PCPP Interview: Mothership Entertainment
It may look like a game where you colonise planet Pandora, but Aven Colony is light years away from James Cameron’s Avatar. We talk to PAUL TOZOUR about why we should be optimistic about the future of the human race...
Interstellar travel is unlikely to materialise in our lifetimes, but as far as Mothership Entertainment founder Paul Tozour is concerned, the time is right to make a city builder set on exotic alien worlds. “Ten years ago, we didn’t have any proof that there were any Earth-like planets outside the Solar System. Now we’re finding a bewildering variety of new planets every day, some of them very earth-like, and a few of those surprisingly close to the Solar System.
“Someday, a future human is going to set foot on one of those worlds. And that mission won’t just be an exploration mission or a one-way trip. To go that many lightyears away, we’ll have to bring all the tools we need to actually build a settlement and start living there.
“I can’t think of anything more exciting than that. That will be the biggest event in human history. I like to think about what that first colonisation effort will look like, and having that whole new world to explore. Aven Colony tells that story.”
Built with Unreal Engine 4, the Aven Colony project has been in part driven by Paul’s idiosyncrasies as a gamer. “I have a terrible habit of starting games of Sid Meier’s Civilization over and over again (usually Civ 5), and building a big nation on a lush green continent. There’s something about the rush of emotion when exploring an amazing new continent, and feeling like you’re building a society on it.
“On an emotional level, that’s what Aven Colony is trying to give to players – we want to take players from a tiny, vulnerable colony all the way up to a massive, sprawling city, and the feeling of ‘This is wonderful – and one of those little people down there? That could be me, and I’d love to live there.’”
An industry veteran of a good two decades, Paul has spent years studying AI development, engineering, and game design to make his vision a reality. “I’ve always enjoyed city-builders like Tropico, but I could never really identify with the idea of playing a Latin American dictator. I wanted to build a sci-fi game with a more optimistic take on the future of humanity – a game that focuses on the moment humanity steps outside of the Solar System.”
Rather than pull a bunch of play mechanics out of a hat, Paul and his team conducted extensive research into how the settlement of other worlds would actually work. “Our science advisor was Prof Abel Méndez, director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at UPR Arecibo, whose day job involves looking for habitable worlds and analysing the ones we’ve found so far. We also were able to arrange some Skype calls with a very high-profile science fiction writer with a lot of experience in the science of planetary habitation.
“There are a million parameters for a planet’s size, gravity, atmospheric density and composition, soil composition, the length of the day and night cycle or whether it’s tidally locked toward its star.
We asked lots of questions about how plants would grow on alien soil, whether the chemistry would be compatible with plants from earth, the effects of different atmospheric compositions and day/night cycles, what sorts of methods for power generation would make the most sense, what sorts of raw materials would be used for construction.”
These seemingly innocuous topics sparked some heated debates. “We were, frankly, dealing with some very antagonistic colleagues at the time who felt that our game wasn’t scientifically correct, so we felt vindicated that most of the answers we got reassured us that what we were planning for Aven Colony was totally feasible. In particular, the giant crystals and the giant rock formations in Vanaar (which are actually fossilised coral reef structures), which were once at the bottom of an alien ocean that has since receded, are in fact very feasible on certain types of alien worlds.”
At this stage Aven Colony has five playable campaign missions, two brief tutorial missions, and five sandbox maps, and they can all be sampled right now thanks to the magic of early access. “We’ll be adding more buildings to the game during the beta and rounding out the campaign and the sandbox maps, and of course doing a lot of polishing and tuning.
“But mostly, we want to know what players want us to focus on the most. The late-game needs the most work right now; we need more options and more gameplay once you have a big and successful colony with hundreds of colonists. We want to know what players most want to see us add with the time and resources we have remaining.”
Next we asked what science fiction movies, books, games, and comics Paul had personally enjoyed over the years, and whether there were any neglected ideas or concepts from the genre he hoped to incorporate in the game. His answer took an unexpected turn.
“Humans are terribly categorical thinkers. We tend to think in terms of how new things compare to existing things. And that can make it terribly difficult to define a science fiction story or setting in a way that allows people to view it on its own terms and not constantly compare it to Star Wars or Star
I think we do more good as creators by painting a picture of a day when we’ve moved beyond all our modern social ills
Trek or Battlestar Galactica or whatever else. We want something new, but when something genuinely new comes along, we insist on defining it in terms of things we already know.
“And the challenge for a creator is to break free of those comparisons. Right now, people compare us a lot to Tropico and Planetbase and Anno and Cities: Skylines to try to understand what this game is all about, and there’s some validity to each of those comparisons. But if we do our jobs right, there should be a day when people compare other games to Aven Colony, too.
“It would have been very easy for us to throw a lot of goofy aliens at you or give you a cliché’d back story with the Earth destroyed by a meteor or something like that. I’ve seen enough of those kinds of sci-fi clichés to last a lifetime. I’m sure your readers have, too.
“Honestly, a lot of sci-fi games and movies nowadays feel like thinly-disguised guilt-ridden social commentary. And with most of that social commentary, there’s a tendency to see humanity as some kind of horrible virus, and society as intrinsically evil, and pile on the guilt for our environmental misconduct or for driving the alien smurfs out of their peaceful smurf village by moustachetwirling capitalists with giant sci-fi bulldozers.
“And frankly, I think that’s terrible and cynical and nihilistic. I’d rather die than make a game like that. I think we do more good as creators by pointing toward the distant star, by painting a picture of a day when we’ll have moved beyond racism and all our other modern social ills and reached a new world, than obsessing on the problems of today.
“The reality is, there are habitable worlds out there, and probably some only a few light years away. We’re exploring the idea that humanity will reach those worlds someday, and that human civilisation getting to those worlds a few centuries from now, and spreading over the surface of those worlds, will not just be a good thing, but a wonderful thing. “That, I think, is a terribly neglected idea.” Paul wouldn’t hazard a guess as to how close we’ll get to an Aven Colony future in our lifetimes, but he did point out that by far the most limiting factor is a lack of political will. “It’s impossible to predict; technology is advancing in leaps and bounds. We have a lot of incredible technologies like the EmDrive and carbon nanotube synthesis and a million other amazing things going on in materials science.
“But at the same time, we seem to have lost our collective interest in space and our political will and courage to do anything that could break us out of our Earthbound perspective.
“From where I’m standing, there’s no question that people like Elon Musk and Steven Hawking are right when they say we need to start thinking bigger, fast. We need to put people on Mars, the moon, and some of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter as soon as we can, and then we need to go beyond the Solar System.”
Paul believes that we need to broaden our perspective, and recognise that at this point we’re really just standing on the doorstep of the universe. “We’re going to have to make some radical changes in our culture to transform into a civilisation that can do what it takes to open that door and walk through it. We’re never going to get to the future until we can do that.”