Star Trek Timelines - Presentation at DST3 in London

<embedvideo service="youtube">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-6okskUjg4&feature=youtu.be</embedvideo>

Transcript

Jon Radoff: CEO of Disruptor Beam

So many decades ago Gene Roddenberry imagined that we would have a device this big that would allow us to communicate across the world. I think it's amazing that now you'll be able to play on a device this size, you'll be able to put the galaxy in your pocket. I'm really excited about this. We're making I think a gorgeous game but one that is really true to Gene Rodenberry's vision. I want to tell you a little bit about it this morning but I also want you to have an opportunity an ask me questions about what we're doing in this game, because we're really still very early in this, and it's about the community it's really about you and working with you we want to be the most community centred game company in the world.

So just to tell you a little bit about Disruptor Beam itself, Disruptor Beam is a team of about 40 people, we're in the US in an area called Boston and what we're doing is bringing together some of the best people from Star Trek, writing online games, for creating online game experiences in a new and interesting way.

So I want to start though with kinda the kind of Star Trek games that I've played in my life before. So when I was a kid, probably the first Star Trek game I every played was on a main frame computer, and I see a wide variety of ages in the audience, but some of you may remember the days of text based computer subsystems where you access it from the terminal that was actually my first experience with computer games. I was about seven years old and my father plopped my in front of the T100 terminal. When I was a kid my first experience with games was just like that and they had Star Trek games which was amazing, these were some of the first games ever made so you could go around the galaxy and explore you could blow up Klingons but that's sort of where the game experience ended because most of it had to do with that blowing up Klingons aspect of the game an that's the way most star trek games I think have evolved.

Most games ultimately come down to combat and some of them are really good, like I really loves Star Trek Strategic Operations Simulator, a video game we have in our office you can go around blowing up Klingons, you're docking with starships, I love those games. But what we really wanted to do with this Star Trek game is something new and different, we wanted to try and bring in the other aspects of the Star Trek experience that are so important to Gene Roddenberry you know diplomacy, science, exploration, that's ultimately what Star Trek is about.

Another aspect of it is really bringing the characters to Star Trek really into the gameplay experience. So to share with you a little bit of the narrative premise of Star Trek Timlines for a moment, the idea is that there is catastrophe across time and space, it's a crisis in the space time continuum. What this means is that the mirror universe, the real universe, they're fusing together, all the different timelines are kind of getting jumbled up, this means that in this game you'll be able to bring in Picard, and mirrir universe Sisko, and Spock, all in the same crew for example. So this is awesome because all your favourite characters are going to be present in this game. You'll be able to work them together and see how they work as a team, or maybe they'll be a little bit dysfunctional as a team, you'll have to try out a lot of strategy in the game it's going to be about how you put your team, your crew together into the optimal problem solving away teams for solving different kinds of situations. So sometimes you might have to resort to violence and combat with something, but often you'll be able to solve things thorough diplomacy, you'll be able to solve things through engineering, science, I think it's that rich story telling tradition that we want to try to bring together in this game and doing it through the characters that you really come to know and love from all the history of Star Trek is going to be really awesome.

So another aspect of the game that I'm really excited about is the gorgeous way that we're bringing to life a huge number of star systems within this game. You're really going to be able to explore in a way that you've never really had the opportunity to do in Star Trek before. We've got a galaxy with countless star systems, I don't know how many, thousands, millions, there's tonnes of places to explore and they're all different. That's because we've created a whole new technology stack, a milestone technology I think because what we've been able to develop, our designs create the infinite number of star systems, we create star systems based on actual physics and cosmology and deliver it across all these different devices, tablets, phones, web browsers, and let you explore everywhere, and it's through this exploration, through this galaxy that's in this state of conflict around the space time continuum you'll be able to go to all these different star systems. They're going to all be affected by this and sometimes you'll be able to deploy different kind of crew configuration that solve things in each individual situation.

So I think that it's really beautiful, it's something that were still developing in fact if you visit our booth right over there later we have something we call the genesis system. You can actually work with one of our developers over there, you can see the kinds of tools that our engineers and our designers use to build our games.

So I', going to actually turn it over for questions so you can use this as an opportunity to learn about what we're doing with this game, but the cool thing with Star Trek Timelines and I think something that is a way we're approaching game development differently than many other companies in game development is the idea that we really want to embrace you the community you know, you are the Star Trek fans, you are the people that we really want to make a part of this, the bridge crew programme which we're allowing you to sign up for today allows you to get early access the game before the general public is going to be able to see it so this is going to allow you to try out different gameplay systems, see if we've got it right, respond to stories, maybe even have some ideas that we'll incorporate into the game and hat's really important to me, is to bring it all together like that.

so anyway, I'd love to answer any questions...