The Very Long Path to Project Coreward

Sometime in 1986, my father had a choice while browsing the shelves of big glossy boxes at the local computer shop. The choice was which space game to purchase: “Star Fleet I: The War Begins” or “Starflight” from Electronic Arts. They both featured similar names and cover art and the former was published by a company called “interstel.” (A few of you just grinned in acknowledgement of that quirky coincidence.) (hint: Even though Star Fleet was published by an intergalactic corporation, Starflight was a much more significant game.)

Thankfully, he chose Starflight. At home, we had a Columbia Data Products MPC on which it could run. It was the first low cost PC compatible clone on the market. This new game seemed like the perfect way to explore its capabilities.

I spent that entire summer with my brother and father playing Starflight. We were unreasonably obsessed with this game. It was like no other game we had seen. We scrawled out vague clues in a notebook. We scheduled evenings of together time to conduct exploration. We marveled at the scientific terms and seemingly accurate portrayal of planetary characteristics. We anxiously flinched at the “motion detected” message which always held the potential for either game-ending plasma bolts or a mysterious new riddle. It all felt deeply immersive, like you really were exploring a galaxy. It was as if you were directing the action top-down from a keyboard and CGA monitor which were miraculously, somehow, connected to a starship and its crew countless light-years away.

The curious side of me wondered how you could possibly fit such a grand game on two modest 5.25” floppy diskettes. The idealistic side of me envisioned even grander games in the years to come, games with better graphics and meticulously detailed planets. No other adventure game had anything near the scope of Starflight and it seemed obvious that its example was the one which all future exploration games would follow. In 1986, most games were just a collection of simple scenes, perhaps several rooms to explore, nothing near an entire galaxy full of life sized planets with all kinds of hidden secrets. Starflight’s technology and scale were awe inspiring. Its jaw dropping plot twist was the icing that confirmed its legacy forever in my memory.

I spent decades waiting but the even grander games never came, not really. No one followed up with bigger and better Starflight. Sure, I played its fantastic sequel. But, throughout the 90’s and 2000’s the idea of a giant procedurally generated galaxy to explore fell out of favor. No memorable attempts in that style made it to market.

So, in the winter of 2004, while working a temp job, I purchased the cheapest version of Visual Basic .NET at a local Officemax. I had fleeting thoughts of writing that game. Perhaps I’d add it to my portfolio as an example to kickstart my programming career. These were the beginnings of the projects that have landed us here. I'd like to show the evolution of my efforts during the past 20 years.

The first thing I did with VB.NET was write something that very much looks like a Visual Basic program. I dressed it up with some backgrounds and colorful buttons. This application, called “Little Bang Toolkit”, created metadata for an entire galaxy. Naturally, I created galaxies that were 30% bigger than what was featured in Starflight. Bigger is better, right? It took me roughly 3 weeks of hobby programming to complete. (That vast empty space in the upper left was where I intended to