail you will remove that cable and replace it with a new one everything got you it's one-to-one That's bonkers and yeah we've got a full electrical distribution system which is running in real-time and it's fully simulated so for example if you press the start capacitor button there the bottom three on the right hand side you just press that so what that does everything's turned red so what you've done you've just shut off the main reactor feed so the ship is now running on the start capacitors so that's what will be part of the start-up sequence so when you're walking to the ship completely cold and dark it'll be black until you press that button out of my word right now and this confuses people but you've just turned off all feeds and it's still working and the reason for that is because the ship's powered by batteries so right now you've turned off all power from the reactor but the ship will keep ticking because of the batteries but if the battery is now drain dry the ship will go dark it's not washing things so the the reactor generates generates power the power is pushed out to capacitors and then to batteries for storage is that right that's right so it goes from the reactor through various distribution buses into the batteries and then from the batteries out to each deck and you've got like these here so like this one here for example you can see you've got two battery aggregators sets of battery rooms and that powers this quadrant of the ship so if you imagine the ship is a pizza it's cut into four slices then each of those pizza slices is one quadrant of power so the front quadrant for example could be completely destroyed damaged but the other three would still work because it's all isolated it's all built for redundancy I was a network engineer in a previous life so I immediately think about redundancy and then it's fleeting through it is so as far as multiplayer is concerned are you looking at a client server model or peer to peer or a pizza both yeah it's a session based sort of just hop in so one player hosts like Minecraft one player hosts a game and then friends can just hop in to that game and dedicated servers yes we will be looking at dedicated servers we've got pretty much all the components we need to make them work we just need to go through the process of setting it all up but yeah we'll have a separate executable for running a headless client and then people can have maybe there's a group of players that are on a particular mission they can have their server running and then they can just hop in and out as they want to that's a rabbit hole and that's just my word that's amazing okay and you touched briefly on sort of going down to planet surfaces away team stuff essentially that's further down the line but my understanding is you've got sort of shuttles and things like that are kind of on the cards so we've done a few tests on that we've got some terrain being generated which you can run around I spawn loads of chairs all over it because that's the kind of person I am rolling around on the surface on chairs so the idea is you'll take a shuttle out of the shuttle bay and you'll have full control over it so you'll be able to fly the shuttle no differently than the main ship and you'll use that for a number of different purposes we want to have like derelict alien stations you can explore and derelict alien ships and your way of getting to them will be to take a shuttle across to whatever that object is and then you can explore on foot from there and we'll have the same process for planets as well so right now the way I want it to work because I think it's important to state that it's going to be very difficult if not impossible to have real time planetary landings using the ship or the main ship or the shuttles because of the way we handle movement within the galaxy so obviously we are on a massive ship it's made of many thousands of pieces most of which are running code full physics 200 crew members wandering around if you try and move that then the game would crash you can't move that much stuff so we're moving the galaxy around the ship instead space is the thing that is moving but that also means that we're chucking planets around when you roll the ship we're moving the planet and if you imagine now that that planet is covered in trees and rocks and grass and everything else you can't move all that at once so it's very computationally difficult to move two things at the same time so there has to be some form of transition and I want to keep planetary exploration as one to one in real time as possible so my plan is to have the area in which you fly down through the atmosphere it will know where that is corresponding to the surface location we'll have a brief transition as you pass into the upper atmosphere of the planet and then you can freely fly around the planet's surface if you then fly up again above a certain altitude you will be then put back into space so we need to teleport the player shuttle to the surface environment depending on where their relative surface coordinates are but I don't want it to be a locked transition so it physically lands you and then you can't fly around I do want the freedom of being able to explore in a shuttle around the surface we just need to work on making that happen sure space first though yeah shift and then we'll work on the surface transitions but that's the grand plan can you talk a little just to explain to the folks because it's slightly unusual isn't it what your business model is because people can actually get hold of this now can't they and from steam yes so right now there's a demo available the rest is just a tech demo so a lot of the game player like surface retrieval and things is coming but right now what you see here is what's in the demo so you can explore the whole galaxy the whole galaxy is implemented it's missing a lot so we don't have moons yet we don't have like multi-star systems but you can just fly around and explore what's there the whole ship is here a lot of it's unfinished but you do have full access to it and the electrical system is practically done so you can fiddle with that so you know there's a lot to see there's a lot to fiddle with and hopefully that gives players an idea of the scope and the potential for this game but yes it's still very much work in progress that's brilliant okay but yes just to answer the question because I went off on a tangent there yes so we're giving the game away for free that is very much the plan and the reason for this is this is just me on my own I'm building up a brand new studio from scratch we don't have any funding it's literally just me with my very good wife Claire helping out and in order to build up the studio and to build up the community the best way to do that is just to remove all barriers to entry and say right here's the game play it let us know what you think if you love it back it and we're going to kickstart hopefully very soon again you know Dan time time scales are stretching out and but at some point over the next few weeks you know kickstarter will go live and if we hit all our targets and if we get a lot of funding on kickstarter then that's just immediately me going out and buying developers and saying right you you you come work on the game start building cool stuff if we don't get the funding it's going to take longer yes we very much want to just remove all barriers to entry and just let people play the game I've got a gut feeling that you're probably going to do okay Dan fingers crossed fingers crossed yeah I mean if kickstarter doesn't make enough in order to be able to expand the team sort of plan B is to start selling some ships so I'll build a variety of different ships and they'll go on steam as DLCs and hopefully we can generate the money we need to buy team members that way game dev costs money and people cost money good people cost even more money yeah absolutely I mean it's great again coming back to the sort of the environment that we live in these days though it's great that you can explore these different things and you can have a plan B and it's not kind of an all or nothing deal but yeah yeah absolutely kickstarter goes Dan I'm not going to keep you anymore we've already taken you away from your development time for long enough so no problem thank you very much for the tour I'll put links in the description to this video below if you want to take a look at starship yourself Dan thank you so much really appreciate the tour mate that's fantastic it has been a pleasure thank you mate so there you have it you'll find links below to grab the technology demo of starship simulator for yourself if you want to give it a try and there's also links there to everything else starship simulator including the games official discord server as Dan mentioned they're looking to take the project to kickstarter in the near future so watch out for that if you'd like to become a backer and help bring the project into full production my sincere thanks to Dan for the chat and the tour of the ship you can bet when there's more news about starship simulator we'll bring it to you right here