Behind the Scenes: Crafting the Story of Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes

We're the narrative team behind Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes, and today we’d like to take you behind the scenes of the game’s story and design!

My name is Martin Ringot, Lead Narrative Designer on Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes. I worked closely with Anthony Jauneaud to bring the rich lore of Battlestar Galactica into a roguelite space game.

Turning Battlestar Galactica into a Roguelite

Translating the core spirit of Ronald D. Moore’s reboot of the show into a roguelite was an exciting challenge for us, both from a design and a writing perspective.

From the beginning, our goal was to create a game where FTL meets Reigns, combining epic space combat with tough political and moral decisions. This vision guided how we designed and wrote the story for this game, while staying true to the tone of the show.

To do so, we closely analyzed the show and identified scenes that could work as player-driven situations. One key aspect of Battlestar Galactica is its spiraling structure: solving one problem almost always creates a new one. Characters are constantly forced to make impossible choices, where no option is truly “good.”

This became the core principle of our narrative design: put the players in situations in which they have to choose the lesser of two evils.

Once this foundation was in place, we could start exploring new themes and ideas unique to the game.

Creating Narrative Content

The game features many crises, and even more standalone events. One of our first challenges was building a narrative system that could trigger the right event or crisis at the right time.

Our goal was to steadily build tension throughout a run (much like a TV season), raising the stakes as you progress. This led us to create the faction system, after many iterations around possible gauges. We were also fortunate to get early input from Tom Jubert, who worked on FTL: Faster Than Light among other projects, who helped us kickstart this conception phase.

Every piece of content had to meet two key requirements:

• Game Design needs (balancing, level design, integration to the rest of the system)

• Narrative core principles (choices must matter, consequences must follow, and everything must feel connected)

Everything has to happen for a reason. Every choice is crucial and promises consequences down the line.

Events

Events are at the heart of the choices players make throughout a run. Through the decisions tied to these events, the fleet can evolve in very different ways, for example into a military-driven dictatorship, an underworld civil war, or even a full-blown healthcare catastrophe.

Events don’t just illustrate these outcomes; they actively shape them. Everything has to work together, creating a coherent experience without contradicting each other.

Crisis

A crisis is a very complex system that sits at the intersection of gameplay and narrative design. We iterated on it extensively to ensure it could support a series of stories unfolding throughout the player’s journey.

Creating a crisis requires constant dialogue with the game design team, making sure the narrative ideas align with the gameplay needs. Along the way, we often had to adapt either the writing or the mechanics so everything would fit together seamlessly.

Once a crisis system was validated, we created and tested its events before finalizing the writing. Anthony and I often reviewed dialogues together to ensure they matched the gameplay effects.

We also collaborated with Tom Jubert