UNIVERSE BUILDING & IP DEVELOPMENT

The Solar Echoes IP: Overview

Solar Echoes is an original science-fiction universe I created and have developed across multiple media, including a tabletop role-playing game, prose fiction, video games, animation, and 3D-printed miniatures. My focus has been on building a cohesive IP with consistent lore, tone, and visual identity while adapting its storytelling to fit each medium’s strengths.

Solar Echoes: Cross-Media IP Development

As creator and director of Solar Echoes, I’ve guided its narrative, visual, and interactive identity across tabletop games, fiction, and video games. My work spans writing, art direction, voice direction, and game design, ensuring each adaptation remains true to the IP’s tone and themes.

Across all Solar Echoes projects, I’ve collaborated with a diverse range of artists to conceptualize and maintain a cohesive visual style and thematic identity. I often provide reference materials from previous iterations of the IP to ensure consistency, while still allowing each artist’s creativity to shine. I’ve maintained a unified narrative tone in the writing across every product, carefully balancing the overarching lore with a “soft sci-fi” approach that is grounded in plausible science despite the allowance for aliens, faster-than-light travel, and starship dogfights. Throughout, I’ve threaded a light, often sardonic humor into the storytelling, reflecting the series’ slightly irreverent take on real-world themes. Each product functions as a new “season” in the ongoing story of the Solar Echoes universe, with narrative threads unfolding in an evolving saga. Whether players are at the tabletop, reading a novel, or exploring a video game, the universe feels unified, immersive, and unmistakably Solar Echoes.

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Unity ARPG: Solar Echoes Lore-inspired Starship Design

Each alien species in Solar Echoes has its own philosophy, biology, and culture. These traits are reflected not only in narrative and art direction, but in the mechanics of their starships. Working with a concept artist, starships were designed that embody each species’ identity, tactics, cultural aesthetics, and technology, translating established lore from the TTRPG directly into gameplay.

For example:

  • Chiraktis (Insectoid Warriors): Their ships resemble predatory insects, favoring swarm tactics and coordinated “hive” behavior. Their missiles detonate in wide explosive clouds even on near-misses, overwhelming targets with area damage. When destroyed, Chiraktis ships release magnetic tracking beacons that cling to enemy hulls (just as real-world insects mark prey with pheromones) alerting the rest of the hive to swarm and attack.

  • Archaeloids (Powerful Mollusks): Massive and heavily armored, Archaeloid ships trade maneuverability for brute force. Their harpoon launchers reel targets in for devastating close-range drill and claw attacks, reflecting their species’ methodical, crushing combat style and patient determination.

  • Krissethi (Reptilian Hunters): Masters of stealth and precision, the Krissethi design their ships with ornate, culturally inspired aesthetics similar to Japanese and Aztec motifs--sleek, symmetrical hulls adorned with sculpted fins, fanged prows, and reptilian spines. Their starships strike from concealment, vanishing into optical camouflage until the moment of attack. Their visual design and tactical behavior translate the Krissethi’s combat style from the tabletop RPG into a dynamic, real-time gameplay experience.

These and other designs draw directly from the original Solar Echoes tabletop lore and ship profiles, now re-imagined in real-time 2D combat. Every faction’s tactics, weapons, and aesthetics are informed by the species’ biological and cultural background, transforming narrative design into distinct gameplay experiences.