Left: The game’s gorgeous art style pulls inspiration from artist Jean Giraud
thinking, what if we made a game where you’re not the hero? You don’t leave this desert planet, you’re just scavenging from these ships and learning more about the world. It just kind of developed from there. “We started playing with a prototype in 2016, which was just a two kilometre by two kilometre box of sand, a literal sandbox with some dunes, and we got a hoverbike from the asset store for like, €5 or something. We put this cube on one side, about half a kilometre in size, and you could just drive across to it. That was the whole experience, it took us two hours to put together. “We slapped some visual filters over it, and then took that to the London indies pub night in Angel. We just put it on a table whilst we were having a drink, and people were really interested. We’ve taken projects there before, but you definitely knew people were playing out of kindness rather than actual interest. This was the first time we’ve taken something where people were like ‘oh, this is this is actually really cool!’ – but it was nothing! It was nothing really in terms of a game. It was just… you can drive to the cube. “But the core idea of seeing something in the distance and journeying out to it, and the dunes acting as this
nice, natural environment that was sparsely populated, but also created these nice moments of travel as you journey across... They kind of like obfuscate things and reveal things as you journey. That was where it started, we had a concept. “But we didn’t think it was gonna make us money, we just thought it was a passion project. We more or less shelved it for about a year. But then we kind of got to the point where we’d been working on mobile games and doing things that we thought would make us money – doing contract work and trying to survive, basically. But we turned to each other and said: ‘What’s this all for, if we’re not doing something that we want to do?’”
As the pair got to work, they started sharing GIFs of their new project online, and things snowballed from
Below: Sable’s journey is often a lonely one, joined only by her hoverbike
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