InCosmoteer, players design and build their own spaceships, and then send them into battle against other players or AI enemies. The space-based strategyindie gamewas developed by Walternate Realities and debuted in early access on Steam in 2022.Cosmoteerhas gained a large following since its release, with players praising its complex shipbuilding system and challenging gameplay.
Game Rant spoke with Walt Destler, the lead developer at Walternate Realities, about the inspiration behind the game, the challenges faced during its development, and what players can expect in future updates. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Q. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and how you came to be a developer on Cosmoteer?
A: Yeah, so I’ve been making games for most of my life, probably since I was around 12 or 13 or something like that. I kind of started off making games as a hobby, learning how to program by making games. Eventually, I went to college and studied computer science. I never really thought of myself as having a career in games, but after I graduated and was working a more normal software engineering job, I wasn’t particularly happy, and I heard about this grad school program at Carnegie Mellon called the Entertainment Technology Center. So I was like, “Alright, I’m going to go do that, and maybe I’ll end up working on games, or maybe I’ll end up working on other things.”
So I went to that program, and all the time, I was still kind of making games in my free time. I went to that program, made a bunch of games as part of it. Then, I graduated, got a real job in the games industry at a company called Rumble Games, which is here in the Bay Area. It’s a mobile games studio, so I worked with them for a few years. For various reasons, I wasn’t particularly happy with my job anymore. I decided I would leave the job. I had this game I had originally prototyped in grad school aboutbuilding spaceships.
It was very primitive, just my very badprogrammer art. There wasn’t really anything to do in the game other than build spaceships. There weren’t any missions or anything like that. But I had a little prototype, and it was compelling, and I had put it out onto the internet. The very small number of people who played it seemed to like it, and I kind of felt there was something to it. So I said to myself, “I’m going to leave my job, I have a bit of savings saved up, so I’m just going to work on my little spaceship-building game until something better comes along.”
For a little while, I kind of looked for other opportunities in games. But you know, nothing really came along. So I just kept working onCosmoteer. It wasn’t calledCosmoteerat the time. It was calledStar Rightif I remember. It’s gone through a few names, but at the time, it was calledStar Right. And you know, I kept working on it. At some point, maybe a year or two into that post-real job era, I uploaded a build of the game onto itch.io, and then a couple weeks later, some YouTubers started playing it.
Then the game just blew up almost overnight. It went from having a dozen people play it a day to suddenly having 20,000 people play it in a day. It was crazy. It turns out when 20,000 people play your game, they find all the bugs. It was fun and stressful at the same time. But anyway, that was the point at which I realized I should probably do this because clearly a lot of people find this game compelling. So it can probably be a success if I continue to work on the game andlaunch it on Steam, right?
So at that point, I stopped keeping an eye out for other things and was just like, “I’m going to doCosmoteernow.” At some point, I renamed it toCosmoteer. I’m pretty sure that was before it went viral-ish on YouTube. So then I was like, “Alright, I’ll work on it for another year or two.” As these things always seem to go, it took way longer than that. But you know, fast-forward another probably four years or something, it’s probably even more than that. I launched the game on Steam a couple of months ago in early access, and it did way better than I was expecting, and so here we are.RELATED:How Cosmoteer’s Modular Ship Design Plays a Role in Its Online PvP
Q. So the bones of the game seem to have been knocking around in your mind for quite a long time now, which ties into my next question. What inspired the idea for Cosmoteer and its unique spaceship building mechanics?
A: I’ve always been intospace stuff and spaceships. I’ve always been a huge Star Trek fan, and to a slightly lesser extent, aStar Warsfan. I’ve also always been really into building things, like LEGOs as a kid. I remember when I was around 14, me and my friend group were playing a lot of tabletop war games or board games. I had gotten interested in game design by that point.
I remember trying to make a tabletop war game where you could design your own spaceships on graph paper, and then you would roll dice to see where your weapons hit, and then you would cross off the boxes on the graph paper. There were rules for what happens when a spaceship takes a certain amount of damage, but the game was bad and didn’t go anywhere. However, that idea stuck around until grad school, when I needed to make a prototype for an independent study class, which eventually turned intoCosmoteer.
Q. Oh, wow. That’s really neat.
A: Yeah, yeah. There’s a board game calledGalaxy Truckerthat people compare my game to a lot. I mean, it’s much simpler, which it has to be because it’s aboard game. I had never played until well after I had started working onCosmoteer. But yeah, that’s something that people mention a lot.
Q. So what would you say sets Cosmoteer apart from other spaceship building games on the market?
A: I think the crew is the big thing. The fact that you’re building a ship and you can see inside of it, see the floor plan, cross-section view of your spaceship, and see all the crew running around inside, just like you do when you watchStar TrekorStar Wars. You’ll have shots of the hallways when people are running around frantically during combat. Who knows what they’re actually doing, right?
