After nearly four years in development, Disputed Space is now officially moving from Early Access to Full Release on Steam! Disputed Space is a fast-paced arcade action game that plays like Descent or Overload, but in outer space instead of inside a mine. Players pilot a small fighter ship that can fly in any direction (including backwards) while blasting enemy ships with lasers and missiles.

2014

I began working on Disputed Space back in January 2014. One of my absolute favorite games of all time was Decent (1995). In Decent, players could fly in any direction while aiming in any direction while strafing to avoid incoming lasers. With Disputed Space, I wanted to bring those arcade action style gameplay mechanics into outer space. The earliest prototypes began with being able to spherically strafe around a few asteroids. I continued adding features during 2014, such as more ships, some of the first layers of AI, and lots of lasers.

2015

Then in October 2015, I submitted Disputed Space to Steam Greenlight. Disputed Space received useful feedback during the Greenlight process. Most importantly, a lot of players wisely suggested that Disputed Space needed to also include mouse/keyboard support. This was important, because I had originally designed Disputed Space around game controllers.

2016

Throughout 2016, I implemented many of the procedural systems (like the runtime space scene generator) and worked extensively on performance improvements. For example, I spent 6 months perfecting the performance of the projectile systems in the game so I could scale the number of simultaneous lasers in each scene. I wanted to be able to deliver over 100 FPS on a modern gaming PC with literally thousands of lasers flying around. To achieve this, I rewrote my projectile systems repeatedly while investigating each new idea I had for tweaking more performance out those systems. I developed instancing pools, which are similar to object pools but use GPU instancing methods instead of using game objects for each projectile. The instancing pools in Disputed Space deliver about six times as much performance compared to a typical object pool.

2017

In June 2017, I released Disputed Space on Steam Early Access. My main goal for Early Access was to get feedback that I could use to improve Disputed Space. I had some local play testers that I relied on for feedback, but they had become too used to my game after seeing it so many times during development. I really needed some fresh gamers to play Disputed Space and offer their best ideas for how I should improve the game.

Thank you for the Feedback

I want to thank everybody for their feedback. Thank you for both the positive and negative feedback. I read every forum post, read every email, and watched every video in order to absorb all of the amazing feedback that all of you have shared regarding Disputed Space. I have tried to incorporate as many of those idea as I could as quickly as possible during Early Access. I posted 59 different builds of Disputed Space to Steam between June 12, 2017 and December 7, 2017 in response to all of the valuable feedback I received. In some cases, I posted a new feature and then iterated the feature until it was right. For example, the Afterburner feature went through several iterations based on community feedback. During Early Access, many features were added or improved, including: Added cockpit Improved HUD Added some inertia to ship movements Added additional control scheme (supports both Action and Flight Simulator) Improved target reticle (red or green dot in center) Added targeting system with lead indicator Added procedural mission objective system Added powerup system Improved damage feedback Added massive explosions Added damage visualizations Added Arcade Hard mode Improved Menus Added afterburner Implemented various AI tweaks Added more ships Added controls tutorial system Added player ejection/explosion/launch system Added scoring system Improved homing missiles Added framerate limiter Fixed many bugs The current build of Disputed Space is much more enjoyable to play than the build I originally posted to Early Access back in June, and that is the direct result of all of the fantastic feedback. Thank you again for that feedback.

Price will not increase

In addition to feedback about the game itself, I received feedback regarding the pricing. My original plan was going to be selling Disputed Space for US$4.99 during Early Access and then US$9.99 after the Full Release. After absorbing the feedback and analyzing player trends, I decided that the Full Release of Disputed Space will only be US$4.99.

Note about Design Decisions

My vision for Disputed Space was a game that played similar to the old Decent games, but in outer space instead of inside a mine. Disputed Space is designed to let players quickly drop into a massive space battle and strafe around quickly dodging lasers while blasting ships. It is not designed as a realistic space simulator. Some players love it, while other players wish I would have chosen different gameplay mechanics. Primarily, some space sim fans have stated that they wish I would gut all of the arcade action gameplay mechanics and then replace those with typical flight simulator mechanics. For example, some players dont like strafing to avoid incoming lasers. They would prefer a game with heavy ships that turn slowly and get hit instantly by extremely fast weapons. That would be a significantly different game from Disputed Space. In the future, I may re-use the framework I developed for Disputed Space to build a game like that, but I am not going to convert Disputed Space into that style of a game. All of my design decisions for Disputed Space were based on my goal of building an epic space battle that plays like the old Decent games that I enjoyed playing. Similarly, there have been requests to convert Disputed Space into a RTS or 4X game. Again, that is not the direction I was looking to go with this game. I have enjoyed playing those other genres, but Disputed Space is a FPS arcade action game, not a strategy game.

Future Plans

I am planning to continue releasing updates to Disputed Space, but not at the pace I was releasing updates during Early Access. These additional updates will include bug fixes and possibly some additional features. In addition to some more updates to Disputed Space, I am really excited to build some new games. I have written notes about a bunch of different game ideas throughout the past few years, and I am planning to prototype some of those ideas and see what plays the best. I built an extensive framework for Disputed Space, and I will be able to re-use some of it when building new space games.

