Darkstar One was my first major gig in the gamesindustry. I was hired as a game designer to develop story missions for the game. As I arrived on the team the major challenge was that there was no scripting API or concept of any kind just yet. So we discussed with our AI programmer what could be done without compromising the world defining economy simulation. Once we had a set of possibilities with simple things like spawning certain ships I wrote mission drafts and dialogs which then would have been implemented by a small scripting team.

Further on I wrote tons of missions and quest for the game, most of the story mission actually and lot’s of my “placeholder” dialogs actually made it into the game. Besides my main task I spend many of my lunch breaks with our VFX/Engine Coder and developed new ideas for effects and additions to the gameworld like destructible asteroid fields, dynamic space system fog effects etc. All so I came up with an solution to handle about 95% of the ingame cutscene camera animations in an easy timesaving way and made a small prototype as proof of concept for this idea. Over all I spend a good year working with the team before I moved on to Sacred 2.