This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they ve taken to make their games. This time, Outer Wilds [official site].
Brittle Hollow is a doomed planet. For a start, in about 22 minutes time, it s going to be destroyed, along with the rest of Outer Wilds solar system. And also, up until that apocalypse, Brittle Hollow will also endure constant bombardment by meteors, which will smash away great crystalline chunks of its frigid surface, so that they fall away into the black hole at the planet s centre.
That place is ridiculous, Outer Wilds creative director Alex Beachum tells me. Brittle Hollow was the last place we finalised, for what are probably obvious reasons. He and his team had to get an entire planet to fall apart, perhaps while players are standing on it, and perhaps if they re tearing through space on the the other side of the system. Outer Wilds is a game in which epic-scale events happen on a minute-by-minute basis, and Brittle Hollow was its greatest test. (more…)