The last two months have been a crazy ride for development. First the indieGoGo campaign and then moving from the UK to Italy, it has been a stressful few months for sure.
Now that I am settled things can continue at a bit more of a regular pace. First of let me address the IndieGoGo campaign.

The campaign didn't reach its goal which means I will have to look at other means of funding the project and perhaps certain planned features will not make it into the initial release. However backers can still expect to get their perks, there is a post here which goes into further detail.

The campaign did raise some money which will keep development going for a short time. Living in Italy for the coming six months will also be a bit cheaper than living in London which will certainly help make the most of the budget I have right now.

If this is a game that you would like to play then I humbly ask you to support the project on Patreon. All earnings on Patreon go towards supporting development and making sure the game gets finished as quickly as possible.

Now, what is new in development?

There are three new ships; The "Tracker", the Mark III Transport and the PIR-3 Colonizer.

There is a new station, Gateway Station, the perfect place to start an adventure.

On top of that there are many other fixes and mechanical improvements:

Player movement on foot has been updated with a much requested directional control system, this functions more like the ships move in space where W moves you in the direction you're facing rather than simply up.

• Damage systems have been reworked and rebalanced. Skills now affect a lot more in the game.
  
• New music system that responds more closely to the current situation with ambient, tense and combat states.
• NPC ships now roam the galaxy.
• There are new planets and moons.
  
• Asteroid belts can now be found in certain systems.
• Cargo missions will now pop up at regular intervals.
• You can delete and reply to messages in your GALCOM.
• Medical stations have been added to ships to restore health after a dangerous mission.
• You can get drunk at bars... because why not, and yes this will affect movement, character stats and aim.
• Ship pilot seats can now be customized with different colours at the shipyard.
• Expanded the HUD with more buttons for ship control.
• The NAVCON now has widgets for easily locating the nearest planets, stations and shipyards.
  

Like you may have read in the previous new post, the entire development of Hyperventila so far has been on a small HP Spectre 360 laptop. While an amazing piece of tech and my favourite laptop (I love that thing), it did fall short in some areas. Processing power and graphics rendering especially weren't its strong suit and the small screen was always quite limiting in what I could do in terms of video editing. On top of that my internet connection in London was a slow ~2 mb/s ADSL connection which meant streaming of the game and uploading quality videos to Youtube was almost impossible.

Well... no longer! I now have a desktop PC with a dedicated graphics card and unlimited fibre internet! This means I shall be looking into which streaming services I could use and I will also be recording the game more often and putting it on Youtube. Expect new trailers and video content coming soon!

That's it for this news post! Keep and eye out for further updates and keep sharing word of the game to anyone you may think is interested!

Tymen, developer

This is a February update for Hyperventila: The Game. Starting with a few character models the content production machine has been set in motion.

This month has also seen a large boost to the gameplay in preparation for the upcoming demo which is still scheduled for a launch along a Kickstarter campaign.

There is now an ever growing solar system with planets, space stations, ships, quests and NPCs.

I now have a more clear idea of what will actually be included in the demo, I want to show off the whole range of features Hyperventila will have to offer from action to narrative.
The public demo will be a pre-cursor to the events of the full game. It will be your first chance as a space captain to make a difference in the galaxy as you get mixed up in a tense political situation on a mining colony in the Tryon System.
As the player you will have to use any means you can to diffuse this situation, be it through action or political scheming. You will be able to make a difference for the better, or possibly causing a war between the factions involved.

Stay tuned for more updates and don't forget to follow and share Hyperventila on the social medias like Twitter and YouTube!

It has been a while since I posted an update here, this by no means is due to a lack of content or progress however. 2019 was a year when Hyperventila became more than I had ever thought possible back when I started in late 2018. The source code is now largely finished and I've been hard at work with asset production over the past months.

Over Christmas, I released a lot of artwork for the game in order to show off more of the visual style of the game. Do take a look:

There are many more screenshots and updates over on Discord should you want to see more!

Now for some news on the release date. I had originally planned a Steam early access release in February but after careful consideration, mainly of the fact Hyperventila relies heavily on story-driven content which should be ready upon release, I have decided to run a Kickstarter instead with a new release date of September 2020.

I strongly believe this is the correct approach for Hyperventila going forward and that releasing a full game in September is going to leave both the players and developer happier for it.

The Kickstarter is scheduled for March of 2020.

Stay tuned for updates and don't forget to follow and share Hyperventila on social media!

This has been a roller-coaster of a time for the development of Hyperventila since the last update. Many core features have been improved upon and today I finally finished the last of the core features; the save/load systems making today a major milestone in development.

There are many new features such as hailing and receiving messages from other ships, manipulating doors and airlocks from consoles inside your ship, EVA capability, a new player model, portable turrets and better ship landing animations!

It is at this stage I will be focusing more of the development time on content creation and writing. I can't tell you enough how exiting this is.

