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

Today I would like to talk about my inspiration behind Hyperventila, the road that led me to start this project and all the people who supported me along the way.

Hyperventila started in the past, not just my past but also the past of the Hyperventila galaxy. Six years ago I wrote and narrated a series of short stories set in a fantasy world called Mikomwood. Mikomwood was this comical and bizarre region of a planet that ended up being the focus point of meddling god-creatures that, while they never directly featured in these stories, always made life more interesting for the inhabitants of this world.

It was a world of mages and wizards, trolls and goblins, elves and humans, you know... fantasy stuff. My main inspirations there were the works of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. Their style of writing and abstract way of thinking always resonated with me.

I wrote one of these stories every few months or so and this world is what ended up becoming the basis for Hyperventila. I thought; what if I could bring this world into a future where magic has been largely abandoned, replaced by technology but the mystical forces remain.

At this point I was living in Sweden, had a job as a technician at a company that did 3D printing in a bio-composite material, a piece of information that's not at all relevant to anything, you're welcome.
After getting sick of living in the same routine every day in a place I absolutely hated and had no connection to whatsoever, I decided to travel and see the world. This journey, while a fascinating and engaging story, is something I'll leave to your imagination.

At some point I ended up in Edinburgh, that's in Scotland for all of you who skipped geography in school. Edinburgh is a city famous for its creative inhabitants and celebrates this every year with the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Perhaps it's something in the air but it was here that I started working on Hyperventila.

Living in one of the most beautiful cities on Earth, I had recently moved into a new flat with my girlfriend ...I sat down at our living room table and started hammering away at the keyboard on my little HP Spectre 360 laptop, my 'workhorse'.

By the end of that year we had moved to London, my girlfriend got a job there so it was either stay in Edinburgh and never see her again or move there, a city that's famous for... I don't know, a big clock, a bridge that is also a tower, a tower that is really just a castle, a globe that is more of a cylinder with a roof and a queen that is sometimes there as well.

After a few months of work I had a working base for the galaxy, some ships that could move and a station to dock with. I also had a hacking mechanic for the doors, even though at that point I didn't have any doors to hack, nor any plans to make doors a feature... development can be like that. It was a time of experimentation and learning what could be done and how far I could take Hyperventila.

It was around this time I decided on the art style. My love is for spaceships of any kind but for this project I knew what I wanted...

I wanted Star Wars meets Alien meets Spaceballs. A world that is hyper futuristic, full of realism and detail ...in the eyes of an 80s film director on a budget. Something that could have been made by the great model makers of the past, before CGI became widely used.

While it is relatively easy nowadays to make greebles* through procedural generation, I still make a point of modelling all detail on the ships by hand in my 3D program. I love it for some reason, it is one of those 'Zen' activities.

*The little mechanical details that decorated the hulls of ships like the Millennium Falcon and the Nostromo in Alien

Of course I would have never made it this far if it wasn't for my girlfriend, my parents and my family who have supported me over the last two years by not telling me I was crazy, for not telling me to stop and to encourage me to keep going even when I wanted to give up.

They all made immeasurably large contributions and I will be forever in their debt.

As you can imagine behind every project like this there is a story, and this was mine.

I want to once again thank all the backers that have contributed to the IndieGoGo Campaign so far and are making this IndieGoGo campaign a memorable one. I want to encourage new visitors to back the campaign and spread the word!

Keep sharing links around the web, tell your friends and let's make it to 10% before the weekend!

- Tymen Muller, 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!

A few days ago I was looking for a way to more efficiently write the branching dialogues for Hyperventila. In the game-engine editing the dialogue looks something like this:

A simple array of questions and answers which when you get to the actual writing part is an annoying mess of copy-pasting text from Google Docs and rearranging it so it fits the above format.

This simply would not do and I went onto the Internet to find a possible solution. One such solution was a piece of software called Twine. It did exactly what I needed but exporting it to a format that would work in Hyperventila left me with the same problem as before.

This was when I decided to write my own piece of software instead, how hard could it be right? Turns out it was quite doable and took only about two days to make.

Definitely worth it considering the time and frustration it saves me when implementing the dialogue the old way.

Now that I have this in my toolkit, I can finally start adding fully featured quests and NPCs to Hyperventila.

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

A first glimpse at a planet in Hyperventila. These strange glowing plants are a great way of demonstrating the real-time lighting in the game.

The way I figured it worked is that the glowing plants grow from their seeds, the orbs, upwards until these seed-orbs become so heavy they fall back to the ground, essentially planting themselves and the cycle begins anew.

Stay tuned for more updates!

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.