After nearly four years in development, Disputed Space is now officially moving from Early Access to Full Release on Steam! Disputed Space is a fast-paced arcade action game that plays like Descent or Overload, but in outer space instead of inside a mine. Players pilot a small fighter ship that can fly in any direction (including backwards) while blasting enemy ships with lasers and missiles.

2014

I began working on Disputed Space back in January 2014. One of my absolute favorite games of all time was Decent (1995). In Decent, players could fly in any direction while aiming in any direction while strafing to avoid incoming lasers. With Disputed Space, I wanted to bring those arcade action style gameplay mechanics into outer space. The earliest prototypes began with being able to spherically strafe around a few asteroids. I continued adding features during 2014, such as more ships, some of the first layers of AI, and lots of lasers.

2015

Then in October 2015, I submitted Disputed Space to Steam Greenlight. Disputed Space received useful feedback during the Greenlight process. Most importantly, a lot of players wisely suggested that Disputed Space needed to also include mouse/keyboard support. This was important, because I had originally designed Disputed Space around game controllers.

2016

Throughout 2016, I implemented many of the procedural systems (like the runtime space scene generator) and worked extensively on performance improvements. For example, I spent 6 months perfecting the performance of the projectile systems in the game so I could scale the number of simultaneous lasers in each scene. I wanted to be able to deliver over 100 FPS on a modern gaming PC with literally thousands of lasers flying around. To achieve this, I rewrote my projectile systems repeatedly while investigating each new idea I had for tweaking more performance out those systems. I developed instancing pools, which are similar to object pools but use GPU instancing methods instead of using game objects for each projectile. The instancing pools in Disputed Space deliver about six times as much performance compared to a typical object pool.

2017

In June 2017, I released Disputed Space on Steam Early Access. My main goal for Early Access was to get feedback that I could use to improve Disputed Space. I had some local play testers that I relied on for feedback, but they had become too used to my game after seeing it so many times during development. I really needed some fresh gamers to play Disputed Space and offer their best ideas for how I should improve the game.

Thank you for the Feedback

I want to thank everybody for their feedback. Thank you for both the positive and negative feedback. I read every forum post, read every email, and watched every video in order to absorb all of the amazing feedback that all of you have shared regarding Disputed Space. I have tried to incorporate as many of those idea as I could as quickly as possible during Early Access. I posted 59 different builds of Disputed Space to Steam between June 12, 2017 and December 7, 2017 in response to all of the valuable feedback I received. In some cases, I posted a new feature and then iterated the feature until it was right. For example, the Afterburner feature went through several iterations based on community feedback. During Early Access, many features were added or improved, including: Added cockpit Improved HUD Added some inertia to ship movements Added additional control scheme (supports both Action and Flight Simulator) Improved target reticle (red or green dot in center) Added targeting system with lead indicator Added procedural mission objective system Added powerup system Improved damage feedback Added massive explosions Added damage visualizations Added Arcade Hard mode Improved Menus Added afterburner Implemented various AI tweaks Added more ships Added controls tutorial system Added player ejection/explosion/launch system Added scoring system Improved homing missiles Added framerate limiter Fixed many bugs The current build of Disputed Space is much more enjoyable to play than the build I originally posted to Early Access back in June, and that is the direct result of all of the fantastic feedback. Thank you again for that feedback.

Price will not increase

In addition to feedback about the game itself, I received feedback regarding the pricing. My original plan was going to be selling Disputed Space for US$4.99 during Early Access and then US$9.99 after the Full Release. After absorbing the feedback and analyzing player trends, I decided that the Full Release of Disputed Space will only be US$4.99.

Note about Design Decisions

My vision for Disputed Space was a game that played similar to the old Decent games, but in outer space instead of inside a mine. Disputed Space is designed to let players quickly drop into a massive space battle and strafe around quickly dodging lasers while blasting ships. It is not designed as a realistic space simulator. Some players love it, while other players wish I would have chosen different gameplay mechanics. Primarily, some space sim fans have stated that they wish I would gut all of the arcade action gameplay mechanics and then replace those with typical flight simulator mechanics. For example, some players dont like strafing to avoid incoming lasers. They would prefer a game with heavy ships that turn slowly and get hit instantly by extremely fast weapons. That would be a significantly different game from Disputed Space. In the future, I may re-use the framework I developed for Disputed Space to build a game like that, but I am not going to convert Disputed Space into that style of a game. All of my design decisions for Disputed Space were based on my goal of building an epic space battle that plays like the old Decent games that I enjoyed playing. Similarly, there have been requests to convert Disputed Space into a RTS or 4X game. Again, that is not the direction I was looking to go with this game. I have enjoyed playing those other genres, but Disputed Space is a FPS arcade action game, not a strategy game.

Future Plans

I am planning to continue releasing updates to Disputed Space, but not at the pace I was releasing updates during Early Access. These additional updates will include bug fixes and possibly some additional features. In addition to some more updates to Disputed Space, I am really excited to build some new games. I have written notes about a bunch of different game ideas throughout the past few years, and I am planning to prototype some of those ideas and see what plays the best. I built an extensive framework for Disputed Space, and I will be able to re-use some of it when building new space games.