#Stars beyond reach indefinitely delayed code
#Stars beyond reach indefinitely delayed free

We made dozens and dozens of cool parts to a really neat watch, metaphorically speaking, but we just can't get all those parts to fit together as a single watch that works the way we want. We didn't just run out of time and stop or something. In our case I have a feel that I want, and we have a whole lot of working parts, but the parts don't all fit together. Generally EA is for games that have a very distinctive vision in mind, and people expect them to be finished. (That pun is inevitable low hanging fruit) TLDR: Its legacy will live on in various other titles we may do in the future, but this one was indeed beyond reach.

#Stars beyond reach indefinitely delayed code

We will inevitably revisit some of the same themes and ideas in the future in other ways, but it won't be from digging up the code or art from this game itself (as good as both are). There are also inevitable complications with rights on various pieces of the direct work here, which would make it hard for us to revisit it from a financial sense. The actual game itself, as it exists in these screenshots, is based on a UI system we no longer use or want to use, an art pipeline that is no longer compatible with how we make games, and a far older version of our codebase. Stars Beyond Reach was to be our magnum opus, and so many things were going right with it, and we spent a ton of money on it, but ultimately it's just another one for the R&D pile. The difference with all those other projects is that we spent far less money working on them, and they never had any presence on Steam or any other storefront.

Cretaceous was a cool dinosaur-themed citybuilder/risk-like that gave some inspiration to Stars Beyond Reach. Starport 28 was a promising idea that wasn't visually legible in the sort of art we could do.

Exodus of the Machine was one that had a huge bunch of art done on it. We actually have had many projects that went through some amount of R&D before being shelved, some with public testing and some without. Many of the technical achievements that we made with this game - or indeed with the also ill-fated In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor - went on to directly have a positive impact on AI War 2. So a lot of the great ideas from this game, the parts that worked, will probably wind up finding their way into the DNA of our other projects.

#Stars beyond reach indefinitely delayed free

Releasing it in a half-baked format also doesn't seem like a great idea, even at a very low or free price. Releasing into Early Access is not an option, because once we take your money we are obligated to somehow figure it out. We had over 100 testers in our alpha versions, and a lot of them did have fun, but the experience as a whole never truly gelled. We had to step back from this in 2015, and moved on to other projects. Why Unlikely To Release?We spent a long time working on this game, and ultimately it never reached the level of being fun.