Satellite Reign - Interview @ Develop

[Myrthos]

Develop has interviewed some of the Satellite Reign devs about their game with a main focus on the Unity engine they are using.

“This is our first game as an indie studio,” said Brent Waller, environment artist. “The response so far on Early Access has been really positive, so we’re sure people will really enjoy it. We hope it does well for us, but for now, we’re trying to play it safe by keeping our expectations somewhat grounded.”

Given the team’s varying levels of experience with Unity on both personal projects, character artist Dean Ferguson says other engines “barely got more than a glance”. In fact, Unity was used for more than just the game’s development.

“All of our Kickstarter pitch cinematics and materials were created in Unity,” he reveals. “Usually something like that would have been created with pre-rendered cinematics. Unity allowed us a high quality end result without the time sink of rendering.”

Thanks Eye.

More information.

 

[FunktionJCB]

Satellite Reign is one of my favourite games of the year.
Sadly, it's been a bit overlooked, and has sold poorly so far, to say the least, despite the positive reception from both gamers and critics.

Hopefully when it receives a sale on Steam, more people will look into it.

 

[Archangel]

Satellite Reign is one of my favourite games of the year.
Sadly, it's been a bit overlooked, and has sold poorly so far, to say the least, despite the positive reception from both gamers and critics.

Hopefully when it receives a sale on Steam, more people will look into it.

I just checked the sales, dear god I wasn't expecting them to be that pathetic

I was hoping it sold well so they can improve it in next 6 months when I was planning to buy it on a sale

 

[xenocide]

Sad to hear about the poor sales.

Very good game and definitely worth checking out if you haven't yet.

 

[Ripper]

Shame. I must buy a copy. I usually enjoy this sort of thing.

 

[FunktionJCB]

I just checked the sales, dear god I wasn't expecting them to be that pathetic

It's even worse if you account that there were 15.000 backers on Kickstarter, and at least 2.000 of them received 2 copies of the game, so we are looking at around 19.000 Steam copies being from Kickstarter backers. Also, the game was in Early Access for some months, so if you remove the sales it had during this period, the game has barely sold any copies since release.

In fact, unless the sales info at Steamspy is wrong, the game has lost around 10.000 owners since I last checked the sales (certainly from refunding purchases).

I was hoping this game would be a stepping stone for other things, since this studio is led by Mike Diskett, one of the founders of Mucky Foot Productions (Startopia, Urban Chaos) and a former Bullfrog developer, who worked on titles such as Theme Park, and the Syndicate series, among others, but unless things change with upcoming sales, I fear this will be a one time thing.
And it's a shame, since the game is very impressive, especially considering the team size, and the budget of the game (unlike many other campaigns, these guys worked pretty much with the Kickstarter funds, and their savings, not external backing).