West of Jupiter - Halloween 2024 Update

Hello from Dog Street Studios!

It’s been a little over a year since the 2023 prototyping project for West of Jupiter completed. This project created the West of Jupiter demo that you may have seen at the Game Developers Conference or XP Toronto.

In case you don’t know (or have forgotten, which would be understandable - it’s been a while!), West of Jupiter is a bounty-hunter simulator set in space western universe, inspired by the Mandalorian, Firefly and Starcraft. It features a natural-language conversation system that allows players to use their own voice to talk to the alien characters that inhabit the game world, along with FTL-inspired tactical ship-to-ship combat, exploration of a procedurally-generated galaxy, progression mechanics centered on the player's ship, and a flexible trading system. Here’s a screenshot of a conversation in the 2023 demo:

At the end of last month, we finally wrapped up a period of intense R&D on our character AI technology. We were originally thinking this phase would last 6-8 months; it ended up taking more than a year. But the upshot is that our simulated characters are now based on a much more solid foundation, especially when it comes to their simulated knowledge and beliefs about the game world.

(By the way, given the rise of the LLMs and the various concerns associated with them, I’ve been putting more emphasis on the fact that West of Jupiter’s natural-language conversation system is based on what’s called symbolic AI, as opposed to machine-learning AI; it does not use ChatGPT or any of its cousins, runs entirely locally on your own machine, and isn’t trained on any copyrighted or ethically-dubious material, or indeed on anything at all.)

And the best part is that we get to focus on West of Jupiter again! We are aiming to have a new demo to show off at GDC next year - less than five months away from now (gulp!).

One of the first things we did this month as we re-focused on the game was to take a pass over the design pillars. These are the core principles or goals that serve as the foundation for the rest of the game design. I thought I’d share the current set with you:

• Immersion - West of Jupiter transports the player from the real world into a different universe, and let them live there as somebody else - "virtual reality" in the original, purest sense.

• Interesting & Consequential Decisions - The player is constantly making interesting decisions, from high level choices about how to manage their relationships with other characters and where to focus their resources, to high stakes tactical decisions during combat. These decisions are not only interesting, but also consequential, with effects that ripple out into the game world.

• Natural-Language Interactions at the Heart - West of Jupiter is a game that fully relies on the power and flexibility of natural-language input. It is a game that would not work with any other form of conversation interface.

• Momentum and Balance - The player always has several projects “on the go” that they are invested in, and each activity in the game takes long enough to feel interesting and meaty, but not so long that it overwhelms the rest of the game.

• Rich and Distinctive Characters - The setting of West of Jupiter is populated by a large cast of memorable, lively, distinctive, emotionally-rich, well-animated characters that drive the dynamically-created story of the game.

• Living World - The world feels alive around the player, with characters that are continuing to live their lives throughout the universe as the player plays - the world does not feel like it revolves only around the player.

• Cinematic Action-Adventure - West of Jupiter makes the player feel like they have been dropped into a Star Wars movie, with high-quality graphics, sound design, special effects, and with a fun action-adventure tone - neither extremely dark and serious, nor cartoonish.

Visual improvements have been low on the priority list as we’ve been focusing on game design and AI, but we do find time now and then to chip away at the graphics code. One area we improved earlier this year was planetary atmosphere rendering:

We’ll be sure to send out an update closer to GDC time next year, if not before. Until then, have a safe and enjoyable Halloween and a wonderful fall!

Best regards,
Troy

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