RetroSpace today bears almost zero resemblance to the first prototype versions, but the vision and philosophy were solidly in place from the get-go. Let's look at how it all started...
THE VISION:
What was the starting point? Well, we just imagined a convoy of ships heading for a new home with the rest of mankind in their belly. The journey is long and dangerous. The destination and the success of the mission are rather questionable, but humanity simply has no other choice. This is 2177, and the Earth has become uninhabitable... So, this was the initial idea, or more like the seed of the idea, the basic situation. The next step - which is still an integral part of the story - is that one of the ships (more like a space station with gigantic engines) breaks off the convoy and gets lost in the infinite vastness of space. And then comes the madness... and the mutants... space-time jumps, and so on.
You know the drill.
In the original idea, we envisioned a kind of soviet, space-age, communist utopia, but in the end, we felt that the American science fiction world of the 60s and 70s - with its cheap TV series, great movie classics, and pulp science fiction novels - would be a much more exciting and (literally) more colorful setting for our story.
screenshot from the first prototype version of the game
some inspirations
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY:
While the world and specific narrative of the game were (and still are) slowly being polished, we found the style we wanted to follow and which we later will call "Disco-Punk", so the next step was to lay down the game design philosophy.
The immersive sim is a rather elusive and hard-to-pin-down genre, but it's the direction we've been shooting in from the start. Mainly because we LOVED games like the Thief or the System Shock series, games where you can live and breathe with the environment, where the world is amazingly immersive, sucks you in, and won't let you go. We felt it was most important not to create a linear game where the player could only choose which weapon to headshot the opponent with, but to give a more open, free-form experience where you can answer each problem with multiple solutions. - it was crucial for us from the start that avoiding enemies, sneaking, or using traps will be just as valid, as shooting or ripping your opponent's head off with a tentacle hand.
However, we want to present all of this in a way that keeps the story and narrative at the center. By the time we had laid out our core ideas, it turned out that we were actually making a narrative-driven immersive sim single-player first-person shooter game with Metroidvania and soul-like(ish) elements. So... we've got our work cut out for us...
FIRST STEPS ON AURORA 5:
First, we had to sell the idea to the team. So we started to create a loose prototype to ensure that the project was worthwhile. Because after our first game, Chicken Police: Paint it RED! (a noir satire adventure), we started to brainstorm and prototype several projects, in several genres.
a small part of the team is brainstorming in our first office, circa 2020
Even though the first prototype was almost nothing like the game looks like now (which is still not the final form!), this version already had some scripted story scenes, hacking, audio logs, computer terminals, turret avoidance, basic enemies with a basic AI, three simple weapons and of course a relatively open space, which presented a linear story, yes, but the player could already decide the progression order and gameplay-style in which they wanted to play through the demo.
screenshot from the first prototype version of the game
This was huge for us, and the team loved the idea! Of course, making an immersive sim game is quite challenging, but we like to challenge ourselves with near-impossible goals, and we've managed to grow our team from 6-7 people to almost 20 in two years, which has allowed us to experiment more and even work on several projects at the same time.
screenshots from the current (still not final!) version of the game
The next highly important element was humor. We definitely wanted to create an absurd, sci-fi satire, but in a way that the humor never overwhelms the horror elements, which we also have big plans for. This delicate balance and sharp contrast is another risk that we added to the mixture, but by the time we finished the next version of the demo (an internal pre-alpha tech demo) and started implementing our own assets (with the new look and feel), everything in the project just clicked and seemed to work perfectly. This was probably the moment when it became clear to everyone on the team that we were creating something special and that we had to see it through!
concept art for the game
So we had a style, a genre, a vision, a philosophy, and even an initial prototype. It was time to get serious and take the plunge. And so "RetroSpace" was born, which at the time had a very different name and went through a series of iterations before it was given its final title...
...but that's another story, which I'm sure will be covered in a future dev blog!
If you haven't already done so, please, Wishlist RetroSpace!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2067820/RetroSpace/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdZROhrwMjQ&lc=UgxeSFnP4JGQKeYBdPd4AaABAg&ab_channel=TheWildGentlemen
See you next time, cosmic voyager...