A new game entering the bustling base building genre looks to expand the scope of the average game. Far from just building megastructures or just managing a colony,Farworld Pioneersaims to do both. It also aims to blend the systems used in modern game development with true, classic MS-DOS design.
The head of the game’s development studio, Rho Watson, is a veteran developer fromStarboundand is leadingFarworld Pioneers’development. He sat with Game Rant for an interview about the game’s inspirations and how it blends so many elements to create something fresh and new, inspired by the limitations of other games in the genre.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Q: Would you mind introducing yourself and what your role inFarworld Pioneers’development is?
A:I am Rho Watson. I am the founder and owner of igloosoft, and I also serve as the creative director ofFarworld Pioneers.
Q: To begin, what inspiredFarworld Pioneers?
A:Many things, it’s sort of the coalescence of years worth of ideas. I would say the nucleus or the idea started way back in 2010 or so. Do you remember whenMinecraftfirst released the online portion? I remember playing it with friends and such. We were all doing our own things, and I was having an absolute blast. Like most people do, I wasbuilding a sort of base. I’d spend days and days on it. It was this huge facility with underground tunnels and mine shafts, and I built this giant pyramid on top of it. There was this huge grandiose project. And once I was done with it, I took a step back–in game, of course–and I was like, “Well, what do I do now? I’ve built this huge facility, and I’m the person who’s really using it.” I’d go to all my friends, ask them to visit, and they’ll come, but they just kind of looked at it and just went back to doing their own thing, which of course is natural.
I was trying to solve the problem that I spent days building this whole thing with dorms, facilities, and purposes, and there was no one to use them or make use of them besides me. It felt really lonely. Truth be told, I kind of stopped playingMinecraftbecause I felt like I fulfilled what I wanted to do, and there wasn’t anything else to really do with it. That stayed in the back of my mind for years.
In 2011, I wasinvited to start work onStarbound. I felt like that was my opportunity to make a game where there could be people and entities that could use the things you made. Long story short, I didn’t get to end up doing those things. My creative input wasn’t really used onStarbound, so I pivoted to just doing the art assets and then bouncing out. I leftStarboundin 2014, and my ideas still stayed in the back of my mind.
In 2018, I began pre-production on what would becomeFarworld Pioneers. I kind of reached a point in my life where I was like, “I’m sitting on this idea, on this concept. If I don’t do it now, someone else is going to, and I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life.” I began production, to start making my own mock-ups of assets in 2018 and 2019. From there, I started gathering people who shared the vision.
Q: I definitely can see the DNA of your work onStarbound. What setsFarworld Pioneersapart fromStarbound?
A:What sets this apart fromStarboundis very much the colony aspect.Starbounddoesn’t really have much colony gameplay, if any at all. There are technically NPCs, but they basically serve as movable furniture. They’re things you’ve placed down, they sort of wander around the same spot, and then don’t really do anything.
The NPCs inFarworld Pioneerscan actually be ordered around to help you do things. It’s sort of like a hybrid betweenTerrariaand a real-time strategy gamein that the AI NPCs you recruit, they actually serve a purpose and have value or bring value to your colony. Whereas in games likeStarbound,they’re interchangeable and don’t really serve any real purpose besides being extended eye candy for your base. At the end of the day, base-making inStarboundis very much like inMinecraft, where once you’re done making your project, they don’t really serve anyone besides you. They don’t really have a use besides serving your imagination.
Q: I’ve read that you also take a lot of inspiration from DOS games. How does that DOS DNA show up inFarworld Pioneers?
A: A lot of ways, actually. One of the things from the start that I insisted on from an art perspective was limiting the game to 640 by 360 or so pixels. Something a lot ofmodern games that ape older gamesdo is they’ll have pixel art, but they won’t truly represent the pixels, if that makes sense? They’ll render the pixels but at a larger resolution so that assets can rotate and the pixels themselves will rotate rather than being rendered at a true native resolution. It was important to me from the start that we render things at the right pixel resolution and magnify them up so that it retains that true blocky resolution.
There are other things. We did a lot of tributes to old games. One in particular for me is, bam, seen from the very start as soon as you load the game up. There’s this imitation DOS startup sequence that replicates older DOS games, and also we pay tribute to the old Westwood Studios intro sequence with the logo they used to have. In the menu, we have touches like “Exit to DOS” rather than “Exit Game.” There are lots of smaller touches like that within the game that we just left lying around for the player to find.
