Big news today – we’re happy to announce that Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime has been selected as the next game to be supported by the Gold Egg Project! This is a fund put together by the amazing people at The Behemoth, and we couldn’t be more excited.
Developing Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime has been quite the experience for us here at Asteroid Base. We have been working on the game on and off since January 2012, and throughout most of that time we have been self-funding the game by doing a few days of external contract work each week. It was really great for the first year-and-a-half because it allowed us to not only be sustainable, but also afforded us the time to figure out the kind of game we wanted Lovers to be.
But, by the autumn of 2013 we were starting to feel the weight of development taking its toll. Progress on Lovers was moving too slowly and we were in the midst of a long period of the refactoring all of our code – up to that point, the game that we showed in 2013 at the IGF, GDC, E3, PAX Prime and IndieCade was basically a very polished prototype. We finally reached a point where we felt that we needed to devote all of our time to development and, to facilitate this, we started looking for outside sources for funding. We went to the usual places, banks, publishers, platforms, etc., but each one came with the usual catches. We contemplated doing a Kickstarter, but were worried that the amount of effort it would take to run a successful campaign would devour even more time out of our already pressed development cycle.
Last summer at PAX Prime we had the pleasure of meeting the fine folks at The Behemoth. They came by our booth, played Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime and then we parted ways. We kept in touch after that, and they seemed to take a real interest in our game. Another few months later they asked us if we were looking for any funding for the game, and there it was! They told us about the Gold Egg Project, and it was an amazing opportunity – financial support from a fellow developer that was structured for a fellow developer, without the usual catches.
And so here we are, three months into full-time development, and Lovers is coming together faster than ever. We still don’t have a final release date, but now that day seems much more realistic!