A swashbuckling open-space game where you pilot capital ships. If that doesn't sound cool, I don't know what does

Rebel Galaxy is an in-development space trading combat game with a focus on player controlled capital ships and naval-like combat. The two main guys involved have a comfortable wealth of industry experience - Travis Baldree, founder of Runic Games, and Erich Schaefer, co-founder of Blizzard North. Intriguingly, for this project they’ve decided to keep it simple and small, with the vast majority of the work being shared between just the two of them.

GameWatcher: How are you finding development with just the two of you?

Travis Baldree: It’s working out great. I really like working this way; working small and nimble. You make a decision and then just go with it. I ran Runic for six years, and it’s very different developing with a larger team - all these different departments to coordinate. When you have something small like this you really get to have your fingerprints all over it.

Erich Schaefer: Yeah, when I just got started in the industry back in the early 90s it was just two… three… four of us making a game. Companies would always start racking it up in size, but my most fun times were when we had just started Blizzard North. It was just three of us at the start, twelve when we shipped Diablo. The company got bigger and bigger and just less fun for me. The same thing happened at Flagship Studios.

I’m OK at managing companies… or maybe not (laughs). But I really like just the development - not having to get a consensus and the speedy style we’re doing now. Travis goes ahead and just does what he wants to do, we don’t have any meetings about what to do next. We can literally do what we want for 90% of the day and that feels great.

Travis Baldree: We sat down and we spent time talking about what we wanted to do and kind of aligned our goals so we knew what we wanted. It’s really easy to keep your vision intact with just two people. If you’ve got more than five or six it starts to be that everyone’s got their own idea about what you’re really doing and they start to drift over time, and it becomes a struggle to get everyone thinking about the project in the same way. We really haven’t got that problem right now.

GameWatcher: You’re focusing on the control of big capital ships. How does that affect the gameplay?

Travis Baldree: You’ve got this naval underpinning where your most damaging weapons are broadsides which means instead of just pointing at someone and firing at them you’re trying to go along side them. That makes where you’re going and where you’re attacking from are really more important.

You have turrets all over your ship which can have independent targets. You can control them or you can have them AI controlled and you can tell them what you want them to target. You’ve also got the management of your subsystems - all the types of weapons, countermeasures, emps, stuff like that.

Erich Schaefer: I think we wanted to capture a grand space opera feel, which is kind of what to do when you’re just a small dogfighter flying about in this giant battle. We want you to run the giant battle, but at the same time being an action game your physical skills are making the difference.

GameWatcher: How else does Rebel Galaxy differ from similar games in this genre like Elite and Star Citizen?

Erich Schaefer: A lot of it gets down to the approach to gameplay. The combat focus and how the ships control. A lot of people ask us about the combat and the fact that we’ve got these larger ships that are locked on a plane. As far as you control and move around it’s a pretty different experience. We found that if you open that up then big battles can look really ridiculous unless it’s a point and click game like Homeworld. But it doesn’t work for an action-orientated game.

Because of having that kind of galactic plane, it’s very naval. The fighters and smaller ships can break off, and you can obviously man the turrets and fire in all directions. You get this nice unique mix.

GameWatcher: In terms of the scale of the ships, what are we talking?

Travis Baldree: We go from fairly small ships, light corvettes which are about a 30 person ship with two turrets, up to the dreadnaughts which you can imagine would have thousands of people manning them and maybe twenty turrets. We think we’re going to let you pilot the dreadnaughts, it depends how well it plays. If it takes 30 minutes to turn the thing that’s not going to be terribly fun, but I’ve done some initial tests and I think it’ll work fine.

The bigger ships are quite different to play than the smaller ones. In the smaller ships you can actually dodge shots. In a dreadnaught there’s no way you’re going to dodge anything.

GameWatcher: Given that neither of you have really made anything like this before, what inspired you to make a game like this?

Travis Baldree: I think both of us were big fans of a lot of older games like Sid Meier’s Pirates and Star Control 2. We’ve been making action RPGs for way too long, we play everything else. It’s a heck of a pallet cleanser to switch from doing swords and sorcery stuff to go in a completely different direction.

We also took inspiration, obviously, from the Elite games. The jumping off spot for the type of combat we’re doing in the game is really like the ship combat in the Assassin’s Creed games where they really got this great punchy, action-orientated but still tactical combat. We thought it’d be really cool to do that but with all the cool stuff you get in space, and it turns out you can do a lot with that in space! Laser beams, shields and little tiny ships flying all over the place.

GameWatcher: What aspects of those games are you really trying to capture?

Travis Baldree: If you look at something like Sid Meier’s Pirates, it’s the systemic reactions. You inhabit a role just based on the things that are currently going on and looking at the way the world interacts. Here goes the treasure ship that’s going from one port to another and when it gets there this port has got more wealth but this port over here is in poverty and you can tell because the flag is in tatters. You’re interacting with this living world and pushing and pulling it based on what you want to accomplish, I always thought that was really cool.

GameWatcher: Talking about a living world, to what extent are you trying to create that?

Travis Baldree: Events can happen on different worlds, for example a famine can happen and then relief ships will be sent from other worlds. You can capitalise on that by going there yourself and selling the food you’ve got, you can even go and attack the relief convoy to ensure the famine goes on longer and you have more loot to sell. Then we have things like the discovery of alien artefacts which are really valuable, scientists discover them and then send out research ships. You can watch for these events and then find out where they’re going and attack them and steal those resources.

Erich Schaefer: Or those artefacts can reach another station and have a chance of creating a tech boom on that station which affects the economy.

There’s also violent ways we affect our various systems. For example, pirates and pirate outposts. You can actually make friends with the pirates and land at those outposts, or you can attack them; you’d probably want to take some of the local military with them who you’d have to befriend first. So each of these star systems can change pretty radically depending on how you act.

Travis Baldree: Our hope is to make a lot of these things intersect so that the systems overlap. These events don’t necessarily happen in a vacuum, they can happen right in the middle of a mission that you’re doing. Bounties can get assigned to ships in the world, for example a bounty could get flagged up on a ship you’re supposed to be protecting and then you can decide if you’re just going to change tracks and collect on the bounty. Plus you can hail other ships and other ships can hail you and you can decide if you’re going to make demands or offer help.

Rebel Galaxy is set for release at some point in 2015.