For what it’s worth, I wish everyone a happy 2025. I had thought about expressing my rather poignant lack of enthusiasm for this coming year and the reasons for it, but it’s probably better to refrain from such things in a game blog. I have to assume people don’t come here to get their mood down. That’s what social media seems to be for.

I will go into one thing, though. Namely that I think that AI will be turning into so many tulips from Amsterdam, only much more devastating due to apparently billions of dollars of government investments in the coming years that will all vanish in a puff of smoke once the bubble bursts. No idea how long it’s going to take exactly and how bad it’s going to get, though. You may disagree with me on that assessment, obviously. But so far everything I’ve seen from the AI “revolution” is telling me that it’s a dead end technology that will see some improvements, but will never be able to signifficantly increase its capabilites. Just as cars became better but never learnt to fly, this kind of AI will become better but will never learn to actually think in any way deserving of that description.

The game and the economy

I went into a bit of detail for a reason there. The reason being, this game is going to be an RPG, but one very much rooted in an economic theme. I’ve consulted some tutorials on how to design stories for your game, on how to do worldbuilding, etc. etc. Mostly I’ve heard things that are either perfectly intuitive and therefore not very surprising, or that are heavily opinionated on how a story should be told, and usually that opinion does not fit very well with interactive media. However, I remember one particular piece of advice from some interview somewhere. A single sentence that had burned itself into my mind while I was not even looking for any advice on worldbuilding or game narratives. It was not mindblowing, except in its simplicity and clarity, it did not sound like a big secret, but most games all through history are testament to the fact that it does not seem widely known, or adhered to. It was, I think, the guy that wrote the story for Subnautica that said it. It went something like this:

Your story should be about the same things your gameplay is about.

It’s so simple, and it makes so much sense. And it immediately told me why Mass Effect, while being fun, just always had a certain dissonance. Why I couldn’t get into dragon age at all. Why I put down Cosmonautica after merely an hour, as soon as I realized that it’s just going to be another “you’ve got to save the world”-story. But also why other games resonated so strongly with me even though, purely on narrative merrit, they were objectively inferior to some other games that didn’t. Ye olde X-com is my goto example, with a hollow shell of a narrative, yet a hollow shell that fits the shape of the gameplay so nicely that you can’t help but fill it with character and drama, but also others like star control II (that did not just have brilliant story design, but also absolutely hilarious writing), and… Imperium Galactica? Huh yeah, that was a thing once. Certainly not the best 4x game ever conceived, but damn did it sell itself on what it had…

And so we come to orbital margins, a game about surviving in the margins of an economy dominated by entities that ate todays largest corporations for breakfast, preparing to gobble up the survivors of a terrible time of hardship that will never be able to go back to earth and that want nothing more than some well-earned reprieve, but without selling their childrens future for it.

There’s not that much of a story there yet, obviously, it’s all still in development. But analogous to this big picture, I intend to make the players story one of struggle, survival, and frequent failure, with just some of your characters making it to some sort of happy ending. This story should be mostly up to the player to tell, X-com style (well, without blasting aliens left and right, and probably also without getting slaughtered 5 times in a row when stepping off your spaceship…). I hope there will be characters and story vignettes to liven up a mostly mechanics-driven experience a bit. I certainly intend there to be events and boons and mishaps that will interact more deeply with elements of the world than they do right now. I desperately want there to be a story of a world that evolves around the player, changing in very significant ways and forcing the player to adapt. The focus here is on adapt, not shape. You’re basically a fedex guy with a hotter exhaust pipe, there’s not much you can do to shape developments on a global scale. It’s not that kind of gameplay. Hence, it should not be that kind of story.

When the bubble bursts

And here’s where I finally loop back to my initial remarks about AI. The entire world of the game essentially came about by an economic bubble. One big, giant economic bubble that prompted governments, financial institutions and private investors to pour ludicrous amounts of money into space technologies, construction and exploitation because they’re suddenly promising to be oh so profitable, and whoever gets left behind will be nothing in the economy of tomorrow that will mostly be fueled by extraterrestrial resources. Or so they all think. The entire bubble comes about by… well, Humans being Human. Not by an actually natural economic opportunity presenting itself, but an entirely artificial one. Namely, the richest person in the world (controlling a paltry 5 and something percent of the worlds economy, since there’s no end to the accelerating wealth disparity in sight) wants to put the Pharaos to shame and build the biggest mausoleum ever - on the moon. Visible from earth. Their glory and legacy forever evident to the people of earth as they raise their eyes to the night skies.

And off we are to the races. If the richest person in the world is bankrolling it, surely it’s a watertight investment, right? They hype causes more hype, other trillionaires jump on the bandwagon and announce their own mega-projects. Of course someone wants to build an O’Neil cylinder without having any sort of economic justification. And then there’s the guy that just won’t be one-uped, and he vows to terraform Mars as his enduring legacy. That’s the straw that finally breaks the camels back - after a while, when it becomes clear that his terraforming business has a lot in common with the south sea company of yore, and most returns on investments into space infrastructure turn out to be slightly longer term than initially thought. Something like the better part of a century, if everything goes very well. The ensuing economic crash and the chaos and struggle that follow leaves the world only barely recognisable. Not quite ready for the game to start, because at that particular time money would be a somewhat useless currency. There is a time of recovery and reformation that ultimately leads to the point where the game starts. I might talk about that a bit another time.

But what about development?

It’s going fine, but so far unspectacular. I was wondering what to write this month, and then I happened to hear about the planned AI investments of the new US administration and others and realized how similar the situation is to the backstory of my game (the basic concepts of which I had lying around in a drawer in my head for about a decade or so), and thought why not make a segue since there’s not many other interesting things to write about.

There’s not nothing, though. Development is advancing at its usual pace (i.e. slowly, but consistently), and I’ve finally completed the trajectory calculation alogrithm in a first iteration that should be good enough to support the game for now. Not quite all I want, but a solid start. It took quite a lot of tweaking of the algorithms parameters, and fixing a truckload of bugs, until all my tests finally turned reliably green. There will be an entire second and possibly third chapter to this particular story once I put the actual moon and lagrange points in, because oh dear is that going to be a can of worms! But that’s still the far future at this point, so let’s not dwell on it.

I’ve decided to do the bulk of the UI first this time, and then change all the backend stuff to actually use the new capabilities. In this particular case it seemed easier to manage this way. I was also pleasantly surprised by the speed of the algorithm. At least for Hohmann transfers the calculation of all available trajectories from one location to another over a couple of days takes a fraction of a second. Not even long enough to require some sort of promise resolution, the calculation is almost imperceptible to the player. Currently it looks like this (don’t worry, this is not the final layout. It’s still very much WIP):

One neat thing I realized about Hohmann transfers is that if they are long enough to have a plane change burn during the transfer, you can signifficantly lower the required delta-v by timing the transfer so you pass a node shortly before intercepting the target if you’re raising your orbit, or shortly after the transfer burn if you’re lowering your orbit. The nodes are the 2 points in an orbit where you can make a plane change burn to equalize your plane, and the DV required for that is directly derived from your current orbital velocity. Which happens to be the lowest possible under these circumstances, which is what you can observe in the screenshot above. This results in a neat collection of trajectories with different DV-requirements - exactly what I need to make that “point-buy system” work that I talked about back in december. Trajectories with lower DV will be more difficult to “buy”, which should make it possible to give characters with high wits a signifficant advantage, while still making these more profitable trajectories attainable for characters with a lower stat, just at a much steeper price in time, dice, and possibly stress. I’m not far enough along to be able to tell how it’ll really play out in game, but discovering this relation (which should have been obvious when I wrote the math, but my brain always needs a bit to catch on to relations between numbers) has made me rather hopeful that it’ll work out just fine. I’m not entirely sure I’ll get there by end of february, but it’s at least not hopeless. Stay tuned to find out!

By the way…

Did you know a new Orbiter version released juuuuust before the old year took its leave? If you want to play with one of the most realistic spaceflight simulators available on PC, you should take a look here. It’s free, and open source, and it’s been teaching me about spaceflight and software development for somewhere about 20 years now! It’s unlikely I would try making this game if Orbiter hadn’t been around.