STG

1: First of all can you tell us a little about yourself and any other games
you and your
team have developed in and outside of Trek gaming?

Tara/SWTrek

I'm a college student, majoring in psychology and art. When I tell my classmates about the game projects that I head and work on they usually pause for a moment because I totally don't look or act like the typical
computer-geek/gamer stereotype.

10 years ago I met several wonderfully nice people on the net who were kind enough to teach me how to program. Bruce Idea, who taught me the C language. "Pascal", who taught me OpenGL. And many others. It is because they took the time to help me and teach me that SWTrek exists today.

Some of them and I decided to form a small OSD (Open Source Development) group called Wolfpack Entertainment (because most of us liked wolves). Most of the programs that we have written are mostly for the home/office (file/image browsers, text editors, etc). We have only written two games thus far. XShipWars (http://wolfpack.twu.net/ShipWars/XShipWars) and Search and Rescue (http://wolfpack.twu.net/SearchAndRescue).

STG

Whats the basic premise of SWTrek? Is it based on Real Time Strategy like Armada 1/2?

Tara/SWTrek

SWTrek is kind of based on "the life of a starship in a Startrek universe", You'll basically be doing what most starships do, like flying about and exploring the universe, making friends and enemies, trading goods with different planets, and having to defend yourself against unfriendly ships. It is both a strategy and an action game, though, slightly more on the action side.

STG

Roughly how many people are currently playing it?

Tara/SWTrek

It's difficult for me to say, in the pre-alpha version of SWTrek we had about 20 players, the last time I checked we have 8 currently on the latest stable SWTrek universe.

STG

Tell us a bit about the process of making the game at the beginning andany hints andadvice for new folks who are just starting to make fan made developed gamesfor the trekfranchise?

Tara/SWTrek

SWTrek is a rather short story, once I had ShipWars (the workhorse powering SWTrek) in shape, the SWTrek universe and all the ships were easy to put togeather. The whole process took a little bit more than a month. I primarly used the information from memory-alpha.org in order to make the planets and starbases as consistent with the Startrek episodes and movies as I could.

ShipWars has a much longer story though, I created ShipWars back in 1997. I made a test program called "ShipWars" when I was learning how to write graphics code in C and XLib (I picked XLib at that time because Windows was too difficult for me than compared to Linux). As I learned and experimented more and more with coding, I stayed with that very same test program as it evolved into what ShipWars is today.

I'm a purist trek-fan, the only scifi shows that I watched during the development were ST:TNG and ST:DS9. So as I worked on ShipWars for the past 8 years I kind of influenced it into becoming as trek-friendly as possible. There are no occurances of trek-specific things (like "phasers") in the code, I wanted ShipWars to be a very opaque multiplayer spaceship gaming system. Because I thought of other universes that I might want to create with it and making it trek-specific would make that more difficult.

So I hope that being a trek-fan, watching almost every show, and memorizing as much trek-detail as I could helped make SWTrek as realistic and accurate to Startrek as it is. Mind that I wasn't able to make SWTrek until a few months ago, I dreampt of making that 8 years ago but I needed to develop ShipWars into what it is now in order to realize that dream.

Today, there are a lot of advances in libraries for games. Programmers can pick libraries such as PLib or SDL and only need to write a few modules in order to make their game work. Compared to ShipWars which has no game library dependencies because none existed at that time its design was layed out.

I feel that the two most important things in writing any successful game are having an interest in it and being responsible enough to see it through. You don't have to be a guru in computers or have a hundred paid programmers working for you, as long as you stay interested and are responsible you'll figure things out and your game will continue to evolve. I say evolve instead of finish because no game is ever finished, players will always want new things and new ideas will always pop into your head so you'll always want to add new things to your game.

To me, your game is like your precious baby, an extension of you. You nurture it, teach it, help it grow, and take care of it. But you will always be that child's... that game's... parent or creator, when you make something you're responsible for it for the rest of your life. It will always need you, maybe more or less, maybe differently as you two both grow and evolve togeather. It stays in your heart and life forever because it is always your game, your baby, and you are always its creator, its parent.

STG

Do you and your team play in any of the official Star Trek games?

Tara/SWTrek

I'm actually haven't played any other Startrek game except for mtrek/jtrek for a short while, but it was text-based and I wasn't very good at it. But I liked it!

I have one friend/beta-tester who played Shattered Universe, but I'm afraid I haven't gotten around to playing that myself yet.

STG

What made you decide to make a new fan developed game?

Tara/SWTrek

I had a light class load during the spring of 2005 (only taking two classes) so I had more time than usual. It was during spring break, when it was too unusually cold in LA to get my tan that I wanted since winter,
I decided to just stay at home and crunch every moment of my time into getting ShipWars in shape for SWTrek. I was mostly upset at the weather, so I felt that I wanted something positive to come out of my precious spring break time.

I originally wanted to create SWTrek 8 years ago only because there didn't exist any graphical online trek game and I was horrible at text games.

STG

Ok, about the actual gameplay. Is the game easy to get into from thebegining or does ittake a few days of knowing the in's and out's of the game itself?

Tara/SWTrek

If you memorized all the important keys of the XSW client and read the opening page that tells you where to connect and how to signup (signup <name>=<vessel>) then you're basically all set.

It's an online game with live players, I've found that other players are nice enough to tell newbies basic things like com channels, how to hail, and send messages. Once they know that then they're all lined up on the learning curve! We've also documented each and every function, listed all the ships stats, and mapped the entire SWTrek universe, but even players who don't like to read the web page can still figure things out relatively easilly by just roaming around.

STG

Is there a lot of player vs player ship battles that go on in the game?Or are peoplemore interested in gaining as many credits as they can while avoiding costlyship battles?

Tara/SWTrek

Originally, I wanted it to be mostly player to player, because that's what most other trek-games that I've played were like. But eventually I added AIs (computer controlled ships and things) and it seemed like players prefer to play against them more than other players.

I designed SWTrek to give players a lot of options, they can earn credits by trading and staying alive or they can be pirates and attack other players (...or a little bit of both). There are two scoring systems, one is who has the most credits, the second is who has the most damage given to damage received ratio. I let players decide which scoring system they like to brag about themselves with.

STG

How long was the game in development for and is new features still being
added?

Tara/SWTrek

SWTrek is relatively new, ShipWars has been around for quite some time. I have a very lengthy "todo list" of features that players have given me that I plan to try and put in.

STG

Is there any plans for future fan developed games other than SWTrek fromyou are yourteam?

Tara/SWTrek

Yes, there are plans to make a ShipWars 3D, so ultimately an SWTrek 3D. That idea has been around for the past 2 years and now we're just trying to find time and resources to see if we can make that happen.

In the mean time we are are working on a Win32 client (other than SWTerm) so that Windows players are not left out.

STG

Lastly, we always give the interviewee a chance to advertise there mod
or game at the
end of the interview. So here's your's :)

Tara/SWTrek

SWTrek is an online game that anyone with an XSW or SWTerm client can connect to and play for free. SWTrek's official web page is located at http://wolfsinger.com/SWTrek. There, you can find up-to-date ships and weapons listings, maps, a message board, and each player's scores.

SWTrek has over a hundred planets, stars, and starbases that are accurate in detail and location to those mentioned in ST:TNG and ST:DS9.

There are over a dozen different ships you can fly, each with its own strenghs and weaknesses, and all have stats made to reflect those seen on the Startrek shows and movies (including ST:TOS and ST:ENT).

So I hope players give SWTrek a try and have a great time! If anyone has suggestions we listen and try our best to accomidate and add in new things!