Working Pitch
A four-character cooperative sci-fi CRPG about an independent frontier survey crew taking contracts across a dangerous, mixed-species frontier. The game combines authored exploration, dialogue, tactical turn-based combat, light inventory pressure, and species-driven problem solving.
The tone is dangerous frontier adventure: practical crews, unstable worlds, failing infrastructure, scarce medical resources, hostile ecology, and enough pulp momentum to keep the game adventurous rather than bleak.
Design Pillars
Exploration First
The game is a CRPG first and a tactics game second. Combat is important, dangerous, and tactical, but it should emerge naturally from exploration, dialogue, survival pressure, bad information, hostile terrain, and mission choices.
Primary play happens on the ground: colonies, wilderness regions, impact zones, outposts, ruins, industrial sites, shipwrecks, and ecological danger areas. The ship matters as a crew hub and campaign enabler, but the core experience is planetary exploration.
Four-Character Co-op
The ideal party size is four characters. Co-op supports up to four players, with each player controlling one main character. In solo or smaller co-op play, the players create and control the full four-character squad — every squad member is player-made and player-controlled from the start.
The game should be cooperative-first. Characters can disagree, express strong personalities, and offer different approaches, but the design should avoid player-vs-player derailment. The goal is to get through the story together.
Ensemble Crew, No Fixed Leader
The party is an established independent exploration crew, not a chosen-one story and not a strict captain-led hierarchy. A captain may exist as legal paperwork or ship procedure, but the game should treat the crew as co-equal protagonists.
Conversation leadership is contextual: whoever starts a conversation leads it. Major mission decisions can be framed as crew decisions rather than captain commands.
Species Matter
Species should radically affect gameplay, traversal, dialogue, culture, and problem solving, while never hard-locking critical path progress. A mixed-species crew is a major identity of the setting.
Species and class are separate. A Yazirian can be a medic, a Dralasite can be a heavy-weapons expert, a Vrusk can be a diplomat, and a Human can be a technician.
Each species should provide signature solutions, not mandatory keys. If a Yazirian dies, the party may lose a glide shortcut, but can still solve the level through climbing gear, drones, hacking, explosives, alternate routes, or help from NPCs.
Tactical Combat With Consequences
Combat should be dangerous and tactical. Save/load exists, but a bad fight should feel costly. The player should care about positioning, cover, opportunity fire, ammo type, power use, injury, revival resources, and environmental hazards.
Ammo is generally available enough that players are not afraid to shoot. Long expeditions can exhaust specific ammo types and push players toward alternate weapons or tactics. Healing, revival, filters, field repairs, and other general-purpose survival tools are more scarce.
Light Survival Pressure
Survival pressure is inventory-based rather than heavy simulation. Important resources include ammunition, power cells, med supplies, revival tools, oxygen or filters in specific zones, and vehicle battery or fuel during expeditions.
Campaign Structure
The campaign should follow authored story progression through fixed contracts. Contracts are not random filler; they are the crew's profession, the mission framing, and the way the main story advances.
The crew begins by doing normal frontier work: rescue, survey recovery, salvage, infrastructure repair, escorting specialists, colony support, and dangerous scouting. Over time, these contracts reveal a larger impending catastrophe.
Act 1: The Contract
The crew takes what appears to be a normal frontier contract. The act establishes the party, species interactions, exploration systems, combat, inventory pressure, and the mixed-species frontier.
The crew learns that a moon has been destroyed and that debris or related orbital effects are beginning to threaten inhabited worlds. Nobody knows how the moon was destroyed. The act does not solve the main plot; it ends with the crew realizing the situation is larger than the original contract.
Moon Destruction Arc
The destroyed moon is one body within a wider orbital system, not a Nimbus-only local event and not one of many simultaneous moon disasters. Nimbus is the first affected playable world and the crew's initial window into the crisis, while debris, orbital resonance, failed prediction networks, and secondary environmental effects ripple toward multiple inhabited worlds.
The cause remains unknown until late campaign. Act 1 should present the event as bizarre and unresolved rather than a clean natural catastrophe or an obvious attack. Act 2 keeps the evidence ambiguous while confirming a larger pattern, and Act 3 resolves whether the destruction came from natural orbital forces, engineered intervention, an intelligence acting through natural systems, or something stranger.
