It’s no secret that the disruption brought upon PixelFoundry by the unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign has slowed things down a good deal for us. It’s also understandable that our recent lack of updates might seem out of the ordinary. Since then, we have been reflecting on what we have achieved thus far while figuring out what the future holds for Blackspace. With our timeline in major flux, any “announcement” that is not set immediately in motion would prove to be problematic.

With all that said, we are still dedicated to bringing Blackspace to our fans who have supported and followed us thus far as well as those that have not had the chance to even hear about us. Along those lines, we are working on putting together the “Mechanically Challenged” pre-alpha demo which we had originally promised during our Kickstarter campaign. This has meant that we had to hammer out some of the rough edges (in some cases literally) that did not get featured in our previous media showcases, as well as removing the reliance on dev-only debug functionality that we use on a day-to-day basis. So things like input control assignments along with gamepad support and graphics settings are now properly customizable via the front-end UI. There is still much to expose to the end-user UI however, not to mention that the UI system overall itself is still in need of a decent facelift. The good part about this effort will be that there will be little-to-no lost work that we would not have had to do for the final version anyway.

Blackspace In-game Flight Mechanics Pre-Alpha Video Blog

Given the work we’ve done in regards to the lower level tech in Blackscape, I figured it’d be a good time to post the way we light things in our game.

Disclaimer: This post might be a bit heavy on the graphics-terminology side.

Here’s a regular scene from the game: