Space Dust Studios

Developer Blog

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A new year, a new name: Obliteracers!

Obliteracers Logo

Space Dust Racers always felt like a working title to us. It wasn’t particularly descriptive of the core gameplay, and was a little longwinded to say. From our very first public appearance at GDC 2014, we’d had chats about finding a better name, but it was always something to be swept away for a later date… we had more important things to worry about after all, like building the game!

But one dark and stormy night, Grigor burned the midnight oil flipping through a thesaurus trying to lock in on what it was that made our combat racing game great. At 3am he cried aloud “EUREKA!”… then profusely apologized to his wife for waking the baby.

We’re sure you’ll agree Obliteracers is much more on point for the combat-oriented gameplay we’re going for… we’re as much about the destruction as we are about the speed!

Photo_GDC_2015_3

“Has the Obliteracers name change caused outrage and internal conflict amongst your team?” “Uh, not really, no.”

We have a lot more to talk about over the next few months as we wind up for our PC release. You can help us out by letting your friends know about the game, and if you haven’t already, follow our Steam store page so you’re notified when you can buy the game. Or don’t, I don’t care, I’m not your dad.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/368740/

PS. Remember when we said we were doing early access? So yeah, about that. After a bunch of long talky meetings with lots of doodling on notepads, we kinda decided not to do that and just release instead. The reason is because we want your first experience with Obliteracers to be super awesome and slick and polished and amazing, and early access just wasn’t going to give us that experience. Call us traditionalists. So thanks for your understanding.
tl;dr WE LIED! AHAHAHAHA!

 

Meet our latest Space Dust Racers map “Transporter”

We’re firm believers that the best party games keep it simple, and our latest Space Dust Racers map Transporter is no exception. Check out the gorgeous weather variations our art team has whipped up, that not only look pretty but also radically affect gameplay.

During the evening things are calm and quiet, but during heavy seas huge waves toss the entire race track around. Head into colder waters and ice on the tracks will cause racers to slip and slide their way to victory. Oh yeah, and there’s a huge foghorn!

Transporter Shot 1

Transporter Shot 2

Transporter Shot 3

Developer Playtest #2 – June 2015 – Space Dust Racers

Team Space Dust battle it out in a game of Survival on Clawtopia Tropic Heat. A whopping 19 minute round… perhaps we might need to pull back the score limits? 🙂

Developer Playtest #1 – May 2015 – Space Dust Racers

Developer playtest time! Watch the Space Dust dev team battle it out on NuVark in a game of Knockout:

Goodbye Kickstarter, hello Early Access!

Hey everyone,

It’s not going to come as a surprise (even to our most optimistic backers) when we tell you we’re not going to reach our Kickstarter funding goal of $128K short of a miracle. In this update we’ll tell you why we’re not upset… in fact we’re actually more excited than we’ve ever been!

Space Dust Racers is really fun to play. We have a blast playing it, festival gamers love it, YouTubers are all over it, and our party gaming friends can’t get enough of it. But as we’ve discovered, describing that fun in a Kickstarter pitch is like explaining how delicious chocolate tastes. We understand now that the best way to sell Space Dust Racers to a new audience is by putting a controller in your hands and letting you run wild. Since it’s incredibly unlikely that we can turn our Kickstarter around, we’re moving ahead with a new plan.

That’s not to say our Kickstarter has been a wasted effort. The last week has been incredibly useful for us. Highlights include being greenlit for Steam within a week, being discovered by tens of thousands of new gamers, having our game featured as a Kickstarter Staff pick, making new friends in the gaming press and letsplay community, discovering new opportunities for funding our game, and hearing what fans want Space Dust Racers to become.

Looking ahead, we don’t want to waste everyone’s time for the remainder of the Kickstarter campaign. Instead, we’re tearing off the band-aid – *ouch* – and are cancelling Kickstarter to move onto phase two as quickly as possible: Steam Early Access. This means your pledge will be voided and no money will change hands.

Now that we’ve been greenlit on Steam, bringing Space Dust Racers to Early Access makes much more sense for everyone. Early adopters can try out the game for less money and have more people to play against, Xbox One and PS4 gamers still get the game in early 2016, and Space Dust Racers reaches a much larger audience overall. It does mean that some of our cooler backer rewards are no longer available, and for this we sincerely apologize, but we hope you can understand our reasoning.

So when will all this happen? We can’t give exact dates yet, but we’ll make an announcement soon.

No need to worry about our funding situation either. New opportunities have arisen during our campaign which we’re exploring now, and we’re prepared to weather the storm for quite a while should they fall through. Things may take a bit longer than planned, but we’ll keep you posted.

Finally, thanks to everyone who’s helped us get this far. To our friends and families for their ongoing support, playtesting and patience. Film Victoria for believing in us when we showed them 16 cubes driving on a flat plane. Fabian (The Otherworld Agency) for stepping beyond music guy into general facilitator, and all the musicians for their awesome work. Chris (Surprise Attack), Lauren/Katie (Lumi Consulting), and Tom/Brian (Evolve PR) for their generous wisdom. Tony/Giselle/Kate/Tristin (GDAA/IGDA) for ongoing support. All our industry pals and crowdfunding alumni who offered valuable feedback and promotion. Everyone at Epic Games/Microsoft/Sony for championing us. The Bone Bros/delqhic for their outstanding letsplays. Cam/Luke for handling the scary business bits. All our backers and fans for pledging, liking, retweeting, favoriting, sharing, posting.

You all rock our socks off, and we’ll see you on Steam Early Access soon! 🙂

Love and space hugs,
Michael, Nathan, Glen, Grigor and Stephen

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