First Contract: Black-Site Extraction
The first contract is a rescue mission and the M5 vertical slice target. An unknown employer hires the crew to extract a VIP prisoner from a covert detention facility on Nimbus. The assignment is presented as a contained frontier extraction, but the job turns unstable as the crew discovers the target is being held because they know something important.
The prisoner knows why they were imprisoned, but cannot or will not explain it during the rescue. The employer's identity remains deliberately unknown, giving the contract an unresolved mystery thread. The mission tone is a dramatic extraction: practical, dangerous, and escalating as it becomes clear this is not a clean job.
Act 2: The Pattern
The crew investigates another affected site and confirms the crisis is not isolated. Similar disturbances appear across different ecosystems, colonies, or orbital paths. Local factions disagree over evacuation, denial, containment, salvage, and scientific investigation.
Act 3: The Cause
The crew pursues the mystery of the destroyed moon. The cause should not default to ancient alien technology or a simple corporate cover-up. The mystery should feel like hard frontier science fiction: orbital mechanics, failed prediction systems, cosmological anomaly, hidden observations, or an unknown force acting through natural systems.
Act 4: The Cost
The crew discovers a possible response, but it requires sacrifice and prioritization. The choice is not whether to be heroic in a simple sense, but what can realistically be saved and at what cost.
Finale: The Groundside Fix
The final solution should require ground action, not a simple ship command. The crew must enter a collapsing environment, repair or reconfigure infrastructure, recover critical data, protect evacuees or specialists, and execute the solution manually under pressure.
Setting Assumptions
The Frontier is highly integrated. Colonies may have human-led, Yazirian-led, Vrusk-led, or Dralasite-led histories, but day-to-day society is mixed-species. Architecture, tools, laws, medicine, and public spaces often accommodate multiple body plans and cultural norms.
The crew are independent frontier explorers or licensed exploration contractors. They are practical professionals rather than mercenaries: part scout team, part rescue crew, part troubleshooters.
The first major colony should be a small frontier settlement in feel, but located on a planet with a meaningful population, potentially millions. The stakes are large enough to matter without making the opening feel like a galactic capital.
Starting World: Nimbus
The first planet is Nimbus, a normal inhabited frontier world rather than a prison planet. The opening contract takes the crew to a black-site prison facility on Nimbus, letting the first playable environment combine frontier settlement texture, secured industrial interiors, tactical rescue encounters, and hints of larger planetary stakes.
The Crew
The starting crew is created by the players before the game begins. In multiplayer, each human player gets a main character, up to four. In solo or smaller co-op play, the players create the remaining squad members themselves — all four characters are player-controlled from the start.
Companions are cut for launch. There are no recruitable or authored origin companions; the four-character squad is the whole party. Species personality and culture come through dialogue options, NPC reactions, and species-specific solutions rather than companion banter. The player should still learn how Humans, Dralasites, Vrusk, and Yazirians think and communicate through the world's reactions to a mixed-species crew.
Class And Role Archetypes
Archetypes are CRPG-facing crew jobs, not species-bound classes. Any species can take any role; species changes the tactical expression and story flavor of the job rather than deciding eligibility.
A four-character party is expected to cover four of the five roles directly. The fifth role can be covered through cross-training, gear, ship support, NPC help, or alternate mission solutions.
- Security: The crew's combat anchor, trained to control danger through weapons, positioning, cover, suppression, demolitions, or close protection. Security characters are the person the crew relies on when an expedition turns into an ambush, evacuation, or breach.
- Technician: The field systems expert who repairs vehicles, bypasses locks and alarms, restores power, handles machinery, and works with computers or robots. A Technician turns broken frontier infrastructure into mission options.
- Medic: The survival and recovery specialist responsible for trauma care, disease, toxins, drugs, freeze fields, and expedition health. A Medic makes dangerous exploration sustainable and gives the party more room to survive costly mistakes.
- Scout: The recon, traversal, and environmental specialist who reads terrain, tracks movement, detects hazards, finds routes, and keeps the crew alive outside settlements. A Scout should create alternate approaches before combat starts, not just sneak during combat.
