Oh, the hardships of game development …
Sad news. Remember the Stellar Indie Venture Red Shift? The grand strategy space 4X game being developed by one-person show Elliott Hill? Well, it was abandoned, or at least its development has stopped indefinitely.
Elliott proposed a 4X experience where you would play as one real Earth nation fighting for control of other worlds in the solar system, and possibly beyond. What a cool and refreshing twist to space 4X games, right? Well, not gonna happen, at least not by Elliott, and not now.
The reasons? Elliott started to doubt his ability to go through with it till the end, and because he felt that the game’s codebase and bugs became out of his control – “I have stopped developing Red Shift for a multitude of different reasons. People that doubted my ability to ship a 4X game single-handedly were correct. I would fix one bug and another would pop up and it became more and more unenjoyable.” ~Elliott Hill
But this doesn’t seem to be the end for Elliott’s ventures as he shifted his energy to developing another game, a game he says to have a “smaller scope, small core of features and a non-spaghetti codebase”. He plans to re-utilize some of his work on Red Shift on his new game. It’s called ZeroPoint and is a space adventure game inspired by titles like the Kerbal Space Program, which we’re also covering here.
Elliott hopes that people who helped him fund Red Shift (people who pre-ordered the game) will accept his failure and embrace his new game, which he intends to give out to them for free. But, he said to be also open to refunds for people who want one, which for that you just need to shoot him an email.
The the question if this was really the end of the line for Red Shift Elliott replied: “I hope to come back to Red Shift in the future but it would be with a team rather than just myself!”. But, Elliott is also willing to give out his source code to someone who wants to pick it up. “I have no problem giving out the source code for RS if someone wants to take over development. No other programmers worked on it [but] me.”.
Good luck on your new adventure Elliott. Your Red Shift concept was strong, innovative and refreshing. I sincerely hope someone picks it up one day and make it happen.
Stellar Indie Venture Red Shift – signing off… (for now…)
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Bummer. Seemed like a great project!
I wonder if I have enough free time….. ;)
That is quite sad. I pre-ordered a copy myself. To be honest I was wondering why it took so long for another update.
ZeroPoint seems interesting and I am very glad to hear that people who already pre-ordered get the new game instead. The game reminded me of Space Station Delta and Blockade Runner.
Good luck Elliot. I hope this project will be easier to complete.
Sad, because I liked the orginal setting and overall design, but not surprising.
Just because there’s many project (especially on Unity) started by non dev people that will never see the light under a complete form.
Arts and 3d engine are a thing, but build a game system and the AI is an another one (I point to the MORE team). For us dev it’s already difficult, I can’t imagine about someone that has zero previous experience of coding.
But anyway not all is lost, and I hope he will gather a team to complete this interesting game.
Always looked too ambitious.
Such a shame, sounded excellent. I really like the idea of playing as an Earth nation colonising the solar system.
Still, there is no point doing it if he isn’t enjoying it.
Have mailed him to ask if some of our students can take a look, might be they agree or maybe they pick up a project for their masters degree! Have to wait and see what he replies back with;
-Rich
Shame as it was a cool premise. As a developer myself I can totally understand the feeling of frustration with spaghetti code and a seemingly never ending list of things that aren’t quite right that you feel really need to be gone back to and rewritten.
Ah what a crying shame. I was looking forward to this title. Its one of the last few hopes I had for some originality in this genre. Oh well.