Impossibility Engineering

I’m a pretty huge Star Trek nerd. If you know me, you know this. If you don’t know me, you might’ve been able to gather it anyway.

The moral of that story is that I play Star Trek Online, a relatively new game that allows thousands of players to captain their own starships in the same galaxy.

The game is fun and certainly has great things going for it, but it was built very quickly and has a lot of room to grow before it really delivers on the promise of an expansive Star Trek Universe.

I’ve been stealing time away from other projects to design some features that I think Star Trek Online could use to spice up the game play and make the experience more “Trek-like”. Recently, the developer of the game even bought some of these designs from me so they could be implemented in the game.

You can read about it in this STO Forum thread, but the gist of it is that I wanted the developers to consider more entertaining interactions with the environment beyond simply clicking on things or shooting things. Ultimately, I thought it’d be cool if the could add short “minigames” that would simulate some technical operation that we often see characters do in Star Trek, like “re-aligning the plasma conduits” or “scan for life forms.”

Here’s one of my designs:

And here’s how it ended up in the game:

Obviously, it’s a real kick to see this stuff wind up in the game and I intend to keep coming up with new ideas. Even if it’s not likely that more will be used, it’s a good exercise to match an interface as closely as possible while designing something that you would expect people to use, not just look at.

That, and it’s freaking Star Trek.