- Envoy: The social, cultural, and psychological specialist who handles negotiation, empathy, faction reads, morale, and tense first-contact situations. An Envoy gives dialogue and crew decision scenes a clear mechanical role without making them the fixed party leader.
Species Gameplay Notes
Human
Humans are adaptable generalists. They may cross-train faster, improvise with unfamiliar equipment, and fit into the widest range of social contexts.
Dralasite
Dralasites can use flexible physiology for traversal, infiltration, medical weirdness, and unusual problem solving. They should have distinctive social presence and not feel like humans with different stats.
Vrusk
Vrusk bring multi-limb physicality, ambidexterity, precision, corporate/social comprehension, and strong technical or procedural instincts. They should read spaces, contracts, and social obligations differently from other species.
Yazirian
Yazirians bring gliding, high-risk mobility, intensity, clan/loyalty hooks, intimidation, and battle-rage-adjacent combat identity. Their traversal should open dramatic shortcuts without becoming mandatory.
Death, Revival, And Recovery
Death should be costly but not strict permadeath. The game needs pressure similar to expensive resurrection tools in Divinity, but with Star Frontiers-appropriate fiction.
Revival has three tiers: field trauma kits, ship medbay recovery, and station clinic treatment. Field revival happens during missions and consumes the rarest portable supplies, such as trauma beacons, emergency stasis injectors, freeze-field recovery charges, or advanced trauma care packs. Ship medbay revival is available after extraction once the ship hub is online; it costs med supplies, time, and possible ship power or repair capacity, but is less volatile than field treatment. Station clinic revival is the safest and most expensive option, using credits, favors, specialist access, or scarce frontier infrastructure.
Costs scale by campaign act as the base model. Each act raises the expected expense of all revival tiers to match the economy, harsher injuries, and increasing strain on frontier medical systems. Repeat deaths add a per-character trauma surcharge on top of the act cost, representing accumulated complications, but this surcharge is capped so one bad encounter does not create a permanent death spiral.
In combat, a downed character may be stabilized if reached in time. If field recovery fails or the character suffers catastrophic injury, the failure state is temporary unavailability, not systemic permadeath. The character must be extracted, placed in ship medbay care or transferred to a station clinic, and returned after downtime and recovery cost. Optional challenge modes may add harsher consequences later, but the default campaign preserves the player-created crew and co-op party structure.
Ship Role
The ship is a light hub, not a shipbuilding or management game. It supports travel, planning, crew conversations, storage, upgrades, and occasional events, but most playtime should be on the ground.
Decided (2026-07-04): the ship hub comes online after the first contract (Black-Site Extraction). Until then the ship is inaccessible or damaged, and reclaiming it is the milestone that opens the broader campaign.
Vehicles
Vehicles are a future design pillar, but not the first system to solve. They should begin as exploration tools and tactical objects rather than full vehicle-combat simulation.
- mobile cover
- cargo and supply extension
- sensor platform
- expedition lifeline
- scouting tool
- traversal solution
- repair or extraction objective
Decided (2026-07-04): the prototype MVP (M3/M4 scope) is traversal-only — vehicles move the crew across terrain, with no battery or fuel management. The resource layer stays a future pillar for the full game.
Catastrophe Premise
A moon has been destroyed within a wider inhabited orbital system. Nobody knows how. Its debris and related orbital effects create escalating threats to inhabited worlds: impact events, atmospheric disruption, communication failures, ecological panic, damaged infrastructure, and unpredictable environmental hazards.
The first act reveals the catastrophe through a normal contract rather than opening with the full truth. The crew gradually learns that the event is part of a larger crisis.
The catastrophe should be the main antagonist pressure early on. The Sathar or another hostile force may influence, exploit, obscure, or weaponize the crisis later, but Act 1 does not need a clear villain.
Open Questions
All pre-production questions are resolved (2026-07-04):
- Companions at launch: none — companions are cut. The players create and control all four squad members from the start.
- Character creation scope: species + name + class only. No appearance customization or stat builds; authored species identity stays intact.
- Ship hub availability: the ship hub comes online after the first contract (Black-Site Extraction).
- MVP vehicle system: traversal-only for the prototype — no battery/fuel management.