Instead, I flirted with one of the local traders, who was a friend of my sister’s, and we soon became fast friends – fast enough that she loaned me her spaceship and asked me to deliver a package to her mother on Venus. I went to the local spaceport, but renting a spaceship was prohibitively expensive. They were my only core contacts – tokens in the game world that represented things of actual value to me – so I tried to reach them. And then, for some reason, I ended up as a mature student on Mercury, whilst they were on Earth. Coming to life, like a clichéd amnesiac protagonist, I reeled through my personal history laid out on the screen – my layabout father, his affair with my businesslike mother, my birth, meeting my partner and having a daughter with her. I wanted Sol Trader to feel like that – where in-game characters don’t give a damn that they’re flying from one planet to another, but they care very much about their friends and family.” They’re fundamentally films about people and families, which just happen to be set in space. That sounds like an obvious cliche (isn’t everyone inspired by it?), but I do see Star Wars as distinctly different from other sci-fi universes. “My main inspiration is the Star Wars universe. That reflects Parson’s underlying concerns about the story he wants his players to experience. In a world where you actually need something, those relations would take on a extrinsic value that’s currently lacking.īut, yes, this is a futuristic world, where people seem to lend friends their spaceships like we do power tools. Talking to someone in the world, you can take one of four different stances, which affect their relations with you, which in turn affects how willing they are to do a favour for you – like, unbelievably, lending you their spaceship. The core social relations engine needs desire and conflict to work. There’s almost no cost to the game – your character doesn’t seem to need to eat, drink, breathe, sleep, rent a room, pay for fuel, or any of the assumed elements of a life sim. Without combat, there’s little peril, and without peril, your social relationships aren’t as urgently important. That makes it hard to judge the game, in its current state. It reminds me most of old RPGs, like Morrowind, where all the interesting content is parcelled away in the cities, and fitting that the interface feels deliberately ten years out of date, in the way that Neo Scavenger’s does. Playing Sol Trader, it’s in an interesting state, with elements feeling old but familiar like Space Rangers II, and other elements missing entirely – like combat. “It’s fundamentally a game about exploration, where the contours of the world are relational not physical.” He says. There’s no structure to the game at the moment, though Parsons is looking to introduce the choice of a basic goal at the game’s start, much like Sunless Sea – whether that’s to be President, to navigate the entire system or something much simpler, without any necessity to ever achieve it. Once you’ve established who you are, you can start choosing who you want to be.

These then feed into their future choices.” Different careers cause different random events to happen, which affect character stats. “The game starts with a few people in each city and steps forward each year.” He explains “Characters move through life stages, meet, make friends, fall in love, choose careers, get married, have children, and so on. When you start a new run, the simulation works out the social history of the entire solar system for two centuries, then lets you choose your place in that world by answering a few questions, starting by choosing your parents. Parson’s shtick is to generate those NPC relationships – the previous 200 years of them, at least. There’s a lot of space games out there that try to create interesting infinite universes, but interacting with characters and people can often take a back seat.” “Sol Trader aims to bring people and relationships front and centre to space gaming. It’s just a reflection on the changed times for indies today, the determinant of success seems to be a tightening social web of ‘in’ indie developers and press, and its creator Chris Parsons isn’t part of that web.įunnily enough, that web of relationships is core to Sol Trader itself, as Parsons explained to me. After all, despite being a one-man game, Sol Trader is well on course to hit its release window of June 2016 as a stable, intriguing game. Skip ahead three years and another charming pitch – “Dwarf Fortress meets Elite” – barely scraped £10,000. That’s absolutely no reflection of the quality of the product. Back in 2013, the pitch “Dungeon Keeper in space” garnered Maia £140,000.

Galcon 2 kickstarter