it's been a long road to reach here, but where is here exactly? certainly not at the point of a playable game. go on, download the alpha and see. i'll wait. three years of effort have yielded a poorly-specced engine, broad in scope, medium in implemented features, low in tested performance. but while i've roughly scraped the surface of potential (and/or desirable) features, there's precious little to do aboard the space train.

and yet, key pieces are in place. i have scriptable items, a wonky multiplayer connectivity, and the menu screen has never looked better. basic infrastructure is in place for a character creator. saving level data out again though? problematic. if i could start again from the beginning, i'd worry more about time steps, and about physics, and about managing the execution of events in a more structured fashion. but there have also been bullets dodged: i have platform independence, and a clarity of code structure that has made it easy to keep adding engine features out sideways indefinitely. tedious programmer stuff.

i don’t really know what i was hoping to do in 2015 when i sat down and thought “i’m gonna make a game”, outside of stretching that ‘do lots of programming’ muscle in the way i have. all i really had in mind was a strong desire to not do what i saw in swathes of other indie titles and heartfelt epics at the time, which was (a.) boil down a simple, enjoyable mechanic to it’s basic elements or (b.) nostalgically retread the games of my youth. whether those were fair criticisms i don’t know. but i took to it, in dribs and drabs, a day here, a weekend there, for most of 2016 and now most of 2018. coding, coalescing free art assets, and lots and lots of working with build systems and compilers. in that time i got a phd, a flat, two cars and a job. but for all that time, i was mentioning to people in passing “oh, i’m working on a game. It’s called _space_train.”

and so today is the release of the “first” alpha. in practise i’ve doled out copies to unsuspecting friends for about nine months now to varying degrees of response, but never for open sharing. from the start i made the dubious decision to program the whole thing almost entirely myself, in c++, from top to bottom, with minor concessions to using libraries for loading file types, creating a window, playing sound (sound is still an entire canvas i’ve barely touched).

i’ve never been sure enough what anyone would get out of interacting with what i’ve got so far to release, and that’s still true. that was true when i took a build to EGX rezzed earlier this year, and watched a pleasing handful of people be completely and utterly bewildered. my initial assumption, as with every project i’ve ever done, was that in proceeding in a straight line towards completion, i would discover the way in which the ideas i hoped to express would embed themselves in the creation of the medium.

this is how i found it to be in video editing, at least. the process of choosing, cutting and refining your edit naturally brings out the ideas, the mood, the sensations of what is trying to be put across. you can watch this at work in the video i made of people playing _space_train at EGX rezzed;  the choice of music is a good match for how i felt attending: ponderous, apprehensive, but hopeful. the close shot of the back of a player’s head as they chase the player character with the mouse, the timelapse of someone sitting and playing the game at length during an otherwise quiet period at the stand: unsure, but interested.

i was assuming and hoping that i could get the same out of programming, as an art. that in pouring my creative thinking into writing code for all the various parts of the game, the game itself would echo them. i’m not so sure anymore. there is an aesthetic to good code writing, for sure, and lots of personal satisfaction to be gained from properly structuring and executing a design in code. but it doesn’t reflect much of anything, or communicate, in the way that when i’m real mad i’ll completely chop up a video edit but when i’m more mellow later i’ll recut to give it more space to breath. fuming about politics while you write a keyboard event system does not give your prospective players a keyboard event system that conveys how you were fuming about politics.

after three years, there’s probably more of my personality and thoughts poured into the hundreds of git commit messages than there is in the thrice-refined implementation of client/server networking. i added a one-line description of a tomato last month that contains more character, world-building and humour than possibly the rest of the existing game combined. that’s just silly.

there’s lots about _space_train, lore and plans and conceived features, that only exists in my head. hopefully in time the balance will tip in the other direction and the stuff i’ve sketched together loosely will become actual game content which will blast out from a loudspeaker the state of mind i thought them up in. i absolutely think games can and do communicate as art; i’ve just not yet spent enough time making a game.

thanks for reading.

_space_train is an upcoming space adventure video game experience. Players can explore, interact and repair a great, hulking space station in the form of a train in both single and multiplayer play. Any number of roles on-board is available, from captain to bathroom attendant, across a huge, interactive map. Take a shuttle and blast asteroids from the rails ahead, or stick with a spanner in the bowels of the engine complex. Pursue politics, religion or fame in the stars!