So a bunch of time had past since we last spoke, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy.
As you know the project is in a bit of a weird state. It’s a rescue. Some years ago we became overwhelmed and stepped away for the sake of our sanity. We’re back but we’re keeping the Steam news down to a minimum until we’re ready to pick up a public release cycle again and have you guys play this thing.
Before that happens we need to revisit the idea, work out the areas we can improve and work in some of the feedback we received over the years. It’s important to note that while things are changing in-game, if you own the game, then you still own it - nothing changes there.
So we have two previous prototypes, we’ve taken to calling them 1.0 and 2.0.
The one that is currently on Steam is 2.0 (actually 1.0 is still there also if you switch builds), we found the source code to that, but it has some mega-flaws. The action can’t really be controlled because each turret required a target to be lined up to fire which meant that the ships had to keep moving. If the ships stayed still like they need to then they couldn’t fire at each other because they were rarely in each other's turret arcs.
Making an RTS is hard enough without having to worry about all that stuff.
The engine would have worked really well for a cockpit-style FPS and if you remember we were going to go there for a while; make it a hybrid thing. I think that’s where we failed with 2.0. We abandoned the hybrid idea (give ourselves twice the work for the same game… hmmm…), but we kept the engine and it wasn’t suitable.
We tried to balance that anyway and turn it into a game with measurable objectives and unsurprisingly it just would not be tamed. Plus it lagged, lots of computational effort was required to calculate all that; it couldn't scale in the way an RTS should.
Then we laughably tried to strap multiplayer to the sides and we ended up with a hot mess.
So now we have to rework what we have, somehow stay true to the original ideas but tweak the execution and simplify the game at the same time (if we ever hope to complete this thing!) All this means changes, and we talk about how in this FAQ post over on the blog. It’s frank, open, and honest but gets a bit whingey at times, maybe even a little bit cringe; we’ll let you be the judge.
Shallow Space 3.0 in many ways is like the lovechild of 1.0 and 2.0, I guess it’s yet another evolution.
Shallow Space 1.0 was all about the strategic play areas, the sort of thing we’re used to seeing in a traditional RTS. This is the part of the idea that is starting to feel refined in 3.0.
We’ve chopped it right back to the bare essentials; this time we’re not wowing you with flashy graphics or working on stuff that’ll impress. This time we’re picking tasks that are essential, giving it the minimum amount of attention and code it needs to be functional and moving onto the next thing.
It's working well; progress is rapid.
Visually it's nothing to look at: you won’t find turrets rotating or projectiles flying; that stuff is the icing on the cake, it comes last. What comes first is working out the game-loops, how conceptually we want the thing to play and then building something that fits the vision (without going off at the deep-end!)
We talk about game loops over in this blog article if you’re interested, it’s what will make this latest incarnation actually feel like a game.
In the reworked strategy experience we took out all the stuff that added nothing and started again, reworking it like a professional piece of software. Previously the game told us how it wanted to be played; it was a romantic idea but unworkable - this time we will define exactly how we want this thing to play.
We feel like we have a good baseline there, things are working as we foresee them, so we wrote up a detailed piece on the blog called the ‘anatomy of a sector’, you can read that here.
So in 1.0 we had these strategy play areas. But we wanted to go bigger. Rather than have the average map-by-map experience of the average RTS, what if we made it so the Player could visit the different maps in realtime - we asked ourselves ‘what if they had background traffic and felt more like a 4X setting?’
In Shallow Space 2.0 we introduced a 'tactical' layer map with concurrent 'strategy' play in multiple areas and we are keeping that in 3.0, but this time we’re flattening the map to make it more controllable, so gone are the confusing 3D ‘space-lanes’ and we’re looking at having a more conventional tabletop style ‘war map’ so it’s easier for us to realise the idea of play areas that evolve as you mission around.
We talk about this a little more in this biog post, it’s a working idea and it’s still early days and needs some more love; it’ll likely look completely different once finished.
So yes, we might be lurking in the shadows here but that’s only because we have a ton to do before we make the Steam page inhabitable again. We need to rebrand, rework all the text and images, get a working version of the game up for you guys to play; until that happens, expect summary updates like this every couple of months or so.
We went through the Greenlight process like an express-train and released far too early, it turns out that we weren’t nearly done working the idea up. In many ways this break was exactly what we needed to step back and admit ‘OK, this wasn’t going to work.’
The team is very much back together now: regular calls, excitement, discussion of ideas, etc. But this time, with us having gone away and gathered some experience, it’s being run as an actual software project.
Thanks for giving us your attention. We’re super confident that we can evolve this thing into something incredible and it’s great to have you here with us on the journey!
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