On top of all this, Hyperventila is now also on Steam!

Please do wishlist and follow the game on there if you have an account!

The game can only grow from here!

Stay tuned, further updates are coming soon!

This month has seen a great deal of bug fixing. A lot of problems that had been bugging the game for months are now partially or completely gone.

A new addition to the game is the ability to equip things on your ship such as the new Corbo Blaster Cannons.

Another addition is the mysterious Giant Space Moth! A space dwelling creature that travels the sky in search of distant stars.

Both are quite nicely demonstrated in this screenshot below.

I also realize that I've not been the best at keeping this particular blog up-to-date with latest news in development. Most announcements tend to happen on Discord since it's just a lot more convenient and seems to have a larger audience as well. Not any more! You can now follow the development of Hyperventila in almost real-time and even more in-depth on Trello through the roadmap which I personally use as a developer: trello.com/b/MUfZrK6N/hyperventila-roadmap. Hurray!

Do check that out if you're interested in finding out about the details of development and possible future game-features. Off course everything on there comes with the disclaimer that just because it's on the roadmap, it may not actually end up in the final game.

That's about it for this development update. As always if the game looks interesting to you and you haven't already, please consider becoming a supporter on Patreon. Do check out the Trello roadmap and don't forget to subscribe to our other social medias like Twitter and YouTube, or why not join us on Discord.

Until next time!

There are many things happening in the world of Hyperventila's game development. Having recently started a Patreon and revealed the first footage of the game I can also now reveal that mod support will be coming to Hyperventila.

It is already here! I've spent last two weeks hard at work on a level and ship editor which will allow people (including myself) to create their own content for Hyperventila.

On top of the editor there have been some UI updates in Hyperventila with more powerful interactive abilities when selecting objects and ships around the game world.

Don't forget to check out Hyperventila on Patreon, please share and maybe even support development.

Welcome to this, the first of many dev blogs which will be the number one way to keep up with development of HyperVentila.

First of all lets start with some background to the game development. I orignally had the idea for HyperVentila as a spin-off for a fantasy universe known as Mikomwood. These were a bunch of silly fantasy shorts I wrote and narrated and then put up on YouTube (look them up at your own risk, they get quite cringy in places).

Mikomwood is this sort of Terry Pratchett's Discworld/Westeros/Middle Earth/Skyrim kind of world where the people living in this relatively small region are at the mercy of maniacal forces that control the fates of man at a whim... and they are very used to it. Suited well for short stories and roleplay, I really wanted to make HyperVentila something similar but I always felt like it was a universe to be explored more dynamically, not through small stories but rather through an interactive medium, so; a game.

My background is what one could describe as 'somewhat techy' but I never studied anything specific only learning on the go as I jumped from job to job. IT support, graphic design, CAD 3D modeling, 3D printing, you name it, if there is a job title within tech you can think of, I've probably quit that job at some point in the past.
Don't think of me as too much of a quitter though, I've always seen it as more of a learning process.

As far as game design is concerned. I've been a long time member on ModDB, with game modding being half the reason I actually started playing video games and it also started me off as a 3D modeler in the first place.

The thing is, I've never been much of a programmer. I've had many ideas in the past, messed around with Unity and the Unreal Development Kit on many occasions in the past however my lack of programming knowledge has always kept me from achieving anything more than a few imported assets and a map.
And while just dumping assets into a map and posting that game on Steam is enough for some developers, I like to set my standards a little higher.
So what was I going to do for HyperVentila? Enter Gamemaker Studio. A modest engine that doesn't promise you the latest and greatest in 3D rendering but has excellent cross-platform support and most importantly of all: it's relatively easy to learn.

Now I struggled even with GML (gamemaker programming language) for the first few months of development but I slowly started picking it up and I feel like I know have a decent grasp of how to make Gamemaker do what I want it to do.

So how long have I been developing HyperVentila?

I started around August last year (2018) and have been building and rebuilding HyperVentila from that point onwards. The game has gone through quite a few changes in the last seven or so months, as part of the learning process I've had to reprogram the core functionality once or twice in the last five months but that's all part of the process. Another major change was changing the art style a few months back from a simple FTL-like 2d artstyle to something in the style of 60/70s science fiction movies which I feel suits the universe and my own design preferences a lot more.

Where is the game in its current stage of development? I would say pre-alpha still, however most of the core functionality is now complete and I can start working on adding more actual gameplay content.
This is also why there won't be any trailers or lots of screenshots just yet. Developing a game on one's own is surely doable but a very time consuming process indeed.

If the game sounds like something you're interested in, please, do bookmark this page for updates and I also have plans for future Discord and YouTube channels. In a few months I will be stepping up promotion for the game a bit more because by then I'm expecting to have a bit more eye catching content however for now just stay tuned and I'll hopefully see you at the next Dev blog!