Gamedevs working on game!

We're a team of 3 working on a Synthwave space taxi game, The Galaxy Rider.

Before starting working on this game, we released another game on Steam, called PalmRide:

You can find more about PalmRide and its development here.

I (the person writing this About section) am mentioning PalmRide because the development of this game began in a similar way. Both games started out as prototype projects for college, but later turned into full Steam games.

In the case of The Galaxy Rider, the protorype was a little space exploration game where the player had to control a rocket and land on some planets in a specified order. The point of this project wasn't really to make a game, but rather implement an AI that can land on planets without damaging the spaceship and using the minimum amount of fuel it can.

Here's what that prototype looked like:



The rocket you see is driven by an AI, not a human player. You can find the full Unity project, along with some nice gifs here.

The prototype above was a team project, which allowed me (SilviuShader) to meet Gunter. She was part of the team responsible for making that prototype.

After the semester was over (and the college overall, lol), we decided to make a new game which combined both PalmRide and that rocket game prototype. So we came up with the idea of making a game where you are a space taxi driver taking people from one planet to another. Gunter still wanted to continue working with me (which is surprising, considering how bad of a team leader I am) and so the team was formed.

Now the team is as follows:

  • Me, SilviuShader, pretending to do game design, marketing and nonetheless programming.

  • COVALENT, the guy responsible for everyting related to sound (SFX, background music, and so on) but also for making trailers and helping with game design ideas.

  • Gunter, who is responsible for the most of the assets in the game (wheter are the 3D models or just images for the Steam page).

Those who followed the development of PalmRide may remember John (Reneg8studio). He decided to move on and work on different exciting projects, and so, he is no longer working with us.

Fast forward a few months, we announced this upcoming game though a Steam post.

By then, we didn't really have a clear design direction so we just experimented with different things. Initially, the player would control a rocket instead of a spaceship:



We later gave up on the idea of using a rocket, and went for a more fun approach, and changed it to be a spaceship instead. The project was started from scratch, as the codebase was already pretty bad, so it was very hard to extend it and add new features.

While implementing the newly started project, I kinda lost myself in trying to make the planets look like they are on scale, and turned the code into a mess again. (And the implementation for this scale of planets was also bad). The thing is, it's very hard to have objects this big and distant in a game engine like Unity as they require working with very big numbers. Now, the problem of computers is that when you work with really big numbers, the calculations are less and less accurate and the numbers are more and more imprecise. This results in jittery movement/ glitches/ visual artifacts.

Here's what that implementation looked like.

That implementation was officially discarded in early 2023 and the project was started from scrath AGAIN, with a much much clear about what the game we are making. Here's how the newst implementation has evolved since its inception until the time of writing this post:
























The above screenshots represent about 5 months of development. The previous 4 were all iterations during a month of full time development (these are very rare).

All these gifs are taken from our Discord server where we post weekly devlogs about the development of the game. If you are interested in following the progress, join our Discord server as that is updated much more often than this website.

Now we come close to the time of writing this section. We just released the Steam page of the game and we want you to Wishlist it on Steam.

The following trailer shows how the game looks/ feels like at the time of writing this: