TOM FRANCIS
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Void Bastards Vs Heat Signature: A Completely Objective Analysis

Note: this was written around the time Void Bastards was released, but languished in my Drafts for years because I’d planned to make it longer. What’s there all still makes sense to me though, so I’m just gonna make it about the 3 things I did cover and throw it out there:

Void Bastards is a roguelike first-person shooter about boarding randomly generated spaceships. I designed a top-down roguelike about boarding randomly generated spaceships, so it’s interesting to see how the two games tackled the same issues differently, and how well their solutions worked out! I picked three:

Progression

Starting with this because I think VB absolutely aced it and HS did not. In a roguelike context, I’m using ‘progression’ to mean anything persistent you unlock or earn – how the outcome of one life can potentially affect those that come after.

In Heat Sig, doing missions gradually lets you ‘liberate’ space stations, and liberating stations permanently unlocks new items in the shops. I’m very happy with the items themselves, and how they support new playstyles, but you can find any and all of them from the start, as random loot. So the shop-unlock reward was never as strong an incentive as I’d like.

I considered the alternative, of course: holding these items back entirely until they’re unlocked. But the cost was too high:

• Having a limited pool of loot for hours.
• Having no Choice Glimpses to know if an item is worth working towards.
• And potentially missing the game’s best gadgets if we fail to describe/present them to you in a way that fully conveys their value – which we would.

Progression in Void Bastards is one big screen of unlocks and upgrades, which you earn by acquiring particular crafting ingredients then choosing which to spend them on. Unlike Heat Sig, weapons you haven’t unlocked yet are completely unavailable to you, but it avoids most of the problems I feared in a few ways:

• You never actually find weapons or gadgets on the ships you board, only crafting materials. This gets around the ‘limited loot pool’ problem in the early game, because materials are inherently valuable and what they might ultimately get you is unknown and unlimited. That makes it feel good to find them even before you have enough to unlock anything at all. They’re also persistent between lives, so you’re always ‘spending’ temporary resources – ammo and your life – to gain permanent ones – another good feeling.
• While you’re mostly finding ‘materials’, in their hundreds, each ship also has a single special ‘part’. Every upgrade is built from just 2 or 3 specific parts, and materials are only useful in that you can spend hundreds of them to craft a part you need to unlock something. Finding the part itself is much, much faster. But because they’re only used in specific unlocks, the random selection of parts you come across gives you a big headstart for a random selection of upgrades. This partly solves the “Didn’t unlock it because it didn’t sound good” problem – you might not think the Nebulator sounds cool, but if you come across one of its components and can afford to craft the other one, now that unlock is temptingly close while the Armour upgrade you’re really interested in is a long way off. And if you find both parts, unlocking the Nebulator doesn’t even cost you anything you could spend on the Armour upgrade anyway.
• Many of the upgrades are just massive boosts to your effectiveness, which gives them a powerful desirability that isn’t susceptible to the “doesn’t sound good” problem. Most weapon upgrades double or triple its damage output. An armour upgrade can nearly double your health. That’s an easy sell. We didn’t do this in Heat Sig because a) we don’t have damage or health, as concepts, b) in a game where gadgets and weapons are the drops, there’s danger in letting the player persistently get more powerful – finding that stuff becomes less special, c) I would have been scared to mess with the difficulty system, which was hard to get right, and d) I didn’t think of it.

Main Quest

I don’t think this was a big focus for either game. In Heat Sig, you’re ultimately trying to liberate 10 stations from each faction and then their strongholds. There is no special ‘content’ to this campaign until you finish it, then there’s a short scripted scene.

Void Bastards goes a bit further: you’re tasked with crafting an item, and when you do, there’s a short comic-book cut-scene explaining why this didn’t solve your predicament and why you need the next item. That cycle repeats 4 or 5 times, then the game ends.

Void Bastards’ presentation is slicker and these scenes give them a place for some jokes, but I actually prefer Heat Sig’s system because of one key difference: in Void Bastards, progress towards completing the game must be made instead of progress towards unlocks. You gather materials and parts for these plot items instead of gathering them for unlocks you want. In Heat Sig, you do both at once – the stations you’re liberating to work towards your overall goal are also unlocking new gadgets as you do so.

This meant VB’s extremely compelling unlock system actually worked against its main quest, for me. I was so excited to get new weapons and make my favourite ones more powerful, that the prospect of diverting my efforts towards mere completion was really unappealing. For all the same reasons it felt especially good to earn unlocks, it felt especially bad to spend those same resources and earn nothing.

Ship Systems

This is an area where Void Bastards reminds me more of my early plans for Heat Sig than Heat Sig does. Every part of the ship was going to be a different subsystem of the ship’s functionality, and you’d be tinkering with them all to manipulate it. We moved away from that stuff because:

• We had to de-emphasise the space game, partly just to focus, and partly because some players struggled enough with the controls that adding any extra challenge there would leave them unable to play the game.
• To give the player intentionality about what systems to visit/mess with, we’d need to give them free run of the ship in a non-linear way, and that tightly constrains how we can design levels to make the critical path substantial/interesting without the ship size getting unwieldy framerate-wise.
• I worried that whatever universal rules we came up with for what these systems did, it would devolve into the player doing the same thing every time.

So in Heat Sig only one ship system is consistently present and relevant enough that you’ll usually visit it: the cockpit. Many others are present and messable-with but rarely end up relevant.

In Void Bastards, every area of the ship has a purpose and most are gameplay relevant. Early on, my pattern was to always visit the Helm for a map, then use this to scour the ship of loot, stopping by Atmo when I was low on air. Later, some ships don’t have a Helm: on these I’d come up with some logical order to search the rooms, to make it easier to keep track of where I’d been and not. Some ships are powered down, in which case you have to visit Gen first to power them up, before applying the normal strat.

This is a significantly better level of player engagement with ship systems than Heat Sig has. But it’s still a little rote: everything comes down to “If X, then Y”. I think an interesting direction to expand in would be: what ship systems would we need to get the player to feel like they’re making a judgement call each time?

Maybe a system that can clear the tricky but not impossible environmental hazards, like fire and electrical leaks? One that adds a new type of enemy, plus some loot? What if the question we ask you is not just “What order do you visit these rooms in?” but “Which 3 of these systems do you most want to use on this ship?” If  each system you mess with took the ship closer to lockdown, there could be a limit that would push you to make bigger decisions than order of operations.

Here’s Void Bastards on Steam, and here’s Heat Signature.