Returning to The Edge: Part I

Coming Full Circle With My First Born IP

If you’ve been watching my socials on Facebook, Insta, and Twitter in the past year, you’ve likely seen a few of my posts popping up from time to time featuring the interiors and exteriors of a starship called Ulysses. That starship model is inspired by the cover of Planet’s Edge, a computer RPG and space strategy title that was my first real foray as a game designer at New World Computing.

For its day, Edge was successful, selling something on the order of 250,000 copies - which might not sound like a lot by today’s standards, but back in 1992, that was respectable. It also garnered awards and favorable reviews in the gaming press and in gaming forums on Genie, Compuserve, and other BBSes of the day. Like Betrayal at Krondor after it, it was a hugely ambitious game. It fused a tactical space combat game with a ground-based RPG and featured the ability to build and customize starships using resources that the player traded for or mined on alien planets. Long before No Man’s Sky and Starfield, we were providing quite the sci-fi buffet.

Aside from it being my first game, it’s significant for me personally because 99% of its narrative content originated with and was executed by me, with the remaining two percent thanks to ideas pitched by Might & Magic III: Isles of Terra writer Ron Bolinger (uncredited), Greg Hemsath (who created most of the game manual content under Pentegath Productions), and New World Computing’s President Jon Van Caneghem (who proposed the starting premise that the Earth vanishes into a singularity). More than on any other game I’ve worked on, I feel an intense sense of ownership over Planet’s Edge.

For a very long time I’ve mulled over the idea of making a remake, or a sequel, or an adaptation into another form of media. In the late ‘90s, I took my first stab at creating the Ulysses — the name of the player’s ship from Planet’s Edge — using Infini-D, a program that gave me my first hands on experience with digital 3D modeling. What I banged out was fairly basic, but it was my interpretation of how the ship might look while preserving the basic characteristics presented on the cover.

At the time that I created that first model of the ship, I didn’t really have any resources that would allow me to do anything with the model or my concepts. The availability of free-to-use game development tools like Unity and Unreal were still many years off, and so for several years my Planet’s Edge sequel — dubbed Galaxy’s Edge — languished in a metaphorical drawer. It wouldn’t really be until I had a health scare in 2020, and then the death of my mother two years ago, that I really, seriously began to think about a return to the Edgeverse.

For the first step, I hoped to suck the original Infini-D file into Blender — a modern, and much more powerful 3D modeling program — but found to my great disappointment that it was impossible. Blender has no tools to read or import the proprietary file format of Infini-D, meaning that if I wanted a digital model, I was going to have to start over from scratch.

Over several weeks, I began the process of slowly re-creating the hull of the Ulysses in Blender, and even banged out a few beauty shots for fun.

GLORIOUS GREEN - Everything is sexier in 80s wireframe green.

WELCOME TO BEIGE-OR - They didn’t head out into the stars looking for a fight, but packing a pair of fusion lances sure can help with diplomacy sometimes.

WINDOWS 2024 - The Ulysses has big transparent windows made possible by the transparent titanium invented by Canadian U.N.F.A. Technologist M. Doohan.

Since the flight deck of the Ulysses has big windows that allow you to see inside, I built out the bridge, once again inspired by details depicted in the original Planet’s Edge.

ORDERS, CAPTAIN? - In Planet’s Edge, all of the shipboard functions of the Ulysses were handled by clicking on the crew members of the bridge and issuing orders.

SHINY - As much as possible, I tried to recreate the general feel of the original bridge design. In particular, note the characteristic shapes of the chairs, and the even the shape of the alien monitors integrated the primary navigation console. An updated (and astronomically corrected) version of the star map which was included in the original game box appears on the console monitor on the right.

WITH THE HELP OF THEIR ROBOT FRIEND… - Aboard ship, and on missions, the crew will sometimes be assisted by L.A.M.A., the shipboard robotic assistant.

A CRATE ENDEAVOR - One of the bridge monitors is reserved for ship’s Quartermaster, so I needed a few of the loading dock, showing off a few of the Ulysses characteristic crates.

FLY ME THROUGH THE ROOM - Static shots of the new bridge don’t convey the new size of the new bridge, so I created this flythrough demonstrating its two-story design.

Next time: Reimagining the crew of the Ulysses as 3D characters using Blender, Metahuman and the Unreal game Engine.