The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Edge of Space
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, lead game designer at Handyman Studios, Jacob Crane, talks Edge of Space, his space shark exploration game in beta and on Greenlight now. What’s your game called and what’s it about?
The game we are working on is Edge of Space, and it is a 2D sandbox exploration game. You, one of the ArkCo Recruits, have been dropped into an area where terraforming should never have been attempted. Stranded in an unknown region of space on a busted-up planet where early terraforming protocols have gone horribly wrong, it’s now up to you and whoever else you can find to overcome the obstacles ahead.
How is the beta going?
The beta is going very well. It has kept our feet on the ground and really helped us identify issues in the core system early on. Whenever you are developing multiplayer, we think it is key you get it out into the “wild” as soon as you can. We wanted to experiment with a different kind of development style to match our small team. After alpha, we pulled out all but the basic features for beta, and then started adding them back in layers as we found things were stable and the necessary iteration was put in place.
This is very much a bottom-up approach. To ensure our foundations are rock solid is paramount. Even though mod development is not being released right at release day, everything has already been made to support it when we do. This has served us very well. It does come with the drawback of not being able to show everything we want to, but it allows us make the code infinitely more stable.Continue reading The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Edge of SpaceThe Joystiq Indie Pitch: Edge of Space originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 30 Dec 2012 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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