Hey everyone,
We've said here and there that you'd be getting news about the Umbral Choir very soon, and it looks like that time has arrived! Today's blog post is the first of a series focusing on the creation process of a faction. We will be covering the game design aspect, then the art, and if everybody's on their best behavior, finish with a G2G vote or two! Ever wondered how the secret sauce was made? Here's your chance!
Today, we're asking our Lead Designer on Endless Space 2, Jhell, a few questions about the elusive Umbral Choir...
- Can you please introduce yourself and what your role is within the team?
Sure! I’m Jhell on the forums, Jean-Luc in real life (not sure you could find a more French name if you tried). I actually work closely with Schell, Quaedam and more recently with Oriolie (our new intern who sometimes meows), making sure everyone is on the same page and that the design actually gets done on time for the programmers and artist to work on. I also spend a fair share of my time on the forums reading your feedback (sometimes even replying to it), and I sometimes lurk on our community Discord. And of course Excel. Lots of Excel.
- Please tell us more about the role of expansions in Endless Space 2, and how this faction fits into this perspective.
Expansions are a cool way to add what you’ve always wanted to do and have in the game but couldn’t include for release. It’s also a great way for us to include stuff that the community wants, or talks about. Before anything, I think an expansion is the execution of a fantasy. Sometimes you have a clear plan of what you want to do, but other times you’re just joking during your lunch break and someone says “you know what’d be cool? If you could destroy entire systems”. More seriously though, we want each expansion to add to the game in a meaningful way, and to emphasize different areas of the gameplay. For example right before the Vaulters, we released the Galactic Statecraft free update. This along with the pirates was meant to liven up diplomacy and bring more dynamism to player interactions. With the Hissho, we had a clear “war” orientation and we wanted to make the map more tactical, give more use to special nodes, and during development we realized it’d be cool to drive war through juicy economic goals (“lemme just destroy the Behemoth driving your science on this black hole”).
Now with the Umbral Choir… clearly we are going for Espionage! It’s a whole new layer for the game. We have to make sure it has a purpose in itself, but also that it ties in nicely and tightly with all the other game systems. It’s an innovative approach that we’re taking, and we’re still very early in development, but it looks promising and we hope you like it! And this has definitely driven how we approached the UC from a design perspective. We want to make a really unique faction, even more different than the Hissho or Vaulters were. It’s going to be really dependent on the new spying mechanic, but at the same time it’ll have to learn to use existing tools in a different perspective. I don’t want to divulge too much but if hide & seek was your favorite game as a kid, you’re going to love the UC.
- What are the goals of this expansion, and what are you trying to add to the game with espionage, and an espionage-based faction?
We have some strong rationales for Espionage and even more so for the UC. We’re also trying to take an innovative approach to espionage. You know how modern espionage has evolved? I mean the super-spy and the secret agent stuff is cool, but the 21st century has really brought some mean advancements in terms of intelligence gathering and use. We’d like to replicate that in the game. We also would like players to feel like they build something, a network, and that they can outsmart their opponents. And we want the UC to be the embodiment of that.
It’s our most ambitious expansion yet.
- What were your inspirations, from a game design perspective, for the Umbral Choir?
We tried to pick very diverse references. Video games are obviously the main one, and mechanically it’s important to be aware of what exists, what works, what doesn’t. But other mediums bring interesting stuff to the equation too (even more important for artists!).
In terms of mechanics, we liked the economic dynamic the Cultists had in Endless Legend, but I can also tell you that Schell really liked Hacknet and Uplink. We looked into older classics like MoO2, and the more modern references like Civ games for 4X.
- What are the particular challenges in creating this faction?
Trying something new is always a challenge by itself. Sometimes on paper things seem fine, and when you try it in the game it doesn’t feel quite right.
With the UC, we want to have a truly different gameplay experience that focuses on a tall gameplay. The tall gameplay in itself is a challenge, and when you add the spying constraint to it, it becomes… interesting. Also, the more different a faction is, the more careful you have to be that it’ll still be easy to grasp for new and returning players, and in our case this might prove to be the biggest challenge.
There is also the fact that this faction was voted on by the community for several of its elements, and this adds some expectations that we hope the gameplay will meet!
- What do you think will set the Umbral Choir apart from other factions, and why will they be cool to play?
First of all, they’ll be a truly tall faction, meaning that they can play with few, high-quality systems rather than trying to gobble up the galaxy. I can’t reveal too much but like I said, the Cultists were an inspiration. We did give the Hissho tools to be played tall, but we didn’t want to force this play style for a Militarist faction, so you could still play them in a more vanilla fashion. With the Umbral Choir we want to go further. Couple that with their unique affinity with the spying mechanic, and you’ve got a very special cocktail that’ll make them very cool to play. Disclaimer: works best if your nightstand book is Machiavelli…
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That's it for today! Next time on the Umbral Choir Making-Of, we step into a game design meeting to bring you the good stuff! What do you think the faction will play like?
