old cancelled project: spacething

A million years ago, in 2014, I was working on a game called Spacething about renovating a sentient spaceship. It contained some of my first experiments with procedural generation and really gameplay code at all – you’d walk around and talk to the ship and say things like “make a new room here” or “pull this wall down” or “put a window here” or “build some stairs”, and it would happen. You could build big wide tall rooms, and decorate them a bit, and people had fun doing this. You’d see space junk out the windows and beam it up, or break it down for resources, and there was a hologram on the bridge that live-updated to show the new shape of your ship whenever you did anything, which I impressed myself very much with at the time. Vid below.

I think the idea was you were gonna try to solve the mystery of what had happened with this ship, and you’d board other derelict ships and find shit on them you could lug back to your own ship and clean them up and add to your arsenal of things the ship can fabricate, so you’d be psyched if you found a ship with a rug you liked because it meant you could beam it up and have rugs on your ship now. A story would unravel in this way and at some point, something bad would get onto your ship, that you spent all game building and making cosy and decorating, all the shit you build would turn out to have secret other uses, and it would turn into Alien: Isolation on a horror level you had unwittingly made yourself, although Alien: Isolation was not out yet, and you’d sometimes have to sever a limb of your ship in order to cut yourself off from some horror-thing, and watch your billiard room or whatever go dark as it spun off into the void. There also was a little Silent Running style boxy robot whose eyes were like the four-quadrant circular LEDs on an Xbox 360 controller and different combinations of lit-up quadrants would be his facial expressions.

I actually got funding for this (2014 was a wild time) but last-second pivoted that funding to the stealth game that I later also cancelled amid circumstances beyond my control. Maybe one day I shall return to the mystery of the Spacething. At the time, UE4 had just come out, and Epic were hitting the Community Stuff pretty hard; this got into the Community Spotlight and was praised on their weekly stream, which I’m not sure if they even do anymore? At that time Epic was always very excited when someone did something cool with Blueprint. What a time to be alive.