Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes · published
Hey, everyone!
We're the narrative team behind Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes, and today we’d like to take you behind the scenes of the game’s story and design!
My name is Martin Ringot, Lead Narrative Designer on Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes. I worked closely with Anthony Jauneaud to bring the rich lore of Battlestar Galactica into a roguelite space game.
Translating the core spirit of Ronald D. Moore’s reboot of the show into a roguelite was an exciting challenge for us, both from a design and a writing perspective.
From the beginning, our goal was to create a game where FTL meets Reigns, combining epic space combat with tough political and moral decisions. This vision guided how we designed and wrote the story for this game, while staying true to the tone of the show.
To do so, we closely analyzed the show and identified scenes that could work as player-driven situations. One key aspect of Battlestar Galactica is its spiraling structure: solving one problem almost always creates a new one. Characters are constantly forced to make impossible choices, where no option is truly “good.”
This became the core principle of our narrative design: put the players in situations in which they have to choose the lesser of two evils.
Once this foundation was in place, we could start exploring new themes and ideas unique to the game.
The game features many crises, and even more standalone events. One of our first challenges was building a narrative system that could trigger the right event or crisis at the right time.
Our goal was to steadily build tension throughout a run (much like a TV season), raising the stakes as you progress. This led us to create the faction system, after many iterations around possible gauges. We were also fortunate to get early input from Tom Jubert, who worked on FTL: Faster Than Light among other projects, who helped us kickstart this conception phase.
Every piece of content had to meet two key requirements:
Game Design needs (balancing, level design, integration to the rest of the system)
Narrative core principles (choices must matter, consequences must follow, and everything must feel connected)
Everything has to happen for a reason. Every choice is crucial and promises consequences down the line.
Events are at the heart of the choices players make throughout a run. Through the decisions tied to these events, the fleet can evolve in very different ways, for example into a military-driven dictatorship, an underworld civil war, or even a full-blown healthcare catastrophe.
Events don’t just illustrate these outcomes; they actively shape them. Everything has to work together, creating a coherent experience without contradicting each other.
A crisis is a very complex system that sits at the intersection of gameplay and narrative design. We iterated on it extensively to ensure it could support a series of stories unfolding throughout the player’s journey.
Creating a crisis requires constant dialogue with the game design team, making sure the narrative ideas align with the gameplay needs. Along the way, we often had to adapt either the writing or the mechanics so everything would fit together seamlessly.
Once a crisis system was validated, we created and tested its events before finalizing the writing. Anthony and I often reviewed dialogues together to ensure they matched the gameplay effects.
We also collaborated with Tom Jubert on several crises. After he pitched narrative ideas, I selected and integrated them into crisis material. While I designed and integrated them into the game systems, Tom handled the dialogue writing, just as we did with Anthony.
Balancing all of this was one of the longest phases of development as it sometimes required us to rewrite entire crises. But seeing everything come together into a cohesive story was incredibly rewarding, and we learned a lot from it.
A strong story needs strong characters.
One of our challenges with Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes was that most Heroes – your XO, your CAG, etc. – only exist for a single run. To keep them interesting, we gave them variables that affect their personality, background, and character arc. This ensures they don’t always sound the same and allows for unexpected twists, much like in the show.
For recurring characters we leaned into more handcrafted storytelling, with a focus on the shopkeepers and the Cylon bosses.
Shopkeepers reflect how far you’ve progressed in a run. Since it wouldn’t make sense for them to profit from humanity’s suffering, we decided to give each of them different reasons to justify why they are helping the fleet to escape the Cylons: continuing the fight, fixing what can still be fixed, or simply accepting fate.
The Cylon bosses, on the other hand, all have their own motivations for hunting human fleets. Without spoiling anything, their behavior evolves based on factors like how many runs you’ve completed and what happened in the previous ones.
Writing for a roguelite is always a challenge. The game is built on repetition and randomness, yet the story still needs to feel meaningful. On top of that, each run starts with a new crew, making traditional long-term character arcs impossible. Meaning that we had to create both a run-based narrative and a meta narrative that worked together.
The meta narrative is simpler, relying on fewer variables to move forward.
The run-based narrative on the other hand, is more complex, and we decided to use a storylet system.
In theory, the game world is defined by a set of variables. Each variable affects what will happen next and each event affects the variables.
In practice, we had to figure out what were the proper variables to base the game world on… Which wasn’t an easy task! In order to drive the next-to-happen event or crisis, we eventually settled on:
Three factions (each with two variables)
Two general fleet states: Maintenance and Healthcare
Every standalone event presents a choice to make to the players, and depending on their choice, it will affect some of those variables.
These variables affect both which events and crises can be selected, but also on how likely some groups of events are to appear, ensuring consistency. For example, if you anger the Underworld by rejecting their demands, you’re more likely to face Underworld-related consequences later in the run.
During development, we ran several closed beta tests and paid close attention to the players’ feedback in order to improve the narrative and quest design of the game.
Many players felt that some of the writing didn’t fully match the tone of the TV series; creating a new experience based on a 20-year-old show is quite a challenge on every level, and with nearly 70,000 words of content, it’s not always easy to have a fresh look on one’s own work! We made many revisions based on players’ suggestions, and Ian Reiley (who worked on Crying Suns and The Operator) did an incredible job proofreading the entire game to ensure the tone stayed consistent.
Player feedback also helped confirm some design hypotheses we had during development. For example, players expected faction-driven crises to have stronger consequences when a faction’s influence was higher. That was already part of our vision, and seeing players expect it reinforced the feature’s importance.
Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes is a roguelite, so no two runs are the same.
Over time, the game reveals that there’s more to your main mission than it first appears. As you progress, you’ll unlock new dialogues, reactions from bosses and shopkeepers, and meta narrative events that slowly point toward an alternate ending.
All will be rewarded in time. As you piece the story together through cutscenes and dialogues, you’ll begin to understand where the next stranded human fleet is heading.
Thank you to all our beta players who helped us improve the narrative of Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes.
We hope you’ll enjoy the final result!