Recent Articles In Star Control Journals
This month marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Star Control II.  Join Stardock, Paul Reiche, Fred Ford, and others later this month for the celebration here on StarControl.Com .  We will be releasing some new content for Star Control II fans at the celebration. In meantime, please visit the forum and share your memories of Star Control II .  We will be sharing some of these as part of the celebration.
Greetings, best friends! As always seems to be the case, we are way behind schedule.  Between the recently announced SINS OF A SOLAR EMPIRE II  and the release of Galactic Civilizations IV and a big, unannounced game in development, we have had our hands full. Star Control: Origins news! First, the good news.  Star Control: Origins - Ultimate Edition, has been ported to XBOX Series X.  We just need to go through the final steps of pre-certification, then ce...
Greetings! It's been awhile since we've done an update so I figured it would be a good time to tell you where things are. Star Control: Origins News Before Covid, we had started porting Star Control: Origins over to XBOX One.  However, all that went out the window when the pandemic hit since you can't take the kits home and everyone was working from home.   However, this past Fall we were able to get restarted on it and we now have the game in pre-certification for X...
With more people coming back to the office work on the console version of Star Control: Origins has picked up.  The first part of this has been to do a pretty thorough revamp of the game’s underlying systems in order to optimize it for the XBOX One, PS4 and also next-generation consoles. During this process we greatly improved the quality of the texture maps throughout the game which includes aliens and ships. [click on thumbnail to enlarge] The team was also able to sub...
February 13, 2020 by DerekPaxton on kael
Heir to the Scryve In Star Control: Origins you had a chance to save the galaxy and meet some very dangerous, troubled, strange (and overly friendly) aliens along the way. There may or may not have been some cannibalism involved. After the successful completion of Origins, the threat was stopped and the galaxy was at peace. What is there for a snarky ship commander to do? Expand the influence of Earth, of course. It's time to get out into the solar system and to start becoming a galact...
It's been an exciting Summer so far for fans of Star Control. Last month we re-released the classic trilogy on Steam, posted a major update to the engine to improve the visuals, and now we are busy working on chapter 3 of the Earth Rising expansion. For those of you who have played the game or will be buying the game in the near future, let's talk about the galactic scene today. Star Control takes place in the not-so-distant future. The stars are real stars, and in Origins they're place...
The first expansion pack to Star Control: Origins, Earth Rising, is broken into 4 parts that is being delivered as a season pass (that is, a new part every season).  The first part, Aftermath, was released in December and added a whole new region of space to explore, as well as new quests for your crew and the beginning of Earth's journey into being an interstellar power. Part 2 is arriving soon and it concerns itself mostly on the mysterious Lexites. The Lexites first appeared in Dawn ...
Greetings! Star Control has definitely been the most...dramatic franchise we've ever worked on.  No doubt the diabolical work of the Crimson Corporation indeed! So what's next? What's happening?   Right now, we're working on Part 2 of Earth Rising which revolves around the Lexites.  You might ask, what is the process for creating these?  Well, broadly speaking it goes like this: General story.  What is the overall meaning for the story. Design up the q...
October 16, 2018 by Island Dog on ID's place to speak
Hello...BEST FRIENDS! We are currently working on version 1.1 of Star Control: Origins and the first free DLC called the Multiverse.  We expect to have a beta version of v1.1 out this week for those who want to try it out.   Multiverse The Multiverse DLC will open up Steam Workshop to modders who want to create their own stories, maps, custom settings, aliens, etc. for people to play with.  This DLC will obviously evolve over time and get more features as we l...
September 28, 2018 by Frogboy on Brad Wardell - Skinning the frog
Greetings!  With Star Control: Origins out and having already sold nearly 50,000 copies after only a week of availability we are now ready to talk about...THE FUTURE. We will be making an official announcement after version 1.1 (the big modding release) is available but we didn't want fans, especially those who are starting to finish the Origins adventure, to have to wait to know what's next. Needless to say, we've gone back and forth on the best way to deliver new stories, que...
September 23, 2018 by Frogboy on Brad Wardell - Skinning the frog
Greetings! Wow! What a fantastic week! Like many of you, we weren't sure what the reception would be. How many people are into space adventure/RPG games? I've even seen debates on what exactly is an RPG? Here's what we have planned for this week: Translation (Перевод) Russia is the #2 market for this game. With German a close #3. The translations came in a lot hotter than we expected due to the star and planet names. We are hoping very much to have a package from Moscow waiting ...
September 24, 2018 by Frogboy on Brad Wardell - Skinning the frog
Greetings!  This is it! The very last of this Prelude series.  I hope you've enjoyed them. So now let's talk about modding. To understand modding in Star Control: Origins, you need to understand how the game is structured. Everything that matters is in the \Assets directory. Meanwhile on your machine, in your documents folder you have: Each universe is equivalent to the Assets folder.  If I want to create a whole new universe, then my changes would go ...
September 17, 2018 by Frogboy on Brad Wardell - Skinning the frog
In the previous Prelude , I mentioned that, early on, there was an expectation that a lot more time was going to be spent exploring planets than we ultimately chose to execute on. Today, let's take a look at the menagerie of creatures we had considered back when we believed that the planets would be where players would spend most of their time. We had a lot of critters designed for the planets. And I don't doubt that, over time, we will find a way to introduce them. But here ...
September 10, 2018 by Frogboy on Brad Wardell - Skinning the frog
The best laid plans... Let's talk about the environments of Star Control... Explore to explore, in order to explore some more... At one point, we expected players to spend a lot more time on planets than they actually do in the final game.  I don't mean just a little bit more time, I mean a lot more time. Early on, we envisioned planet exploration to be the primary activity of the game. We were wrong. I don't know if there was something in the drinking...
Back in part 9 , I touched briefly on the art style with the debate we had on having a "mobile" style UI vs. an immersive style UI. Today, I want to walk you through how the art style itself evolved during the five year development of Star Control: Origins. Let's jump right in.. A tale of two philosophies Let's take a look at Star Control II: If you look at the box and the screenshot below it, you get a sense that it's trying to convey a classic pulp Sci-...