The crew inCosmoteerdoes two things. I think it hits that particular fantasy of having all the crew running around through your hallways while easier ships are slugging it out in battle. I think it really hits that core fantasy, but the other thing that the crew does is probably even more important – it really kind of informs how you actually design your ship.
So a lot of games where you build spaceships or vehicles of some sort, either I find they’re creatively limiting or very free form, but then it doesn’t really matter how you build your ship. You know, you just have a certain number of guns, and it doesn’t matter where you put them. I really wanted it to matter how you design your ship. So what the crew inCosmoteerdoes is make you think about how you design the internal layout of yourship for exploring. Because for your laser blasters to get power, crew have to go to the reactor and pick up the giant glowing battery and carry it to your laser blasters or Shields.
For some reason, in this strange fictional future, no one has power lines. But that means that how quickly your crew can deliver power to your laser blasters affects how quickly they can shoot, or how quickly you’re able to get power to your Shields affects how quickly or how long your Shields can stay charged. So you’ll have to think about how you design the internal layout of your ship. Yeah, I’ve noticed that when I’m playingCosmoteerand watching the little guys walk and run around depositing power where they need to, it’s fun to watch.
Q. And in terms of the challenges around implementing your modular shipbuilding mechanics, did you have any challenges, and how did you overcome them?
A: Like the programming of them?
Q. Yeah. Were there any challenges in that?
A: Yeah; the game is like a never-ending series of challenges to do everything. In particular, the fact that that ships can kind of like be blown apart into multiple pieces makes everything way harder than it should be because as your ship is changing, there is path finding that your crew have to do constantly to update to handle the fact that, you know, the ship’s been blown in half. Pieces, modules have been destroyed, stuff like that, right? So, you know, the fact that ships are destructible and can split into multiple things is very tricky to handle behind the scenes, certainly.
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Q. That makes me wonder, did you have to outsource any coding of any kind or any work?
A: Not coding, no. So, it’s my owngame enginethat I wrote in C. I use a handful of kind of open-source code libraries, most notably the physics engine. But even that I kind of had to heavily modify to get it to do the things they needed it to do and run well enough. Um, but yeah, no. It’s basically like almost all the game. You know, either wrote myself, or in a few cases, or like open-source libraries.
Q. How does Cosmoteer balance realism and gameplay regarding its space combat mechanics?
A: So I like to say that it’s a space fantasy simulator, not a realism simulator. I’m trying to simulate the fantasy of being inStar WarsorStar Trek, not what real lifespace battlewould be like. I’m only using real world physics because it makes the game more interesting or accessible and intuitive, not because I’m trying to simulate real life. It’s simulating space fantasy that’s the goal, if that makes sense.
Q. Yeah, that does make sense. Could you share an interesting story that arose during Cosmoteer’s development?
A: Oh, that’s an interesting question.
Q. And if you don’t have any, that’s fine.
A: No, I do. So, when one makes a game that is very physics driven and about player creativity, lots of interesting and unexpected strategies and exploits can emerge. Probably my favorite was this exploit/strategy that the community dubbed “nuke slingers” or “flingers” or something like that.
So, this is going to take a bit of setup to explain, but basically inCosmoteer, almost all weapons have an area of effect when they hit something and explode. The exception is the nuke, which has an expanding shockwave that expands over time. At the time of this exploit,the mechanics of the nukeworked such that when it hit something, the expanding shockwave would stick to the first thing it hit.
Another gameplay mechanic inCosmoteeris tractor beams. Tractor beams are not just useful for pulling things; you may also put them in push mode. Players figured out that they could build a ship with nukes and tractor beams, and then attach a piece of armor to the ship using an explosive charge. They would then disconnect the armor with the explosive charge, target it with the tractor beams in push mode, and get the nuke to hit it as it flew by. Because of the way the nuke explosion works, the explosion would stick to the armor and travel with it as it flew towards the enemy ship. Since it was just a piece of junk that had separated from the player’s ship, the enemy weapons wouldn’t try to shoot it down, and the enemy ship would take the full force of the nuke explosion from much longer range than a nuke could normally reach.
This strategy was so effective that I had to patch it by changing the mechanics of the nuke explosion so that it would stick to new things it hit, but not transfer as much force to the enemy ship. It was a cool and creative strategy, but it was too powerful to leave as is. Then also, the tractor beam mechanics themselves changed where you could focus all of its beam on basically a single tile or a single part of a ship, like a little armor piece that you split off. Right now, it’s like a pretty wide fan. So it’s much harder to get a whole lot of force on a really small piece. But yeah, that’s my little story.
