The IGF (Independent Games Festival) aims to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize independent game developers advancing the medium. This year, Game Developer sat down with the finalists for the IGF’s Nuovo and Grand Prize nominees ahead of GDC to explore the themes, design decisions, and tools behind each entry. Game Developer and GDC are sibling organizations under Informa.
Starship Home turns your personal living area into a spacecraft, filling it with strange machinery and alien plant forms. Whether you want to get to know your plants and their varied personalities or fly to entire worlds from your living room, this VR game offers striking places to visit and some interesting plants to care for.
Game Developer spoke with Doug North Cook, creative director of the Nuovo Award nominated game, to learn more about how they came upon the idea to make use of the player’s living space within a mixed-reality world, the design decisions that went into carefully making use of the player’s living space, and what appealed to them about having players care for plants when they’re soaring through the cosmos.
Who are you, and what was your role in developing Starship Home?
I am Doug North Cook, the CEO and creative director of Creature, the studio behind Starship Home. I can’t emphasize enough how much of a group effort this project was with our art director Ashley Pinnick and engineering director Mark Schram co-leading development with a much larger team. Their leadership, passion, creativity, and brilliance are what helped our team ship something that, at the start, felt impossible to build.
What’s your background in making games?
Most of my background is actually in academia. I was a design professor focused on immersive technology leading a department at Chatham University in Pittsburgh until my friend Callum Underwood convinced me to leave to run VR at Robot Teddy (where we helped release The Last Clockwinder, Among Us VR, No More Rainbows, and several others). I left Robot Teddy to focus on building Starship Home and to build an XR-focused game label which also released the Meta Quest Game of the Year, Maestro, and the Apple Vision Pro Game of the Year, THRASHER.
How did you come up with the concept for Starship Home?
The original concept for Starship Home was one of those magical moments where an idea lands nearly fully formed in your mind. I spent an entire day furiously filling a notebook to capture what I saw. The core concept revolved around this idea that if we were making a game in mixed reality and we couldn’t control the context that the user played the game in, then we needed to embrace the context and make it a core part of the game. We turned whatever room you played in into a starship and then we launched that room into outer space. Your room comes with you on an adventure, and in that way, it is a character in the story and the game feels different depending on where you play it. There is some deep magic in that.
A few days after having the original idea my wife helped me translate that initial vision into a pitch deck that I quickly shared around with the people who became the Starship Home team—the idea being to pull together people who had made some of the most important contributions to novel interaction, narrative, and technical design for immersive projects to date and get them all to collaborate on one project.
What development tools were used to build your game?
We built the game in Unity exclusively for the Meta Quest 3 series. This allowed us to do some techno-magic—integrating platform specific features to build a type of experience that is only just now possible to build.
Starship Home turns your home into a spacefaring craft. What appealed to you about taking the player’s living space and adding fantastic elements to it? Why mix their reality with your creative alien technology and beings?
We often talked during development about the idea of Starship Home as an “assisted daydream” and that by grounding the player in their environment and slowing building up a shared illusion we can tap into the player’s imagination to fill in the gaps. We go really deep on the interactivity and responsiveness of the objects we put into your space so that you feel like they belong alongside the physical products in your space. We often see users move a chair to position themselves as the captain of the ship, move books from a shelf to make space for one of our plants—it is a type of imaginative play that demands a childlike approach. We wanted to instill in users a sense of wonder, delight, and awe.
What challenges came from creating elements that would connect with the player’s real world living space? What thoughts went into designing the various ship parts, technologies, and plants in such a way that they could connect with the player’s world when living spaces are so varied in shape and structure?
This was one of our biggest hurdles—making a contextless game that feels meaningful in any environment. Early on, we built consensus in the team around a few core design concepts that Ashley Pinnick, our art director, solidified into concept drawings and design language that dictated much of what the game became.
These included surface awareness—the idea that every object should meaningfully interact with the floor, tables, shelves, and any surface we can define at the platform level. A great example is the plant pots. If a user moves a pot towards a surface, the pot has legs that reach out from the bottom of the pot that land the pot on the surface and we cast a shadow on that surface—but if the player lets the pot go in mid-air the pot will turn on small jets that hover it in place. We try to ensure that players can interact with objects in a variety of ways and that they can discover through the natural course of play—learning alien technology as they go.
Early on, we had ideas to augment the player’s space in more ways and have more visual overlays, but in the end what we found to be the most compelling with the current state of the technology was to have fewer objects that have a higher level of detail and richness. The plants are also aware of the space, the player, and each other in ways that can be surprising—one of the plants has a long tentacle arm that, if in reach of the helm, it will occasionally reach out and hit buttons on helm to turn on and off our holographic star map. Some of those plants are real rascals.
What ideas went into creating the various machines and ship devices so that they felt alien and creative, yet conveyed their usage in their design? How did you make a starship’s controls feel intuitive?
Early on, Ashley nailed down our organic, drippy, goopy shape language that serves as the basis for everything. We wanted the ship to feel soft, alive, and familiar all at once. We borrow some items from classic sci-fi like levers, buttons, and holographic projectors, but other items like our fertilizer creatures, and the contraption you use to access the dreams of alien plants, required multiple rounds of iteration to find something that was novel while still remaining accessible. We tried to focus on interactions that were simple yet surprising.
What appealed to you about focusing on caring for various plants in the game? About giving the plants various personalities for the player to uncover?
We were excited with the idea of making a game that encourages players to be caretakers and plant lovers—to find joy in nurturing. These are things we want to see more of in the world. With a mixed reality game, users are trusting us to build an experience in their home. We take this unspoken intimate contract really seriously and wanted to work to ensure that we created positive, magical memories for places. I think that Starship Home imbues a little bit of magic into every space it is played in.
The personalities of the plants are a big part of this—they respond to your touch, they each have different needs, and they respond to care in different ways. Every player has a favorite (which ends up being placed in a place of prominence). They are somewhere in between plants and pets—a space we’d love to explore even more in the future.
How did you design the plants in order to convey their unique personalities? How do you create something that looks like a plant from another planet? How do you then show the player that plant’s personality through its behavior and visual design?
When approaching the design of each plant, we tried to think holistically about the end-to-end experience of the player. The planet they find the plant on, the dream of the plant you enter into, the music in that dream, the interactions with the player—all of this comes together to paint a full picture of a complex entity. We tried to only occasionally borrow shapes and concepts for plants from Earth (like the flower on the eyeball plant), but for many of them we tried to focus on an interaction-first approach—you feed this plant, this plant wants to poke things, this plant plays tones when touched—and then we designed the plant to encourage and foster those interactions.
Finally, what thoughts went into the different worlds players could explore with their lander? Into creating whole worlds to amaze the player, and the ways in which they could interact with those worlds? When you were not bound by the limits of the player’s living space, how did that alter your designs?
We went through several radically different concepts for the lander. We knew we wanted to keep the player in their room at all times but that we wanted to allow them to explore these worlds. We settled on the lander feed concept as something that would allow players to collect some lore, catch the vibe of the planet, and get a sense of the plant’s home world all while still keeping them grounded in their home environment.
To do this, we close all the exterior windows of the ship, dim the passthrough, and focus the player’s view on the feed. We wanted players to enjoy these scenes as interactive vistas. This, like many of the interactions in Starship Home, are meant to invite the player to embody the narrative of the world where they are a researcher, explorer, and caretaker. We hope that players engage with Starship Home less as a classic game and more as an adventure that they allow themselves to imagine going on. If you are willing to play Starship Home that way, the journey is worth the trip.
