I’ve been thinking about signaling in the context of this game, since play generally occurs in the vacuum of space where speech isn’t really possible. Instead, I’ve been imagining that folks read lips but also use a series of hand gestures to emphasize certain points and prevent misunderstandings about critical issues such as travel. During play of the game, the use of certain hand gestures will probably mark when characters are speaking in character, to simulate this in a minor way. There could also be some emergant gestural play in the mode of Primitive.

However, I’ve also been pondering the things characters take with them: clothing, jewelry, items, weapons, and the like. Craftsmanship is going to be really important to the nascent stellar civilization and items themselves serve as markers that people can read, signaling who a person is, which people they know, where they’ve been, what they’ve accomplished and the like. As in Final Fantasy, you can probably tell from a character’s equipment where they’ve been, what treasures they have earned, what level and class they are, etc. Interestingly, this might enable us to boil down the character sheet into a series of markers (items, scarves, bracelets, etc.) that serve to summarize a character’s abilities and traits.

I’ve even wondered about having “dress-up doll” style character images, with reusable stickers printed with various items and such that characters can accumulate in the game. So when you discover a certain lost temple of early human stellar civilization, you can peel off the sticker for the Iron Rod of Adam, a giant hunk of smelt iron that you discover there, and stick it in your character’s hand.

That might be a bit extreme for what we ultimately end up going with, but I’m definitely pondering a way for the things you carry to actually mean something.