Hey everyone, this month I wanted to talk about something that I've been wanting to go into detail about for a while now; the history and creation of Relentless Expanse!
Now, unlike many indie devs, Relentless Expanse isn't actually something I dreamed about making. I was very new (still kinda am) to game development, and I got the core gameplay idea from another free game on steam called Ruthless Conquest. You can probably tell that Relentless Expanse's name was inspired by it too! Me and my friends played it on and off randomly for several years, and I enjoyed the gameplay, but I always wished it just had more depth to it. The developer didn't update the game since he mainly made it for fun (very valid), but that made me a little sad since I genuinely enjoyed it but I knew that some of the more frustrating or missing features would never be updated. As lots of gamers do, I imagined creating my own version of the game, or updating/modding it myself, but at the time I didn't have the knowledge, or motivation, to really act on that.
Eventually though, in 2024, I actually started getting pretty heavily into game development, including teaching myself how to code, how to use Godot, and playing around with several random small starter projects that I made from scratch. All of them were... quite horrible, but it eventually gave me enough confidence that I could actually make a game worthy of being released on Steam if I put enough effort into it. My friends had been joking around for a while that I should just create an updated version of Ruthless Conquest myself, and I honestly didn't have any other ideas that had a relatively small scope... so I just did lol.
I started planning on roughly what the gameplay and UI would look like, I made a Game Design Document, and on August 26th (almost 2 years ago!) I created and made the first commit to GitHub for Relentless Expanse! The core gameplay itself was actually finished insanely quickly. In less than a month, almost every main mechanic was already working, although not quite polished. Here's a fun GIF of what it looked like without any assets, before I even brought on an artist:
Seeing the progress coming along so quickly really motivated me, which was necessary, because I quickly ran into the worst mistake I ever made in game dev: multiplayer. Some developers love it, and all the power to them! Super happy for you guys! I hate it. With a burning passion. I didn't know that at the time, but I very quickly found out my opinion on it. I had never done anything with multiplayer before, and although apparently Godot has one of the easiest versions of it to implement compared to other engines, it was still a beast to get into. If it weren't for me convincing myself that no one would play the game if it were only singleplayer (terrible assumption!) then I would've dropped multiplayer support very early on. And honestly, maybe it'll sound crazy to some players, but I still think that adding multiplayer was the worst mistake I made while working on Relentless Expanse. Maybe one day I'll get into the technical details for it, but basically 80% of our issues with development, both before AND after release, have been related to multiplayer in one way or another. I mean, multiplayer itself has only FINALLY been made stable a couple of months ago, roughly 1.5 years after the initial release. If I were to go back in time and start again, then excluding multiplayer is absolutely the choice I would go with.
Anyways, let me stop ranting about multiplayer before I make this entire post about it, this is supposed to be fun! WE'RE HAVING FUN!!! Seriously though, creating Relentless Expanse WAS actually a lot of fun! In late September of 2024, I felt that I had made enough progress on the game to start bringing on other people, and I invited both Timber and Andrew (art and sound geniuses) to the project! Since the core gameplay was in place, we began brainstorming all kinds of random mechanics. Diplomacy, trade, obstacles in space, etc. We even explored the idea of adding "commanders" in some way, resulting in stuff like the hilarious image below, courtesy of Andrew:
We narrowed things down to what was actually achievable for a Steam release within a short amount of time, and then tried our best not to cause any scope creep as we continued our work on the game! Once all of our bricks were laid out, we were able to get everything in place pretty quickly. Timber quickly narrowed down our art focus (some of the earliest concept art of which is shown below), which was actually originally going to be Vector art! I actually remember that in the Game Design Document I explicitly said "anything but pixel art" for the art style, lmao.
After a couple of months of that, plus a not-so-brief struggle with figuring out the ins-and-outs of publishing to Steam (their approval process is strict!), we were able to launch the game in early access! Overall, considering the fact that no one who contributed to its initial release had any published games, I would say Relentless Expanse was surprisingly successful! Very positive reviews, several thousand players, and still enough of a community to this day to justify creating a post like this! I'm very happy and grateful to see so many people enjoying the game that my team and I put so much time and effort into. Just... don't expect our next game to be multiplayer.