LO1: Analysis/Review #1 - Starbound

Platform: PC

Genre

- Starbound is done in a wonderfully detailed pixel style, with the attention to detail being no exception. It belongs in both the side scrolling genre and the sandbox genre, although the latter is the more prominent one. The entire basis of the game is around doing what you want, where you want and when you want, much like other games in the sandbox genre, and as such the game tries to cater around that. You have quests to do, but only if you feel like it. You need to build tools and weapons to defend yourself, but if you want to run around the planet and skip through fields of flowers without a care in the world, you can do that too. There's no penalty for this, expect maybe death, but even then you respawn back on your ship after your resurrection, and there's nothing to stop you from beaming back down to go about your business. The whole idea of roaming around and creating your own world is something that's always been appealing to fans of this genre, but if people enjoyed creating their own world you can only imagine how many people would have loved to find out that in this game you can customise and explore the entire universe, with several sectors, too. It's infinitely expanding and you'll never run out of things to do, which definitely increases it's replayability, and leaves you coming back for more. It's unique in it's own way, too, which makes it stand out considerably as a strong competitor to those in the same genre.

 Narrative

- Whichever race you start out as determines why you left your home world, but it doesn't really affect the gameplay all that much. My character so happens to be a Floran, a savage race of flower people, and her backstory is that she grew tired of her people's ways and took to the stars to pursue a more honourable hunt, and maybe then her kin would stop calling her weird, as she can 'feel it in her stems.' The story doesn't really have a huge impact on the way the game is played because of it, it's a simple two dimensional side scroller with no real restrictions based on the backstory given. It says my character wants to be more honourable, but in truth you could just walk in to a stronghold full of people and massacre them all and there's no penalty for this whatsoever. It's not honourable in the slightest, and the backstory, in my opinion, is there as a reminder, that your character has a past, and now you're controlling the present. It affects your approach simply by letting you choose how they act and what they want to do with their life, if they want to be a nomad and travel the stars, or to be a hermit in a little cottage in some remote forest planet, or to be a feared outlaw that kills everyone and everything in their path, then you can do that, it's fine. The story only connects with the target audience because it's your story now, and you get to choose what happens from here on out. It creates a sense of freedom that the sandbox genre is very good at.

 Production Process

- Starbound uses it's own specific engine and is coded using C++ among a few other things, which sets it apart from a lot of the other games. Normally games using the same engine are limited in what they can do and it's apparent when, say, two games can only do certain things and are limited despite the fact that they're totally different, and it can be easily be distinguished even with their differences. With every update Starbound produces a change log on the start up launcher and normally these changes are added in through the producers own incentive, and are things ranging from serious, such a bug fixes, to the not so serious, such as new items, weapons, and, let's not forget, Viking helmets. Things are always changing, though, since the game is still in the Beta stages and is always being updated to provide a better game playing experience for us all. Mechanics are being removed and added thanks to the feedback of the players, and, if that's not enough, there's a ton of mods people have made themselves to even add in more stuff to play with and enhance your gameplay tenfold.

Characterisation

- In a game where everything is up to you people would expect you to be able to make your own character, and Starbound does exactly that. With six races to choose from, both with their own gender models, as well as a ton of starter outfits to mix and match as well countless hairstyles and colours to choose from, you have full reign over what your character looks like and what they're going to be called. It's appealing, too, because you want to create something in which will be satisfying enough for you to play with through the entire game, and ultimately the longer you play with that one character again and again you'll grow attached, almost like it's personal. You made this character, you named them, you set them off on their adventure and decided what their life was going to be like, so a part of you has gone into making them, which is why it hurt a considerable lot the last time the game updated, and my character was wiped. I made her again, sure, but all my progress was lost, but at least it gave both me and her a new start. The idea of customising your character isn't anything new to the genre, as said before, the game is all about what you want to do, so to deny you the ability to make a character as you see fit would be quite disappointing. Just making your character alone adds a whole new way of playing the game, for both those who are casual and do whatever they want, or to those who are quite strict, and keep to their own rules. The characters are, truly, as strong as you make them.

