The Vision Behind Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Blackbird Interactive, a studio known for its creative approach to game development, has crafted an immersive and futuristic experience in Hardspace: Shipbreaker. This zero-g spaceship-salvaging sandbox game is set to release on consoles on September 20, offering players a unique blend of science fiction and real-world industrial elements.
The team behind the game includes Elliot Hudson (Game Director), Chris Williams (Studio Art Director), and Vidhi Shah (Senior UX Designer). Their goal was to create a world that feels both futuristic and grounded, drawing inspiration from various historical and contemporary sources.
A Retro Futurism Approach
One of the key inspirations for Hardspace: Shipbreaker is the concept of “cassette futurism,” which draws from 70s and 80s technology. This aesthetic choice helps to bridge the gap between the past and the future, creating a setting that feels both familiar and imaginative.
To build the lore and context of the game, the team conducted extensive research into emerging technologies and theories about the future of human space travel and the industrialization of space. They also explored the history of industry and human labor, looking at events such as the Luddite rebellion, America’s Gilded Age, and the work of Ironworkers who built the first skyscrapers in the 1920s.
Additionally, the team studied modern-day shipbreakers, particularly those in places like Alang Beach in Gujarat, to understand the challenges and realities of the shipbreaking industry.
Designing the Spaceships
Creating a believable and immersive environment was crucial for the game. The design language of the spaceships had to reflect the harsh realities of salvage work in a zero-gravity setting. To achieve this, the team researched contemporary seafaring boats and ships, studying blueprints and even visiting a derelict ferry to gain a better understanding of their construction.
The team’s approach to designing the spaceships was not just about making them look cool. Instead, they focused on practicality, considering how these designs would function in real life. This involved thinking through what a day in the life of a shipbreaker would be like and how technology might help or hinder their work.
Balancing the Future and Reality
Striking a balance between futuristic elements and details from our current reality was a challenge. The team established ground rules to ensure the game’s world remained internally logical. For example, there is no faster-than-light travel, nor is there teleportation or advanced AI. The industrial challenges of salvaging ships are mostly solved through brute force.
Despite being set in the future, the game aims to show that the tools of labor often look similar across different time periods. The team looked at existing welding and grinding equipment, trying to bring a tactile, rough-and-ready look to everything they created for the game.
The Dynamics of Labor and Industry
The dynamics between the working class and corporations in Hardspace: Shipbreaker are intentionally heightened and sometimes satirical, but they reflect broader themes that have existed throughout the history of labor and industry. These dynamics are easy to recognize even today, making the game’s setting both relevant and thought-provoking.
Finding the Right Tone
Mixing references and inspiration was a key part of the design process. The team drew from 80s and 90s anime for their industrial design and visual effects. Regular movie nights helped explore the balance between satire and dystopia, with films like “Alien,” “Moon,” and “Outland” influencing the game’s tone.
Documentaries and dramas such as “Brazil,” “Blood on the Mountain,” “Deepwater Horizon,” and the 1979 blue-collar thriller “Steel” also played a role in shaping the game’s setting and atmosphere.
Literary Influences
The team read works by authors such as John Steinbeck, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joseph Heller, Cory Doctorow, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ray Bradbury throughout the game’s development. These literary influences helped the team understand the themes they were exploring and provided a foundation for their storytelling.
Zero-Gravity Physics Simulation
Simulating a zero-g environment and providing players with full movement within it was one of the biggest challenges the team faced. Ensuring that players could easily navigate the salvaging environment required careful attention to spatial cues, such as giving each ship an easily identifiable floor and ceiling.
Technically and artistically, the requirement for all parts of a ship to be destructible and modeled with complex physics meant that each part needed to be a simple, convex shape. The art team worked tirelessly to overcome this challenge, using texture work to add detail, while the technical team implemented graphical features to “cheat” even more detail on objects.
First-Person Perspective
The first-person perspective was chosen to enhance immersion, allowing players to feel as though they are truly part of the game’s world. Many members of the team are long-time FPS fans, and this was a great opportunity to explore and expand their skills as designers and artists.
To reinforce the game’s immersive quality, the team opted for a mostly diegetic UI style and HUD. The UI interfaces in the game are modeled after early monochromatic computers such as the Apple II, and the player’s HUD in their helmet is inspired by fighter jets.
Conveying Information and Dangers
The team intentionally went a bit overboard in conveying large amounts of information to the player through the HUD. Decisions about the limited color palette, visual effects, and distortion when a player runs into hazards are all designed to reinforce the dangers of the job and the sense that the player is just a small part of a big world that may not have their best interests at heart.
Lessons Learned
Working on Hardspace: Shipbreaker was a valuable learning experience for the team. The shift to a first-person perspective and the physics simulations were crucial parts of the experience, although they proved to be more challenging than anticipated.
However, these challenges also made the project more satisfying. Developing a game that fits with the team’s core strengths in world building and ship design, while also allowing them to stretch out and try new things, was a rewarding endeavor.
Release Details
Hardspace: Shipbreaker will be released on September 20 on Xbox Series X|S and will be available Day One on Xbox Game Pass. The game is already available on PC and is included with PC Game Pass.