Q: Are your planets procedurally generated, handcrafted, or a mix of the two?
A:Sort ofa hybrid of the two. The terrains, features, set pieces, and so forth, those are randomly generated. So, no two planets will ever be the same, but the types of planets, the biomes, and the planets within the star systems, those are predefined. So in any given star system, there will always be X amount of ice planets, X amount of deaths, plus X mammal-filled planets, but when you actually visit those planets, the terrain will always be different between playthroughs.
We wanted to do that so that we could control the progression and have a tighter rein on the design and so on. Just so we can more tightly control what the player encounters and comes across rather than leaving it entirely up to chance.
Q: From either players or your team, what are some of the most interesting things you’ve seen built?
A:That’s an interesting question actually. I’m always fascinated, just in general, at the personal projects that players come up with. Players will build things ranging from just regular outposts to grandiose projects. Like, I remember one dude built this giant glass pyramid base. It was just something that, when designing the game, I would never have figured that players would use our assets to build.
Every test session, there’s always something players build that makes me take a step back and go, “You know, I never would have thought that players would have used our things to build that.” It was really humbling and interesting, but in particular, there are all kinds of mining facilities, space courts, and pyramids. It was fascinating to see what players just ended up coming out with.
Q: You mentioned both your work onStarboundand your inspiration fromMinecraft. Is there a plan forFarworld Pioneersto also embrace user-developed mods as those games have?
A:Yes, yeah, we haven’t really got a chance to incorporate that just yet, but that is on the roadmap. From my experience with Starbound and what I’ve witnessed in Minecraft, we are well aware that modding is a huge attraction for players with these sorts of games. It’s something we intend on embracing.
Q:How does shipbuilding work? I’m wondering how freeform it is versus how, obviously, there are certain things a ship needs to be a ship.
A:Ships currently function, in many ways, like planets do. There’s a range of static ship designs that players can choose that they will be able to choose one. Currently, there’s only one, and that’s pretty much just a shuttle of sorts. It’s intended to just ferry you between planets. But in the wider game, there’s going to be a range of ship designs. You could choose one and there’ll be different ships, designs, and classes, each with their own facilities and uses that will be expandable.
You’ll be able to choose from each ship design, and you’ll be able to choose one that will suit your gameplay. So, some ships will be like the ones you currently see, there will be sort of taxis between planets, and some ships will have onboard crafting facilities. Some ships will have different ways of transportation. We’re planning on having ships that will have all sorts of expandability that will be manually defined on the ship designs themselves.
Q: From the sound of it, one of the big things that you’re really proud of is the colony mechanics. Could you go into a little more detail about how the colony mechanics work?
A:Theelevator pitch I’ve always givenis: imagineRimworld, but you could at any point jump in and play as any one of the NPCs that you have running around. You could manually control them to help out, craft things, and do things yourself at any given time. That’s what we’re sort of going for here–that community aspect of the game where at any point, you can choose to be one of the cogs in the machine that’s running, help out and do things, assess, help grow and expand.
That’s always been one of the founding pillars of the game. You can, at any point, jump in and assist and be one of the colonists helping out and helping your colony move forward. And likewise, you also rely on your NPCs to help move you forward. You can, if you want, go it alone, but it will be a lot slower than if you had NPCs helping you out. That community aspect is really what drives the game.
Q: Speaking of community, can you talk a little bit about multiplayer?
A:Like I said, the idea is that you–and for that matter, anyone playing with you–can act as a colonist. If you bring friends along, that just helps the experience because your friends can act as one of the colonists just as you can.
Q: There’s also PvP from what I understand?
A:The game is sort of a cooperative experience, but yeah, at any one point, you or any one of your friends can go off and do your own thing, set up your own colony, and compete with each other and play against each other. If that’s what you want to do. From very early on, our publisher wanted us to incorporate an experience where you or any friends–or strangers for that matter–could join a server and compete with each other and play against each other. So that’s always been a factor that we’ve incorporated in the game and try to account for.
Q: Is there any big narrative frame to the game?
A:There isn’t really a story of sorts we use. We still were sort of aiming to provide the player with a setting and leave defining the story and narrative up to the player. So really why you’re there and why you’re doing X, Y, and Z? We want to live up to the imagination.
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Farworld Pioneersis available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
