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!

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!

Imagine your ship gets blown up. Your crew and yourself are stuck in a small escape pod, where do you go? The shipyard of course! This is where you can reclaim, repair or buy new ships.

This is also the first video I released on the new Hyperventila YouTube channel so please Like and Subsribe if you haven't already! 

Here is a big milestole in the development of any game; the first footage of gameplay.

While this is more like another showcase and doesn't contain any actual gameplay like you would see in the final game, it certainly is more than I expected the game to do when I started out on this project.

The scale, visuals and level of interactivity with the world is far greater than anything I thought I could build at first.

This video demonstrates the capabilities of what the game can do now, from interaction with every object, ship and planet to NPCs reacting to the player and even more visuals like debris, particle effects and of course lots of lighting effects.

Features I didn't showcase (because I don't feel they are ready yet) are, among others, the dialogue system and NPC interaction as well as my inventory system that contains the items picked up. These features all exist but require some more work before they undoubtedly get a showcase of their own.

Stay tuned.

A great thing about Hyperventila is the abilty to take a hands on approach to space exploration and actually leaving the helm of your ship to explore unknown stations,  ships and space ports around galaxy.
This is a major component of the game. Now after a re-design of the Manta Shuttle interior I can show what progress has been made.

What it looks like in-game:

I also made progress on the weapon designs. That will be a showcase for a later time but here is a little sneak peak:

Another aspect of the game which in my opinion is very important is the visual atmosphere. It's very easy to make a space game that ends up lacking in atmosphere due to space being very empty and dark.

With this update I'd like to share a major upgrade to the feel of HyperVentila through real time lighting made possible by Xor Shaders, check out their awesome work on XorShaders.weebly.com.

These renders show a few of the ships in the game in their full 3D glory. I will be posting smaller updates and showcases like this throughout development of artwork in the game or possibly even things that didn't quite make it into the game.

Updates like this could be work in progress renders, sketches or other experiments.