Q. Can you talk about the use of AI in COSMOTEER and its role in that procedural generation and space combat mechanics?
A: I don’t really know what the AI has to do with theprocedural generation. There is a basic AI inCosmoteer. It’s honestly not very good. People do complain about it and wish it was better. At some point, I will make it better when I have time, of course. But, yeah, the enemy ships have a relatively basic AI that will aggro against nearby enemy targets. It has a fairly basic assessment system for deciding what specifically on the enemy ship it should shoot at.
It tries to take into account how deep inside the ship a potential target is buried. So, if your reactor is at the surface, it’s very likely to target the reactor. If the reactor is buried more deeply and harder to blow up, it’s more likely to target something on the surface of the ship. It’s honestly not super sophisticated. Hopefully, we’ll get more sophisticated over time, but right now it’s fairly straightforward.
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Q. Yeah, that’s fair. Do player choices and actions impact the game’s procedural generation at all?
A: Not really, not yet. I have some ideas about how I want the player to be able to influencefaction territoriesthrough choosing what missions to go on and what to fight. Right now, faction territories don’t change, but certainly one of the things I’m hoping to get to is for the player to ally with a particular faction and help that faction conquer the Galaxy. Or, potentially, the player could even found their own faction. Those would be cool, and that way, as territories changed, it would influence what spawned in the star systems depending on what factions control and have influence over a system. But that does not exist yet; just hoping to get to it sooner or later.
Q. Cool. Can you talk about Cosmoteer’s multiplayer and how it differs from the single player experience?
A: So the two single player modes, the maincareer modeand the creative mode, both support co-op. They’re basically the same, but you play cooperatively with friends. Multiplayer also has a few different PvP modes. There’s a basic elimination mode where you design a ship and battle to see who gets to destroy each other. There’s an arena mode which is more like elimination, but players can also respawn.
So instead of last player standing, it’s more of a point-based game. You earn points for damaging and destroying ships and then once the time runs out, the player with the most points wins. There’s a third mode called domination where there’s a map with capture points and you earn income based on the capture points. If you capture all the points or have the most when the time runs out, you win. It’s a bit more strategic because you’re capturing points and using the money to spawn in more ships.
It can be fun. It’s surprisingly deep. I wasn’t expecting it when I originally added PvP, which existed even before co-op did. I thought it would just be a fun thing that friends could do, design ships and fight each other, but it turned into a more competitive and fairly competitively deep experience – I think, particularly, one that you don’t see in a lot of games where so much of the competition is done ahead of time in the design phase. Probably two thirds of what influences the outcome of a battle is how you design your ship. That’s a fairly novel thing forPvP games. It’s been interesting to see that competitive scene evolve around the game and grow into its own thing that you can’t control as easily as before.
Q. What future updates and features in the works for Cosmoteer are you most excited for?
A: Oh yeah, man. The ones that people ask the most for are carriers, so you can launch your own fighter craft, and boarding, so you can board other ships with crew. I do think both of those would be really awesome and they are absolutely on my road map. I definitely plan to get into both of those. But the thing that excites me the most is I really want to add robot hinge joints to ships so that you can make ships that transform their shape into other configurations. I’m really excited to do that because I think it will blow open the possibility space and the strategic possibilities of what you can build. It will add a whole layer of depth toship designthat I’m super excited about eventually getting to, even though I’m also honestly really scared of the technical work it will take to get it working.
Q. Certainly. Yeah, that’s sounds like a massive overhaul to what’s already there.
Yeah, it will be a massive overhaul for sure. But I think I can do it.
Q. Can you elaborate on how long it would take to get some of those to some of those later phases of your road map?
A: Oh gosh, I mean, to be honest, not really. Honestly, I deliberately did not put dates or time frames on my road map because I’ll probably be wrong. And so they will happen when they happen. Fortunately,Cosmoteerhas done really well financially, so I’m not about to run out of money or starve to death or anything like that. So, I think they should all happen eventually. It’s just a matter of when. But I really hesitate to try to predict anything because I probably won’t be accurate.
Q. That’s fair. I understand that tempering the expectations of your fans and player base is an important aspect of maintaining a game like Cosmoteer.
A: Yeah, no doubt. Definitely. It seems like the smarter move in my opinion.
Q. And is there anything else you would like to add?
For everyone interested in the game, there is a demo on Steam where you’re able to try it out before buying the game. It gives you the firststar systemof career mode, and you can play creative mode as much as you want with a limited selection of weapons and other modules. I’m biased, but I think theCosmoteercommunity is great. We have a huge Discord with lots of friendly, helpful people sharing ship designs and talking about strategies for building ships and stuff like that. So definitely come check out the community.
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Cosmoteer: Starship Architect and Commanderis available now on Steam Early Access.
