Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a first person, zero-G, spaceship salvaging game.
You play a shipbreaker at Morrigan Station.
It's a blue collar job, you're punching the clock every single day
you get paid for your work, you punch the clock
go back to your hab and the next morning you wake up and you do it again.
It's roughly modeled after the gilded age of America
where civilization was expanding across this new frontier.
And so in Hardspace
humanity has spread through most of the solar system.
And so you have people that live on Mars, or on the moons of Jupiter, that kind of thing
and that's where all of the rich people, mostly, have gone to live.
And so Earth has become this backwater
and you really want to just escape that squalor
so you took this job, this extremly hazardous job with the Lynx corporation to tear apart these ships.
But we also wanted to kind of play around with the corporation thing
and one thing that we could all relate to on the dev side of things was this idea of being in debt.
And it's not something you really realize until you get there to the station
and it's kind of in the fine print of the contract.
Like, we've all signed EULAs where you tick a box and you're like "yeah yeah yeah whatever, I just need..."
and you hit submit
but how many of us actually read those kinds of things?
Well we wanted to kind of have a play with that and if you do read the contract in the beginning of the game
there is some fine print there
You're an employee of Lynx in the game.
They own you, essentially. They own your D.N.A.
So you may try escape this hard work
that they've got you indentured into
by dying.
You're out of luck because they have your D.N.A. they can just reassemble you
and whenever you die in the game
boom, you're straight back in for another go.
And so, to do that, you have this cutting torch
the big heavy duty tool that you've been equipped with in the yard
And you can go in, you can split any object in the game.
You can approach it from any direction
and it was a huge technical challenge for us to be able to go in and say:
the player can aim in any direction and split something apart in any way that they want
and how do we maintain physical accuracy with that, does that thing light on fire now?
Does it melt? Does it just vaporize into nothing?
It's probably the single biggest attention to detail that we've tried to do in this project.
We knew we wanted to tell a bit of a different story
flipping things on their head a bit, where we were looking at
what was really cool and exciting about being just a worker in this universe, basically.
If you look at people who work on oil rigs,
or even going back to the early skyscraper photos of people way up on girders hanging out over New York.
There is something there that spoke to the team.
So what we'd do, we'd look at some references for that Cowboy Bebop was one of them
Was it Black Gold? Was another one, the documentary about oil rig workers
and we start to seed that into the game itself.
So we really tried to ground the environment to be this kind of like blue collar setting.
So for example the dockyard, that the player actually works in
is an approximation of a real life dry dock, that you'll see shipbreakers working, ship repairmen working.
Maybe you're pretty badass, because you're not Master Chief, you're not the ultimate badass in this universe.
You're someone that maybe no one is looking at, but is actually a total badass
and taking these immense risks, and being incredibly brave to really just help people,
and help humanity expand out into the universe.
When we were showing it at PAX, we had a guy that came up and he is an actual shipbreaker.
He worked for the U.S. Navy out of Alaska and he was like, 'I heard about your game'
'I came to check it out cause I actually break ships' and we are all like 'whaaat'
and he played the game, he came afterwards, he came up to us, seemed to be having fun.
And we were like 'yeah, right on' he came up and then he was like
'You know guys, I gotta say, it's kinda like my day job, you know?'
'Only it's in space.'
We were like 'Perfect, that's amazing!'
One of the beautiful things in the narrative kind of devices that we've got in the game is
in most games you go out into the world and you experience the story of how the game takes place
well, in Hardspace: Shipbreaker, the story comes to you
by way of these ships
and in each one of these ships, we have PDAs, and we have audio logs that you can kind of discover
and they're almost like
messages in a bottle from crew members and from some of the stories of where the ship has been.
Who made it? What did it do while it was out there?
And slowly but surely, the more ships that you break down and these more stories that you collect
and you listen to, you start piecing together, all of the puzzle pieces that make up the Hardspace universe.
So Blackbird culture has been one of, I like to call it a garage culture, it's very...
I mean we've grown quite a bit in the years that I've been here.
Obviously you have to layer in some corporateness, in order to have a studio that runs at this size
but Blackbird has always maintained that kind of gritty, like
coming from the garage, incorporating everyone's idea, collaborative type environment.
Well, it's really important to us to get the community involved cause we want to make
the best game we possibly can.
You know, we all play games, we love games, we have ideas of what we want this game to be.
But that doesn't mean that we are the only ones with ideas, and the only ones with great ideas.
And part of the reason is that we're a very small team you know, we're twenty-ish people at any given time.
So we have limited bandwith and we have limited brainpower and so if we can harness the global brainpower
of all our fans around the world, we feel like we can really generate something fantastic.
With Shipbreaker you're actually dynamically cutting panels, and that's creating physics objects
and no one have done that, no one has created a massive starship and then allowed you to set off a reactor
and watch the chain reaction as fuel lines explode and the whole thing is dynamically exploding in front of you
as it would in space as it's decompressing.
No one has done that.
The opportunity that a lot of players are gonna have is to experience something they have never seen before.
This is not a slightly better version of a first person shooter you've played many times
This is a completly unique experience.