Video games - Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace

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	Video games - Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace

Spelljammer – the Pirates of Realmspace is a computer game for MS/DOS and was released by SSI in 1992. It is a Dungeons & Dragons PC computer game using the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition, Spelljammer rules. Spelljammer was programmed and designed by Cybertech Systems.

Concept

Spelljammers are magic ships that fly through "wildspace" to various planets. All the planets and wildspace for a system are contained in a Crystal Sphere. Outside the Crystal Sphere is the Phlogiston, also known as the "flow". Holes in the Crystal Sphere allow the flow to shine through, appearing as stars on planets. Spelljamming ships cannot enter the Phlogiston.

Game Mechanics

In the Spelljammer game the player captains a ship and crew. The player can ship goods from planet to planet for a fee, take on simple missions including, delivering people and goods, destroying pirates, and guarding the space lanes. As the player completes missions his character gains reputation points, eventually gaining enough points to be asked to help rid Realmspace of a terrible danger. This mission led to the simple plot in the game.

The game starts the player with a 5th level character. The available classes are: Clerics, fighters, Paladins, rangers, Mages, and Thieves. There are three main parts to the game: docked at a planet, in space (travel and combat), and on board a ship. When at a planet, various text menus allowed the player to buy and sell cargo, repair and upgrade their ship, buy and sell character equipment, and seek missions. A rudimentary trade system allowed players to make money shipping goods from planet to planet, and some key planets had more options for ship repairs and equipment. In space, the player can travel from planet to planet, or simply point the ship in any direction and go. Real-time ship to ship combat using ballistas and catapults takes place in a simple 3D view. The player can steer his ship to aim the weapons at his enemy, and to try to avoid enemy missiles. The occasional meteor storm is a minor hazard while spelljamming.

One little used feature programmed into the game was the ability to crash your ship into the Crystal Sphere. Normally "space" was shown as black, but if a player was patient and continued towards the Crystal sphere space would turn dark grey, light grey, the stars would spread out, and eventually the ship would crash into the Crystal Sphere.

The player can bring his ship close to the enemy ship, board, and do turn based hand to hand combat on a simple isometric map. A full range of spells and weapons is available, and ships are crewed by a wide range of humans and monsters. The player can directly control each crew member in the turn based combat system. For a game released in 1992 the ship to ship combat was innovation for a D&D game, but not cutting edge technology compared to contemporary flight simulators. The turn based combat engine was quite good for the time, supporting spell effects and animations on the map, for example a "stinking cloud" that persisted for multiple turns.

The Development of Spelljammer

Initial Phase

Al Escudero was a successful game designer with a couple of commercial titles under his belt working out of Vancouver BC, Canada in 1990. Escudero had started design work on a space battle game for SSI, and put in a few months of effort before SSI decided to kill the project. Design work continued for as long as it did because the decision to kill the project did not trickle down to the level of management Escudero was dealing with for 2 months after upper management killed the project. To make up for the loss of time and money, SSI quickly found another project for Escudero – Spelljammer.

Escudero designed the ship to ship combat and came up with the idea of using a 2D map, then using the distance between ships to scale the size of the ship’s bitmap and display it in a simple 3D view on one plane. He then designed the basic layout of all menus, the overall look and feel of the turn based hand to hand combat, and most other key parts of the game. At this time Cybertech Systems was actually just Escudero in his basement. Lead programmer Alex Russell was acquainted with him because he went to high-school with Russell's younger brother. Russell had done a couple of small porting jobs for Escudero in the past. Another programmer named "Zoid" worked on the game for a couple of months. As Russell had only been programming business systems up to now, Zoid’s knowledge of PC hardware was valuable at the start of the project.

Artwork

Escudero worked on the art for the game, doing most of the planets, tiles, and much other minor art. Russell also did artwork, doing a few scenes used when at ports, and decorations for menus. They also used a black and white video camera (colour camera was much too expensive for the budget they were working on) and a RGB colour wheel to digitise models, both scale and human, to used for the game. An Amiga was used for digitisation. The Amiga could write to standard PC floppy disks, and Deluxe Paint on the Amiga would write files that PC Deluxe paint could read. Deluxe Paint, and Deluxe Paint Animation were used for 90% of the art. Three freelance artists drew the bulk of the ships and a few ports. Each ship required 8 hand drawn pictures, one for each of 8 rotations. These 8 pictures were then scaled as required for the semi 3D used in ship to ship combat. A 30 second Cybertech introduction of a door opening took 4 hours to render on a 486, and over 24 hours on a 386.

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