Fed II Star - January 29, 2006

STAR CHAMBER
by Freya

There is an undeniable lure to building a planet. Bringing a world to life is a powerful feeling. It is not surprising then that some players develop an interest in creating their own planet.

There are a series of questions you need to ask yourself approaching planet ownership. Do you want to create your own planet or do you want to use a stock planet?

Building a good planet is a lot of hard work requiring a cool idea, vivid imagination, much knowledge and many, many hours of painstaking attention to every detail.

If you're bored and need something to do, go ride a bike or toss a Frisbee. Both activities are healthier.

If you want to fill an otherwise idle evening, consider spending some quality time with your loved ones if they're around or your TV set if not.

If you plan to be finished in a day or two, don't even bother starting.

If the main reason you want to build a planet is to become famous and get your name in the Fed Star, go ahead. But don't count on it.

If your main motivation is to make Federation II even more fun and challenging to its players by adding a high-quality planet or by improving a stock planet, and only if you are willing to do the best job possible no matter how hard it is or how long it takes, please read on and more power to you!

Why you should design your planet on paper

To create a planet, pick up a pencil, an eraser and lots of paper. Don't shut down your computer completely, you may want to look into Fed for reference, guidance and inspiration or check the workbench manual. But don't even THINK about designing a planet directly on the building tools.

Using the building tools is just the mechanical aspect of creating a planet. By far the most crucially important and divinely creative part of making a planet is its design. You have a mental image of a story, of places, beings and things, and your job is to make a sensible planet out of it. You need to keep track of many different things at the same time, and you need to keep everything consistent.

You can't sensibly keep all this information in your head, and I think that shuffling through a few honest-to-goodness pieces of paper is the only way you will be able to keep track of things.

Show me a planet full of disturbing incongruities that the author did not intend and I'll show you a planet that was built without being designed. Show me a planet that took a player days to debug and that draws complaints from other players even after debugging and I'll show you a planet where the design phase was rushed or skimped. Or not done on paper.

There is a REWARD! Other than enabling you to make a better planet, doing the design phase right results in a much quicker, more fun and creative building phase - even the parts that are normally dreaded.

I will continue this next week, when I'll run through the stages you need to go through to design a great planet. I'll also be setting up some sessions in the game to talk about planet design; details of that will be in next week's Star Chamber too.