This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games. This time, Hardspace: Shipbreaker [official site].
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a game about cutting up spaceships with heavy industrial tools for cash. It’s a thrill to drift in zero-G, slicing and chopping and severing hull panels, superstructures, cockpits, airlocks, partly because the way you take them apart is up to you. You know what you have to do as soon as you get into space; you just need to figure out how.
That was also the experience of developer Blackbird Interactive as it began to develop Shipbreaker and brought it to Early Access. The theme quickly crystallised, but figuring out how freeform cutting would actually work was a lot harder, setting stern technical challenges that were never really solved, posing questions about player freedom that resulted in surprising answers, and causing spaceship designers’ nightmares.