Breaking cover on Subveillance

Some time last year — or was it the year before? — I was watching Jack Lyttle stream Elite Dangerous. He got talking about his wish that there was a game that recreated the situations you see in Star Wars. You know the kind of thing, one team is in space and their buddies are down on the planet. The planet team have to turn off the force field so that the space team can blow up the thing in space that needs blowing up.

Now, I have wanted to create a sci-fi game for a very, very long time. I'm talking decades. Sci-fi games like Elite and Space Quest and Wing Commander and Command & Conquer were a big part of my life growing up. I’ve made a handful of games on-and-off over the years but I’ve never scratched that itch to recapture something of those formative experiences.

So as I listened to Jack describe this sci-fi game that didn’t exist I wondered… was this the game I was looking for? Had it found me? I chewed on the idea for a good long time.

Before I could contemplate starting any kind of development I needed to check if a game like this existed already. I didn’t want to pour time and effort into a project only to have someone say, "Oh, you mean your game is like Awesome Star Wars Scenarios – The Multiplayer Game?".

I searched and searched, punching in all the combinations of keywords I could think of into search engines and game stores. Nothing quite like what I had in mind came up. Certainly there are games with some of the elements. Deep Rock Galactic has co-op in space, but it's about mining a single location. Payday has the team heist thing sewn up but it's set in present day. Operation: Tango comes close but is limited to 2 players.

And so about 5 months ago, with moderate confidence I was creating something at least partially novel, I started work on Subveillance. I should note that it didn’t have this name until about a week ago and the naming probably deserves a post all of its own.

In the run up to Christmas I took a 3 month detour and created another game called Undead Farmstead. It was an important exercise in learning the Godot game engine on a small scale project but also means that Subveillance is less progressed than you might expect. I do have some early experiments under way but I’m going to leave those for future posts; this one has gone on long enough already.

Today I’m breaking cover on Subveillance with this post. I’m hoping that making a public declaration will spur me on when times get tough. I have no idea how the game will turn out but I hope to it ends up something fun to play with friends. Stay tuned!