About Inner Space
Operation: Inner Space is a unique game.  Here's how and why we created it.

The Making of Inner Space 
Fourteen years ago in 1992, Inner Space was conceived at Software Dynamics as a natural progression from our previous products. The world of software was different in 1992, so remember this was written from that perspective. Inner Space is now the oldest computer game still sold and played in its original version on all Windows platforms from Windows 3.1 to Windows XP. Yes, we still sell Inner Space because people keep buying it.

In 1992, after creating the Windows screen saver genre with our Magic and After Dark products and producing more than 60-70 unique screen savers, we wanted to break new ground again. Although screen savers were useful utilities, users often told us how much they loved toying around with them.

The next step was to go all the way and actually make a game. At the time, we saw a lot of games, but not much real fun. There were racing games, boring strategy games and lots of games where you just kill everything you see. We thought games should be fun delivery systems. The problem is that most games didn't deliver much fun, just impressive graphics and at that time, there was almost nothing to play for Windows.

The Problem with Games
From Space Invaders to Doom & Quake, the premise of action games has always been to kill everything you see. The only thing that has improved over the decades is the graphics and sound. Cool audio-visuals are great and many action games are visually impressive, but they are also mindless and dumb. Only very recently have more games evolved into a social context and included more open-ended scenarios for player imagination.

Computer opponents in games are the intellectual equivalents of mosquitoes, except rendered in 3D to look like space ships, people or monsters. Claims of artificial intelligence are exaggerated so that the term AI has lost its true meaning. All computer opponents ever do is try to kill you or some other simplified task, they have no reasons for their actions and they aren't subtle about it. 

Real Opponents
This is the usual argument for playing against human opponents. Playing with other people is good, but then the only games available to play are ones where you kill everyone. So, if you're playing head to head with other people, you just go in, search around for the other player and then blast each other until one or both of you die. It's boring and unrealistic because it's not playing with an opponent, it's just killing them. It reduces the human mind to a simple killing machine which is a horrible waste. Play is more fun. 

While playing with other people is good, the vast majority of game play is solo against the computer. Therefore, our idea was to program real players into the computer. We're not the first people to think of this, but we were the first to apply some serious AI to computer gaming. Real AI has a proper model for a computer player. A computer opponent has to feel hunger, anger, fear, tiredness, loyalty and be flexible in it's outlook on the world. It has to have a reason that makes sense for every thing it does and it has to have goals to achieve in the game world beyond killing the human player. This level of depth had not been done in action gaming before.

The model for Inner Space was a virtual world inside your computer where you fly around, collect icons to get stronger, fight enemies and hazards, do favors to build friendships and computer players do all the same things. Computer players would have drives to refuel (hunger), take refuge from danger (fear) and repay favors (loyalty). Human and computer players all start out with allies and enemies, but depending on what happened in the game, attitudes and loyalties evolve. For example, if an enemy ship is in distress and you help it, he will like you a little and his allies will, too. If you kept helping him, you could make him your friend. Consequently, friendly computer players that you attack would become unfriendly and all their allies would start disliking you too. With such a model, computer players in Inner Space really are just like playing with real people.

Uniquely Personalized for Each User
Inner Space is also the only game to create custom game worlds for each individual user. We thought this was an important concept because people are not clones and they like things that are customized just for them.  Therefore, Inner Space dynamically generates a unique game world with all the programs installed becoming prizes to be captured and destroyed.  What could be more cathartic for computer users than safely blasting or torching Word, Excel and other apps in a game?

Just to push Inner Space over the edge, we designed it as an open-ended game system so that users could create their own ships with custom graphics, sounds and behavior for use in the game.  In this way, Inner Space was a game, but also a tool for creating ships to add to the game. 

High Performance
In 1992, Solitaire was the most popular Windows game. Only DOS games were actually fast. Another of our goals was to get unprecedented performance in a Windows game. We wanted to optimize Inner Space so much that it would play at 36 frames/second full screen on most 386 PCs, which was supposed to be impossible. By making the game that fast, anybody with a Windows PC could run the game and users could even run other programs like email and fax in the background while playing without a noticeable slowdown. Nobody had written a decent native-app Windows action game before Inner Space and we were aiming for performance that most DOS games would envy.   

Funny is Good
We definitely wanted the game to be eclectic and funny. We originally made severe military-looking space ships and a straight command structure of missions, but once we made the Ship Factory and it was easier to make ships, we couldn't resist going wild.  So we made Ducks and Dolphins and Tigers and Teddy Bears wearing jet packs alongside Mig 29s, F16s, and Flying Saucers.  Even the weapons, fuel cans that turn into tea cups at tea time, messages sent from ships and other features had funny elements.  My favorite whimsical weapon is the Wildcard defense. If deployed, it turns all threatening nearby objects into random fruit. 

A Self-Consistent Game World
Part of the idea of making the computer players real was making the game world real. The concept of flying around inside a computer is pretty unreal, but what we were driving at was to model every object so realistically that users would think of them as real objects, not just computer generated graphics. For example, there are rocks floating around in the game. If you shoot a rock, it heats up.  If it hits something else while it's hot, it causes more damage than if it were cold. If you make anything explode, the shock wave can come out and damage you, too, so it's best to keep your distance.

Strictly speaking, this sort of realism is overkill, but it allows players to do things that wouldn't be possible otherwise.  For example, with the lightning weapon, you can charge up a rock so that it will discharge on the next ship that comes by. When objects are that realistic in a game, the user can make up new things to do that the game designer didn't even foresee.  It's an open-ended world where you can do anything, as opposed to most games where a few things look or act realistically, but everything else is just pretty graphics that you can't do anything with.
  
Fun Graphics and Voiceovers
Finally, we wanted the game to have interesting audio and visual elements.  Since the game is strategic in nature, it's very helpful for players that it has a top-down view with the player's ship in the center of the screen. It lets you see what's going on and who's doing what nearby.  We had almost as much fun with the audio as with all the weird ships and weapons in the game.  The sound effects and music are good, but it's the voiceovers that are really interesting. We spent endless hours recording and refining voiceovers that present useful information in a sultry and oddly evocative way. I think we get more positive feedback about the voiceovers than anything else in the game. They not only sound cool, but they make the game easier to play by rewarding users with positive encouragement any time they successfully accomplish something.

Putting It All Together
We weren't sure it was possible to make a fast, simple, intelligent Windows game in 1992. Many colleagues told us point blank that it couldn't be done when the standard PC was a 15Mhz 80386. We worked hard and ended up with an addictive, funny game with exciting action and unparalleled performance that gives each user a unique experience. Inner Space is incredibly easy to play despite having complex computer AI that makes computer players really interesting opponents and allies. Even after thousands of hours designing, programming, and debugging, we still enjoyed playing the game ourselves.

14 Years Later.. It's Retro and We're Proud of It!
Our fans are people of all ages from hard-core gamers to white collar workers to people who never played a computer game before. We are amazed at the longevity of Inner Space as a going concern. Even though it was built for Windows 3.1 a decade ago, it continues to be ordered by new customers with the hottest newest computers as well as played by some of our original customers a decade after they first bought a copy of the game. Many users go through 4 or 5 new computer upgrades but still love playing our game. We're proud to have made a truly fun game that stands the test of time. Inner Space is now the oldest computer game still sold and played in its original unmodified version on all Windows platforms from Windows 3.1 to Windows XP.

On behalf of the development and testing crew, I'd like to thank each and every user who has paid for a full copy of Inner Space. Knowing that people enjoy our work is very rewarding.

     Bill Stewart