Hi everyone! I'm Dimitris, the game director for Signal Lost. We've been working on this game in one way or another for almost two years now.
While we announced our game in August of 2024, there was still a long way to go before our game would ship. We thought that this would be rather straightforward, but after meeting with publishers and other developers, we eventually decided to re-design several aspects of the game's story and gameplay to what is now, Signal Lost.
If you're interested in learning more about the game's development, check below, otherwise watch our new trailer either in the updated store page or in the link below, and make sure to play the demo!
For a couple of months, the prototype for Signal Lost was exclusively 2D and designed around resource management. The game was inspired by a news article I read about the original Voyager spaceship sending garbage transmissions to the science teams on Earth, and how the team had to fix it despite the distance that separated it from Earth.
The game also had a different name at this point, "World Explorer". The concept was quite more complex than the narrative we have right now, where the player was accomplishing something like machine learning as an end goal for an AI to replace them. Basically completing tasks, shutting down systems to save resources etc so that the AI would learn this procedure effectively for the manufacturers to send it to interstellar voyages, instead of sending humans with cryosleep.
Then the end goal was to reach Mars, where the player would have to explore caves with a rover and eventually meeting alien structures and lifeforms. Realising this was beyond our scope, we revamped the narrative and cut the second part of the game. By this point, we had already switched to a 3D view of the spaceship and removed a lot of the resource management parts of the game. The only thing we basically kept was the task mechanic.
There was also this idea that the player was a brain in a jar, but we scrapped this as well for a conventional design for gameplay and narrative purposes.
And around here is where the story ends of previous iterations of our game. Since then we've been iterating and polishing existing content. We thought the development would have been over a while ago now, but we're excited to see how players are receiving our game, especially today with the release of the demo!
We're not too far off from the release of the full game, for real this time, and we will keep you updated when we have more. The demo is a significant milestone for us that proves we are close to the finish line.