I’m going to break from tradition here in a couple of ways: Firstly I’m going to level with you and address you one person to another because every idea starts in a single persons mind and secondly, I’m going to talk about the scaffolding surrounding the game rather than the game itself, give you a little bit of background. So my name is James, I live in the UK. I grew up in a dodgy area, so rather than my parents letting me mingle with the local reprobates, they instead opted to put a computer in front of me at the tender age of around 7. Probably the best thing they ever did for me. The computer had two games and back then they were very expensive, but DOS came bundled with a flavour of BASIC and so I became exposed to computer programming from a very young age. Professionally I moved into computer support, later infrastructure design and consultancy and through hard work and determination found myself in a high paid role managing a midsize budget and a small team where I also opted to do a degree part time in Business and Software Design. Afterwards, I continued to hone my software development skills, and worked on a couple of new business start-ups, helped out with a few indie projects but I think it’s fair to say that my heart has always been with computer games, both playing them and making them. I grew up playing the likes of Starfleet Command, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, Warcraft (the RTS’,) Syndicate and the Ultima games. So one day, I was watching Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and was enthralled in the last ten episodes which was effectively a total war footing: The Federation, Romulans and Klingons vs. the Breen, Cardassians and the Dominion – simply put; EPIC. Eager as pie I launched Steam (back in 2013) and started trawling the library and I found nothing. Surprisingly, besides Homeworld and Nexus there hadn’t been a game that truly focused on fleet warfare for over 10 years. That’s a situation that disturbed me so deeply that it prompted me to put 12 years of hard work and a very well paid job into the proverbial shredder. So I’m an effective manager and a good programmer this much I know, I had a poke around and yes there were game development environments that had evolved to the point where all the time consuming 3D maths had been whittled away and a suitable abstraction layer existed between the game engine and OpenGL/DirectX. This removed a truckload of time consuming nuances and made it so possible that if I worked hard, like REALLY hard, I could potentially code this thing on my own – that’s important because developers and managers are the biggest costs. So over the last three years I’ve been asking myself the questions; how can we make realistic ship movement, what should govern the AIs decisions when the ships move and fight, how I can imbue the player with as much of the responsibility of a fleet commander without overloading them. Perhaps bizarrely, we designed the game from the ships upwards, rather than picking the generic RTS template and working down from that. At the same time I hunted for talent, drew up specifications, set up business, got distribution sorted and built an effective team. I met Alex, who I consider my partner in crime now – he lives in a completely different country on the other side of the world but we have a great friendship based on mutual appreciation and necessitation. He’s a VFX dude predominantly, but kickass programmer too and I fed him a long list of assets that I would need to make Shallow Space. Now truth be told, that’s time consuming work and I didn’t expect him to work for free (neither did he!) so he setup a business himself and sold the assets publicly – strange feeling at first but it is what it was; a means to an end. Then we have the designers, again – talented people, time consuming work, I wasn’t going to insult them by offering them empty promises of X percentage. So I paid them what they were worth out of my own pocket and later, using the funds that you guys have provided, grew the team so that we have additional designers. They are all technically contractors, but interestingly they were all in a rutt of some form, either their talents weren’t being appreciated or they were stuck doing jobs they didn’t enjoy. When you pick someone up and dust them off like that, you get the very best from them and therefore, the very best for the game. We attracted the attention of Vincent Van Diemen, producer of Nexus: The Jupiter Incident which blew my mind frankly, he is a great guy absolutely dying to help in whatever way he can. From here, I thought, it’s easy – put the pieces together, create high quality assets and media, attract the attention of the press and therefore a crowd – a self-fulfilling prophecy, or so I thought. How wrong was I. After I figured out that suspended not a meter above my head was a highly polished glass ceiling, I did feel a little dejected. No matter what quality of assets or game we produce, we’ll likely never get major coverage. I was pretty gutted at first until I rationalised it all and spun it into a positive and realised that actually, it’s a good thing. That was an important day actually because that’s when I stopped trying to pander to the latest popular review/preview category and development of Shallow Space as a wannabe-famous game ceased. So ‘what do Players actually want to see in this game’ I thought, well that part was easy – because you’ve always been gracious enough to provide feedback and if you’re good enough to give it, then I’ll read it – every word and the feedback strangely lead me back to the game I was dreaming of in the first place. So ‘how can I reach people’ I thought, well Steam alone does a fantastic job of that – but I still need to know who I’m talking too, know my target audience. According to my figures you’re an average of 33 years of age and male. Well that’s easy, because I’m 33 years of age and a male. So I sat down and brainstormed the things I would want to see if I were you and it was an interesting if not obvious list: Transparency, honesty, trust, consistent communication, reliability and above all, evidence that I was being taken seriously as a customer. I set my pen down and realised I’d made a mistake, rather than making the dream I’d settled for some halfway house that doesn’t seek to innovate or advance. I might as well of handed the idea to a AAA game studio and said ‘here make this.’ We’re Indie, i'm not afraid to admit that now we can break the mould and do things differently and more than that, we absolutely should. I remember that moment clearly; it was like an articulated lorry driving into a 50 foot bell. I closed my laptop and went into the living room. I turned on the TV and by pure chance guess what was on? Yep, that same episode of Deep Space 9. It was then that I realised, I had to take the risk – it’ll mean a setback initially but I need to pull the project apart and make the game I wanted to make originally. Procedural open-world environments, an intimate relationship with the ships and combat… I don’t need to spell it out; you’ve no doubt read the Overhaul articles. I took a chance and talked about it here and that’s when the people came. There has always been the people attracted to the idea from the start and I’m forever grateful to them. But then there were new faces, the Steam articles started getting a surge in likes, the blog saw twice the traffic every post. People were talking about this. Now, I’d always been careful to keep my job in the background, though I think they knew that by now my heart was on something else. But last month (March 2016) I did it; I took voluntary redundancy and made Shallow Space my fulltime job. You’ll be pleased to know that I personally have the money now to buy my time enough to release what we deem ‘the minimum viable product’ but actually, even with the Early Access funds trickling in we’re going to see a lot more than that. You’ll also be pleased to know that, even if the funds dried up tomorrow, we still have enough money to finish the game. If the bank burst into flames, I can take short term IT contracts and work the game on the side. But what about burn-out? Those boys are putting a lot into this game you’re probably thinking... Well I know me personally, I’m far happier now that I’m doing one fulltime job rather than two and the guys, they are looked after – they can walk away and come back, the pressures on them are minimal. It’s happened now, all the ducks are finally in a row and let me make it official: Welcome to the start of something truly beautiful. James