For the Stars is an ambitious multiplayer survival experience built in Unreal Engine 5 from Snail Games that blends planetary exploration, player-driven economies, and systemic world design. You can wishlist the game on Steam right now.

Rather than pushing players rapidly from one destination to the next, the game is built around meaningful time investment, encouraging players to settle, experiment, and develop a relationship with each planet they discover.

In this interview, Calix Reneau, Lead Designer at Snail Games USA, breaks down how that philosophy shapes everything from procedural content and environmental storytelling to multiplayer systems, combat pacing, and mod support. Previously, Reneau worked on Moon Raiders at Misfits Gaming and Star Citizen at Cloud Imperium.

For the Stars leans into emergent gameplay and community-driven progression, offering players the tools to collaborate, specialize, and shape the world around them.

Can you give us an overview of For the Stars and its core design philosophy?

Calix Reneau, Lead Designer at Snail Games USA: For the Stars is a big, open, survival, and economy sandbox experience. At the heart of it is exploration. I want you to go to places and be surprised. It’s about being curious and having all these elements of scanning and research, and the ways you visit multiple planets.

We’ve approached it with much more focus on planet-side content because we don’t want it to just be fly over, land, and leave everywhere you go. When you get to a planet, the intention is that you spend several hours there, going from place to place, into different regions, getting to know the cities that are there.

It’s not just stop by, see what color it is, maybe pick a flower, and then go somewhere else.

How do you approach procedural content and making locations feel meaningful?

Calix Reneau: With any content generation, be it procedural or authored, you have the problem that players are going to see what you have to offer. The faster you churn people through destinations, the faster you saturate that content away from any of the meaning that you initially intended.

I want it to be really satisfying to have arrived somewhere. There should be a lot of stuff to do here. I don’t want you to be in a rush to leave immediately.

You get here, and you find out that there’s a cave full of spiders near your research outpost. Those are procedural elements that are connected. It makes it so that the research outpost has an infestation that it wouldn’t have had if that cave weren’t nearby.

That’s important to allow the player to interrogate their environment and understand that those details are meaningful.

How does progression work across planets and systems?

Calix Reneau: There’s a mixture of horizontal and vertical progression at the same time. You’re gradually expanding as you go to more planets.

There are going to be places that you don’t feel particularly keen to go back to, and that’s part of what gives the places you do connect to that real weight.

You might find that materials were more available somewhere you were before, or that manufacturing processes work better in certain environments, like cold, heat, or radiation.

So you might want to take this place where you’re processing things because the area is good for that. Your relationship with these places should be changing over time based on your needs or what you’ve learned.

How do larger systems like the economy and factions influence gameplay?

Calix Reneau: There’s this grander level of system-to-system connections that goes into factions or guilds because it’s in a multiplayer environment.

Those connections are dynamically determined. What it takes to move resources from here to there can be safer or more expensive. An area that you had before could change in value because of the politics in the area. You might even have a vested interest in changing that.

What role does combat play in For the Stars?

Calix Reneau: It’s not our main draw. It’s more of the thing where, well, it’s a third-person space adventure game, so you expect to be able to do it.

The combat is either more PvE focused or, if it’s PvP focused, it’s going to be slower and more long-term because we’re talking about much greater elements of player investment.

You don’t want a situation where something you’ve taken a great deal of effort and time to build up is suddenly wiped out in a matter of seconds.

If you lose your ship, a lot of things have gone wrong. Even things like boarding or destroying a ship have time constraints, so players have a chance to respond, call reinforcements, or even negotiate. It has a place, but it’s not the core thing you’re here for.

How would you describe the overall player experience and community design?

Calix Reneau: I want any given player to find the part of the game that they want to hyper-focus on.

What I really want is a community of players who are contributing to each other. I found my corner, you found your corner, and now we can coexist and complement each other rather than having to be rivals.

There’s a basic philosophy that when things get to a grand enough scale, the only two options are unity or apathy. Most things players invest in are not aligned with apathy. So we want our community and experience to reflect that idea. There are a lot more tools to build up than there are to tear down.

Can you share details about the technical stack and multiplayer setup?

Calix Reneau: We’re on Unreal 5.6. We’re using Nitrado for our servers, and we have a combination of public servers, private servers, community servers, and local hosting.

The degree to which you are multiplayer is up to you. You can play fully solo, or you can host and have people join you.

How are you approaching mod support and player freedom?

Calix Reneau: One of the things we’re really focusing on is supporting modding, which is difficult to balance in a live multiplayer environment.

We treat different servers as their own universes that you can traverse between. That way, you can have a local environment where you can do whatever you want, but when you move into a more competitive space, there are safeguards.

Community servers get to choose how much they accept and how much they trust. It’s about empowering people to maintain their experience. If you give people that authority, they’re going to push toward that experience.

Calix Reneau, Lead Designer at Snail Games USA, on For The Stars

Interview conducted by David Jagneaux

Don't forget to subscribe to our Newsletter, join our 80 Level Talent platform, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, and Instagram, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.

Are you a fan of what we do here at 80 Level? Then make sure to set us as a Preferred Source on Google to see more of our content in your feed.