The idea for this game came out of a call with Vitalii, our 3D artist, about a year ago. We'd just released Super Loco World and wanted a break from strategy games and work on something with realistic graphics Vitalii was itching to make.
I immediately thought back to The Invincible, which I'd played a couple of years earlier. What stuck with me was the retrofuturistic setting, and the moment when you climb into the rover and start flipping all its switches. Incredibly immersive.
We also knew the game had to be small in scope, because our resources are limited. So that's how the core concept came together: a tactile first-person game set in a small but dense space, with a retrofuturistic feel. Then Vitalii showed me the PVKK page, and it was clear this micro-genre had already taken shape, with an audience behind it.
After that came a long process of working out what exactly to build.
The first idea was a bunker: you end up in one, and from there you either survive inside it or try to get out. As a fan of 10 Cloverfield Lane, I loved the premise — but once we got down to what the gameplay would actually be, nothing interesting came out of it. It kept boiling down to one of two things: routine bunker chores, which get old fast without a clear goal and progression, or a heavily scripted narrative game, which felt unrealistic for a small team to pull off.
So we moved to space — the natural place for retrofuturism. In the first version, the player was an operator running a drill at a small colony on Titan, but again, once we started digging into the details, the concept felt thin.
We eventually landed on putting the player aboard a logistics station in Saturn's orbit, responsible for routing cargo shipments out to the colonies. This one felt right, because:
There's room for a story to develop (other people's lives depend on you!)
There's a clear core mechanic: managing cargo
There's an interesting environment: a space station you can explore and interact with
Let me know in the comments what else you'd like to hear about Saturn 94, and I'll try to cover it in future posts. And as always, come join us on Discord.
— Andrii