After spending some time on post-launch content for Swirl W@tch and Red Tether last year I have now finally settled on what Hyperspace Anthology Vol 3 will become. The game will be official announced very soon.
In the process of getting there I produced yet another (probably to be abandoned) prototype that didn’t make the cut. I also revised a lot of older prototypes and small experiments that didn’t go anywhere either. Looking over all this stuff was weird but also fun and I now I really just want to dump all those gifs on you too. So join me on a journey through roughly 3 years of my life that went into making game content that will likely never be released. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It’s hard for me to not see this as wasted time, but then again many things you’ll see here made it into other games in some way or form, so it's not all lost.
Hyperspace Admirals was planned to be a tactical captain sim, basically FTL with fleets that I worked on with a small team for about 18 months. A lot of foundational conceptualization for the Hyperspace Universe was done as a part of this game. I also made a ton of ship designs in those days that I’m continuously reusing and redesigning till this day. Hyperspace Anthology Vol 3 is turning out to be somewhat similar to this game, so we kind of came full circle here.
The whole thing didn’t even make it to a fully playable combat encounter after a year, but in retrospect I’m not sure the whole design would have worked out anyways.
Apparently we got semi-dynamic ship destruction working just before we axed it.
We made a lot of fancy promo art for it. As you can see here, the Contempter armada was basically fully formed already when I started Red Tether much later. The soundtrack that was commissioned for HA was used for HDog instead, hence why it is weirdly chill for an action game.
I also wrote thousands of lines for never to be seen multiple choice events. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We stopped development on this cause the team drifted apart (one member started uni, one had a kid) and my programming skills where not sufficient to continue this on my own.
After releasing HDog I briefly experimented with a 2d tile based lighting system for a hypothetical station exploration roguelite, including multiple vision modes.
Advanced Hyperspace Wars mockup.
Hyperspace Watch was a space rescue roguelite I worked on for about half a year. It was based around randomly generated vessels in peril.
You would then control a group of rescue workers tasked with evacuating any survivors aboard these vessels. This is the point when I really go into putting parallax objects everywhere for when using top down perspectives.
Your emergency personnel was able to maneuver in zero g but when entering ships they’d just walk with mag boots. There where various time based interactions you would need to perform to progress through the ship and you’d have to manage your crews stress levels as well. Atmosphere and depressurizing aboard the ships was already fully modeled. Later in the game you’d have to work around other ship systems too, with reactor meltdowns adding time pressure or breaches needing to be sealed to preserve atmosphere etc.
This I canceled cause no fun core gameplay was forming and I wasn’t sure if anyone would even want to play this. Also the subject matter was kinda dark and got me down after some time and I didn’t really like the artstyle either. Missed my chance to do 2d Shipbreaker 3 years before that game released. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hyperspace Harvest was a otherworldly farming sim I worked on for about 16 months. It even got a [url= https://store.steampowered.com/app/1342560/Hyperspace_Harvest/]Steam page[/url].
The game had you grow bio-engineered crops on the skin of a massive lifeform that had its own weather system and season-like life cycle.
There was a probably overly complicated gear design system where everything (crop seeds, tools, character upgrades, weapons) are made from combining and augmenting whale bio code. I especially liked the aspect of allowing you to design your own crops for farming.
This extended to complex crop interactions where you could mod some crops to buff others on the same hex-tile.
There was a nice mall to get genetic code to engineer new plants and bio-organic weapons for your character.
And minegames. So many minigames.
Of course there was fishing too and many of the creature designs for that mysteriously resurfaced in Swirl Watch and Red Tether (V-Fish). One of the many other things you could spend your ingame day on was venturing into the whales body to basically fight corrupted cells and gradually cure the whales disease. The lighting system I made earlier was used for some areas.
Combat required you to go into melee from time to time to get energy for recharging ammo and shields.
Different levels would take place in specific parts of the whale’s body, featuring enemy types specific to that organ or tissue. Didn’t get further than doing bloodstream and vegi-lungs.
There where some fully developed boss fights though and you could mod your melee to extend cross the entire arena of course.
This was canceled cause it looked like it would even be finished if I’d spent yet another 16 month on. The whole thing started to feel way to ambitious and I seemingly was unable to create much interest for the game. I started to worried that sales would never come close to justify this long of a development cycle so I got out while I still could. This experience led me to releasing Red Tether 1.0 in 7 months and I think that worked out way better. Nowadays I get pretty anxious if development of a new thing exceeds even just a single year. Making more focused, smaller games (I mean in terms of development time, not content) ultimately worked out better for me and Swirl Watch is yet another reminder that I should probably stick with making leaner games. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Untitled Space Forklift Game was cargo management space-life sim I worked on for 3 months in late 2023. One core system was delivering incoming and outgoing cargo in an open hangar bay, with you deciding how to store, sort and manage your ever changing inventory.
There where hundreds of cargo types planned, with individual handling requirements and hazard ratings, which would also define your pay. Eventually you’d get tasked with towing ships in and out of moorings too. I planned to add ship-breaking and block-based zero-g farming as separate work-shifts you could spend your ingame days on. And during your shifts you would explore various story lines of other people aboard the mega-structure. The art got a major rework about one month in.
This is yet another thing I stopped working on because no clear core gameplay loop was forming and there didn’t seem to be that much interest in the concept, which was hard to sell anyways. Also it looked like it would get way bigger than I thought one months in already. Once I prototyped the farming portions I started having Hyperspace Harvest flashbacks and I knew I had to get out. After that I spent 3 months now on what is locked in to become Hyperspace Anthology Vol 3. So stay tuned for the official announcement later this week!
Bonus:
Game Jam stuff I made over the years. Red Tether and Swirl Watch started like this, but these are jam games that I didn’t develop into full titles.
Hyperspace Blast Wave – A surf shooter where your speed is your health and you need to catch waves to survive. The first thing I made as a solo dev.
Rogue Signal Unicorn – A pretty simple rhythm game where you have to sync your inputs with the beat to hack your way through network nodes and defense programms.
Mech Revenant: Input One – A endless runner where you control a mech using only a single input.
Dual Feder – A game about a badminton variant that I play IRL, featuring 2 player teams and 2 shuttles. You only score if both shuttles count against a team simultaneously and you can pick up and re-enter shuttles into the match at any point.
Dice Loader – A tense management game about delivering the right combination of dice to cargo ships.
Opponent 1 – A boss battler where you deploy swarms of drones against a single evolving “player” craft.
Hyper Gladiator – An orbital spectacle fighter where you use hardlight melee and harpoons and try to build large combo chains.