Star Trek: Klingon Academy - Development

Development

Klingon Academy was intended to be a sequel to Interplay's Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Starfleet Academy was released in 1996 after a lengthy and difficult development process. Both games featured 3D space battles where the player controlled their ship by use of a keyboard and mouse or keyboard and joystick, and were set in the Star Trek universe. Starfleet Academy was set during the period of the Star Trek TOS feature films and was a moderate success, although it was criticized for an overly complex interface and poor vessel movement dynamics. Interplay started laying plans for a sequel around 1997, and a development team was assembled under 14 Degrees East, Interplay development house responsible at the time for games under the Star Trek license. To save costs, the sequel was to use the same game engine with which Starfleet Academy was created. The setting of the game was moved to the time just before the events depicted in the motion picture Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which was released by Paramount Studios in 1991. Therefore, Klingon Academy is a prequel to Star Trek VI. Like Starfleet Academy, Klingon Academy features space battles interspersed with full-motion video, with real actors and sets and frequent branching dialogue response options.

As soon as Klingon Academy was officially announced, developers ran into problems with the old source code from Starfleet Academy. Parts of the code were lost, garbled or incoherent, and delays began to mount. One of the biggest limitations of using the old code was a built-in constraint that restricted the game's on-screen resolution to 640 x 480 pixels, even though some similar games were capable at the time of being run at higher resolutions. This problem was not solved until just before release in June 2000.

The goals of the developers were quite ambitious: 1) They wanted to add detailed damage modeling to the ships, dubbed "ginsuing" after the infamous late-night Ginsu knives commercials on American television; 2) they had to create and flesh out a large number of new ships with high polygon counts and superior graphics; 3) implement control and ship movement changes to make the game a more authentic Star Trek space combat experience.

Originally slated to be released in the spring of 1999, development delays (not uncommon with many games) pushed the ultimate release date back until the summer of 2000. At several points during the game's halting progress it was nearly cancelled by Interplay, like a previous game entitled Star Trek: Secret of Vulcan Fury, which had been cancelled some years prior. The game entered beta testing by the spring of 2000 and was hastily rushed to completion by Interplay on June 21, 2000.