 Gameplay

- Challenge is presented in many different ways in this game, but the one that comes straight to mind are what are known as sectors. To access a certain sector, you'll need to do certain things in your current sector, and so on and so forth. For example, starting up a new game, you'll find yourself in the Alpha sector. From here you'll be instructed to do certain quests as a tutorial to get you started, up until the tutorial which requires you to craft a distress beacon. One hundred and fifty pixels, two silver bars, ten copper bars, ten iron bars and one hundred wooden planks later, you have your beacon, and you beam down from your ship to place it on your planets surface, and all of a sudden you're being bombarded by a huge spaceship, operated by Dreadwing the Penguin. Yes. Penguin. After a lengthy battle, assuming you didn't die, you'll be greeted to a ton of goodies and then your quest will be complete. You can use one of those goodies gained, a molten core, to create a Metalwork Station, and from there you can then create a Starmap Update Mk2, which allows you to jump to the Beta sector. You'll soon notice that, in this sector, all your threat levels will go up from one to two, and things are a lot tougher from here on out. Another challenge itself is getting good enough weapons and armour to survive, as well as getting food and other things important to your survival. It engages the player because there's just so much to do you want to know what everything does, there's no excuse to turn off the game because you died, you resurrect and, apart from losing a few pixels (which, by the way, is the in game currency) all your items, weapons and armour are still there, so you just keep playing and playing and get sucked into this universe you're creating. Apart from all that, there's a ton of other things to do gameplay wise. You can explore any world that you want, although you do need certain items to explore certain planets (space helmet for moon and asteroid fields, leather armour for snow planets, etc..) as well as mine for minerals to smelt into bars for crafting, which opens up endless possibilities in itself. You can pretty much take anything from the surrounding environment with a tool called the Matter Manipulator and use it to decorate your own houses or spaceship. You can build anything you want using blocks via the Matter Manipulator using the left click to place it on your level whilst using the right click to place it behind you, although this doesn't apply for decorations. The only way I could see the gameplay engaging with the narrative is, again, taking into account what you want to do. If you're not really creative and don't like making your own house and want to go around and hunt down the native wildlife, then by all means do so. The gameplay itself does evolve the further you get into the game, as you have to consistently adapt to the new hazards that the game throws in your way, be it unstable planet atmospheres, dangerous and deadly new enemies or the fact you forgot to feed your little Floran, and you've run out of offal.

 Target Audience

- The target audience for this game seems to just be fans of other games in the same genre, and there's no real gender divide here. It has things in which both males and females would enjoy either respectively or simultaneously, which makes for a more broader target audience and as such a wider reach of people. Playing as either a girl or a boy harbours the same results in any case and there's no real distinction between them, so that's another thing. I think the main reason as to why I think this is because there's just so much to do, and not everyone has the same interests so for those who play the game there's going to be at least one thing that they're going to enjoy. For those who loved the other games of this genre Starbound keeps what made those games great, allowing you to do whatever you want and gives you a ton of ways to do it at your disposal, but it also enhances it considerably more. To stand out from the crowd and make their game sell they added in what people have wanted in a game for ages. Space travel, adventure, spelunking into dungeons and taking out hordes of machine-gun wielding anthromorphic birds and monkeys, slaying mad purple clad cultists and fending off your home from the aggressive beasties that roam the night, defeating a penguin in a UFO, destroying a robot with your own two hands, swinging your sword at a skeletal dragon and attempting to run away from a wiggling mass of purple jelly. Crafting countless things, mining for minerals deep into the surfaces of the world, trading with merchants, cooking your own food, building your own house, decorating it, finding strongholds, trying out new armour, testing your new pointy sword out against the nearest helpless critter, meeting up with your friends on multiplayer for twice the carnage and chaos. Okay, maybe it's not precisely what people wanted, but it's a new idea that gave all of us who found the game a ton to look forward to, and it made the game stand out so much because of it.

Platform

- At the moment Starbound is only available for the PC, as it's currently being updated and is still in the Beta stages of development, and I'm not sure if there's any plans to port the game over onto consoles if it became big enough like Minecraft eventually became. Being that it's only one platform the game isn't suited to anything else, but it is suited to the computer extremely well. Many interactions within the game utilise the mouse, being used for the main menu selection, creating your character by selecting parts, aiming, firing off a gun or swinging whatever weapon your character has, placing down blocks with, again, the use of the left and right mouse buttons, using bandages or stimpacks, eating food, making your character face either way, clicking on items to move them, you can also use the scroll button to go through your tool bar quicker then using the hotkeys, which is another feature. The keyboard numbers are used to select items along your tool bar which can be placed on there through your inventory screen, and you also use the standard WASD key setup to move your character, although W doesn't seem to do anything, with A and D being left and right respectively, and S being down, whilst the space bar is used for jumping. There are certain shortcuts for other windows too, if you fancy using them. I opens up your Inventory, C opens up Basic Crafting, J opens up your Quest Journal, and so on.