FAQ -- What is Project Morningstar?

I've been getting asked this a lot by the users who have come from our mods Fallout: New California and Save Our Ship 2, "what is Project Morningstar?"

Project Morningstar is a blend of inspirations from StarSector, Rimworld, and Fallout 1&2. A 2D isometric Role Playing & Colony Sim hybrid. 

You play as someone abducted from Earth in the 21st century, finding yourself next to a pillar on a Fragment of an alien mega-structure called Morgana. 

After making a main player character, you find yourself a stranger in a strange land, surrounded by largely medieval & iron age communities of humans, and alien lifeforms from other worlds, all seemingly mixed together without rhythm or reason. 

https://www.youtube.com/embed/o5OkxHusxpk

It is up to you to decide who your first player character will be, gathering berries and firewood to survive your first week before meeting other characters in hopefully welcoming communities willing to give you shelter and offer you a job. You'll be navigating through complex social systems to trade, build relationships, and invite people to join your party. 

As you build close relations with people met through quests, trade and emergent events, you'll be able to add them permanently to your group, making them player characters you can switch to at any time. 

Combat in Morningstar plays out in real time, using a Jab & Slash melee system of parries, blocks, and attacks. You want to equip a weapon and face the enemy, trying to get past their defenses and score a wounding hit.

Injuries won't just reduce a simple health bar, but instead a sophisticated Wound system reduces stamina and cripples limbs, as pain overwhelms and drops a character to the ground before a fatal blow kills them. This allows you to capture enemies and heal them, or be captured yourself. 

Maintain your health by eating healthy, mixing herbs to make medicine to reduce fevers, cure infections, alleviate pain. 

You can always switch away from combat to a tactical view, using your current player character as a leader behind the lines, issuing orders and bolstering moods. 

Your character has a mood, which affects their work speed and willingness to work. They also have traits they gather, like fear of combat and anger towards their enemies. Managing these moods keeps your spirits high, helping you fight off illness quickly and remain fighting when others would give up.

These Wants & Needs drive emergent gameplay and quests to acquire necessary goods and unlock achievements with lasting benefits, such as pride in your accomplishments the permanently boosts your mood when doing work and love of family which keeps you going with an endurance boon so long as you have family members left alive.  

Gather plants, animal products, minerals, and technology to craft items in a sophisticated crafting system, allowing you to mix & match items into unique recipes.

If you don't want to do these crafting tasks over and over yourself, assign some party members to stay at base and do it in automated pipelines, from gathering to an input bin, to making the items, to storing the output products, and finally selling them from that bin.

Morningstar is all about improving over the formula of similar games and automating away the tedium, so you can focus on playing rather than grinding. It's fun to chop down trees and mine out iron the first time, but eventually you'd rather just pay a group of miners to go handle it for you! 

Build yourself a town and use it to store companions as you venture out across the world, making alliances with other independent towns and civilizations, and completing motivation quests. Or just go explore! 

The grass & plants grows dynamically on a base of terrain with fertility and movement speed stats.  Picking a spot on the World Map is crucial to your long term survival as a town, with coveted spots with fertile soil in a good climate being pressured to join the big four factions, and harassed by raider tribes.

Travel the world to find locations to settle, acquire unique plants to farm back home, and trade with far away civilizations for their unique items.

Trade is complex, with some factions seeing certain items as worth more or less, depending on their culture and religion. A vast array of items are available to trade, none without some use in game. 

FAQ

1. What happened to their legs!?

Haha! We decided they don't need them! 

It saves money on animation (a quarter of a million dollars by some estimates!) and opens up the door for modding in your own items without all the hassle of animations either. The art style is pretty minimal and many hobbyist artists and freelancers see this style as easy to make, keep costs to a minimum for user generated content. The 8 directions are a little extra, but they look smooth and are easy to make.

The weapons animate, but the characters do not.

2. Where are you in development?

We're pretty early on still. It's been a year of full time development around our mod SOS2, which we use as a test bed for things like our Speed Loader XML Serialization, and Symbol system, which we use for handling all the data in Morningstar. 

2022 will be the year we hire another coding partner, make a big push to get to our first alpha milestones, and I hope by early 2023 we'll have a demo that's playable and rich with content, with a lot of the big systems coming after that, similar to where Alpha 5 was for RimWorld before the world was added. 

We have a ton of progress setting up Unity, our tools, and have a bunch of demo scenes housing feature prototypes and our UI is pretty far along. Nothing unified and playable yet, that's the next milestone: addressing issues found in this first prototype phase and doing them over again better for the alpha. 

Art assets are also very well established with a unique style and system for making more. We have gas in the tank and we're ready to go full time! 

3. Why Project Morningstar?

The True Name is not a name which can be spoken... until near release. We'll reveal the real name of the game as we get deeper into development and approach a release date. 

Project Brazil was our code name for New California, and Project Morningstar will get a shiny name when it's time. For now, it's our rallying point to organize all the data.

4. What about X feature from Y Game?

The goal of Morningstar is firstly to come into its own as a unique and fun indie tile, and the secondary objective is to overcome issues that plague our genre peers like RimWorld and Kenshi. Quality of Life mods are dear to us as modders, and we learned a lot about making our own mods for the games that inspired us.

5. What engine are you using?

Unity. Mostly driven by C# and XML for programming. We also invented our own Symbol system for saving huge towns, npcs and all their stats and inventory, and all our items. It makes procedural rendering super fast. Our in-game editor also allows us to change item stats and descriptions in real-time as a game is running, which is unique and powerful.

6. Will it be multithreaded?

We will use DOTS for procedural generation of maps, navmesh layers, and some other things. Burst compiler and other threaded tools will be used too. But overall, threading can only do so much where best practices and optimization are concerned. Our goal is to make a game that's readable by people and easy to mod, so that will require some PUBLIC sacrifices.

7. Will you continue to support SoS2 and/or New California or are those mods dead?

I really don't like what that implies. SOS2 is still being actively supported with tech help. So is New California. But where New California 231 is in a finished and fully playable state, the future expansion was left up to the community. SOS2 will continue with patches probably indefinitely. We've clearly never abandoned anything until it was finished, so we won't start now. 

8. What about war crimes?

Muhahaha. Yesss.

9. How about Updog?

Absolutely.