#constellationdistantia

Blueprint research, jet crafting and inventory. VR enabled.

After the launch of the ever so beautiful No Man Sky I got a strong feeling that it’s probably a good idea to be as open as possible about Distantia long before we’ll launch it. So here we go. First off, the game is heavily story driven. The manuscript is around 200 pages, written by Anttoni Pihlajamäki, who has more than a decade of experience in editing, publishing and writing. I’m obviously not going to give any spoilers, just gonna leave this here: the game is unique storytelling-wise.

In-game cut scene

The game mechanics is my handiwork. I’m Anttoni’s brother, Valtteri. Nice to meet you. I’ve been around gaming and IT for a long time already, even though I’m only 37. I absolutely love sci-fi and good games with entertaining mechanics, and these are also the foundations of Distantia. While there are quite a lot of things to do in the game, it’s still on the more casual side of the spectrum. It’s super dangerous to make comparisons, but I would say that Distantia reminds more of a GTA game than a space strategy.

The story is told via cut scenes, which are beautifully illustrated by my wife Eve (yes, we are a family business).

The core mechanics are built around free flying, mining, crafting, and trading. Mining can be done in several ways; by making bombing flights on a planetoid with a smaller vessel, all the way to a world destroying mega nukes shot from the mothership. Trading is done by interacting with the other characters in space. 

Free fly mining, a.k.a. a bombing run

Mining like a boss with a huge ass nuke

Resources can be gained through mining and trading (and robbing), and can be used to craft upgrades and all sorts of other things after studying the blueprints. All actions reflect to player karma, which affects to pretty much everything.

Blueprints to research

On top of the core mechanics, we have a bunch of story related custom mission mechanics and occurrences built into the game, but those will remain secret for now. Also worth mentioning is that the space is not always a happy place. There will be blood. 

Hostilities in space, they nuked my mothership goddammit!

I’ll make ‘em pay!

We have been putting a lot of effort into the look and feel. Even though there has been technical challenges from VR requirements to the simple fact that an exploding massive planet is quite a resource hog, we have managed to come up with an outstanding style and design, thanks to the efforts and overseeing by our design director Tomi Wahlroos (brother from another mother, who hasn’t updated his LinkedIn page since 2014.)

The game will be published early 2017 on Steam. Later the same year, on every possible console and VR, details will come later. At the moment we are working fully independent, but we are open to a good publisher co-operation if we happen to run into one. The team includes also my father Kari, who tried to retire after some 40 years in finance, but is now handling everything related to the bureaucracy around the many varying rules and regulations of running a company. Thanks Dad.

Additionally, our latest recruit Matias is working on the VR port full steam and looking good! (The VR version I mean.)