(This was typed out using voice-to-text on my phone so my appologies if there are any reading issues)

When I was 16 I decided I wanted to create a game that was more or less a recreation of real life in game form. Ever since then I was obsessed with the concept and I started training myself through my twenties as a programmer, graphic artist, project leader...etc. As soon as I turned 30 I decided it was go-time and I would stop all other projects and devote my time to this one concept. The first couple years I was experimenting with building a graphics engine using HTML5 which I decided HTML5 was the best course of action. The idea behind that was to create a game that had the lowest barrier to entry which meant no downloads and no plugin installs whenever possible. A game that you can just click and start playing.

After a bunch of experimentation with HTML5 and some graphic techniques I eventually made a concept video that is currently called the survival planet concept. This video eventually went viral when I released it and this was in about 2013. After the video went viral I went on to try to recreate the publicity a little bit and started a donation page to accept donations for producing a project like this. There was a lot of people that were inspired by the concept and they wanted to help out in any way possible and so this was the answer to that. I realized at some point that I wouldn't be able to make the survival planet game directly as it was two important to me (and my first major game project), and I wanted to make sure I did it right. As a result I decided to go with the Voidspace concept as the front-runner and essentially my test baby. Voicespace would have many of the same concepts if not all of them that was planned for the survival planet game but in a much simpler graphical environment allowing me to concentrate only on the parts that were unique about the game and not so much on the graphics. This also worked well because hardware at the time didn't really support what I was hoping for which was essentially VR.

In 2015 with the success we had with the prototype that we built up to that point and the momentum we had with people supporting the project, we managed to get a whole bunch of funding. At that point we decided it was time to throw everything away and basically rewrite it from scratch but doing it better than we had before. The majority of the time between 2015 and 2019 was actually spent in r&d. Very expensive but honestly I feel like despite the fact that I really would have liked to have finished the game by now, I'm very happy with how it ended up and where we took it. Even if this means that it's not finished yet.

So as of 2015 we basically went dark publicly because it's not very interesting to have nothing to show for years, or to have backward progress.

I guess it was generally starting early 2019 that we actually started working on the final game (its current form). This is when we move to LibGDX and away from our own homegrown graphics engine. This gave us the ability to deploy the game natively on all major platforms, which turns out was a really important thing. Running the game entirely in the browser was just too slow even on the latest hardware and certainly too slow for mobile.

And here we are now. We finally have a mostly-functional tutorial that takes you through the basics of the game, and I feel like everyone that gets into the game enjoys themselves quite sufficiently. There is still a lot missing of course, especially around groups which is probably the next most important thing to do.

Working towards this big release that we have on June 29th will be finalizing the tutorial, working out as many bugs as we can, polishing up the UI so that there's no big headaches, and getting the monetization model in place. All of this is being done so we can eventually move on to make the larger concept, the one we codename Survival-Planet.

Some additional thoughts on what's next...

Depending on how many content developers we have working with us hopefully we can also add a bunch more interesting inventions along the way. A few that people might find interesting are the different ship types, we're calling them subtypes, that allows you to make ships that are geared towards a different task. For example combat, or scientific and research, or shipping. This just means that the layout is generally different. Combat variants might have more weapon slots whereas science ships will have more accessory slots. And then passenger transports and cargo transports would have obviously passenger cabins that are capable of carrying more people and cargo holds that are larger respectively. We also plan on releasing larger classes of ships, but I think people will get more use out of the subtypes so we're putting that out first.