SpaceSimCentral

Hi everyone, i'm Alex and i'm part of a small indie development studio in the Netherlands called Split Polygon. All 5 of us are fresh out of college and have been working on our first game "Interstellar Rift" for a little over a year, which I would like to tell you a little bit more about. Interstellar Rift is a space sim which will lets you get out of the pilot seat and manage your ship from a first person perspective. This means you'll be able to man a single ship with multiple people working together while you explore a proceduraly generated galaxy, fight enemies and other players or simply mine to your heart's content so you can further expand your ship. Players can use the ship builder to design their spaceships in whatever shape or size they want. You will be able to completely customize the interior and exterior to suit your tastes and needs. Further down the line you'll also be able to create space stations in this manner. Our goal is to create the a sci-fi space sim sandbox, where players can do whatever they like. Build a giant capitol ship with your friends and attempt to maintain order as you lay claim to a star system or simply play the humble pirate that teleports aboard other player's ships and raids their cargo when the shields are down. or perhaps you're more of a trader, finding rare resources and items to sell to other players for big profit. Our first devblog will explain what we've done so far and where we're heading. You can check out our screenshot gallery here We've recently released our pre-alpha ship builder to the public for free, and we would like people to play around with it and give us feedback. The ship builder will allow you to design a ship from the ground up and also let you walk around inside via virtual tour mode. As its still very early in development any feedback you're willing to provide will help us greatly in making sure its fun and easy to use.We are currently updating the ship editor every two weeks and we hope to have the alpha version of the game out later this year. you can download the ship builder here We hope you'll give the editor a try and let us know what you think. In any case, any critique comments or questions are more than welcome and I'll do my best to answer all of them. For more information please check out our website and forums at: www.interstellarrift.comor feel free to follow us on twitter, facebook or IndieDB Thank you,Alex

Sounds very interesting! Am surprised i haven't found this one yet! First impression for me it sounds like a mix between limit theory, space engineers and pulsar lost colony. Especially like the way ship building works, the cooperative ship play and the amount of freedom. Also kudos for not using unity. It's limitations are lately causing plenty of ragequits here.

Sounds very interesting! Am surprised i haven't found this one yet! First impression for me it sounds like a mix between limit theory, space engineers and pulsar lost colony. Especially like the way ship building works, the cooperative ship play and the amount of freedom. Also kudos for not using unity. It's limitations are lately causing plenty of ragequits here.Thank you, and you're right that we're taking inspiration from all those games. Including several others :)We've only announced the game a month and a half ago and we haven't gone full force on the PR campaign yet. so it's not surprising you haven't seen it yet. And we're not using unity because it simply can't do what we need it to do with the performance we are looking for. Games like pulsar are aiming for a 5 man experience, while we're aiming for 64+ player persistent servers (similar to freelancer) where each player can own their own ship or they could join forces and man 1 ship with multiple people, with the level of complexity we're going for that's simply not possible in unity without a major overhaul. So in the long run it would save us time and headaches by making our own engine.

I'm glad you made that decision beforehand instead of discovering it during development (looks at kerbal). In the end, it causes headaches at the devteam and consumers alike. At least shows some brains behind the design decisions. That deserves some roomijs/kudos  For the rest, might be going to download the alpha sometime soon and play it with a bunch of friends (my home is often converted to lanparty gaming center, and next month i am quite sure there will be plenty of gaming fun). Does the alpha right now support multi/coop play? And if not, any idea on when that might happen?

I'm glad you made that decision beforehand instead of discovering it during development (looks at kerbal). In the end, it causes headaches at the devteam and consumers alike. At least shows some brains behind the design decisions. That deserves some roomijs/kudos  For the rest, might be going to download the alpha sometime soon and play it with a bunch of friends (my home is often converted to lanparty gaming center, and next month i am quite sure there will be plenty of gaming fun). Does the alpha right now support multi/coop play? And if not, any idea on when that might happen? Not yet the pre-alpha is just the ship editor, It will let you make a ship (inside and outside) and it will let you walk around inside what you just built. Flying has been disabled for the time being as it isn't working as intended yet.Right now we're focused on gathering feedback so we can improve the editor. In the near future we'll start adding multiplayer so you can walk around with multiple people and start interacting with systems etc. 

Ah okay Let me know when the multiplayer thing arrives Glad to test it out then.

Very impressive but I take it this not a free game so I will move the thread to the online multiplayer forum tomorrow. Any single player game in there or is all just multiplayer.

As far as i could gather, it will be both. But maybe sentinel can shed some light on this

Very impressive but I take it this not a free game so I will move the thread to the online multiplayer forum tomorrow. Any single player game in there or is all just multiplayer. ah sorry about posting it in the wrong forum, but since the editor is free and will always remain free I thought i should post it here.In any case the single player mode will be similar to multiplayer but just with less people in it. we're not planning a storymode at the moment.

We recorded a small video to talk a bit about the new power distribution system and how you can connect systems. These new additions to the game are not in any way complete and will have bugs and issues. In the coming updates we will build on this system and slowly open up the possibilities to control your ship. You can download the latest version of the ship builder here. 

It's been an interesting series of months but we finally did it! Multiplayer and spaceflight the core of our game are working!  If you want to check it out for yourself you can download the pre-alpha for free! right here http://www.interstellarrift.com/download/[/url]

WIP video update, 

Another short video.  Looking good if they get the single player option sorted out I will be getting this.

We've just released the first Trailer for the Pre-alpha 

Nice video of an extractor which I am guessing turns asteroids/rocks into ore. 

Interstellar Rift just keeps getting better and I still cannot believe the sheer size of the insides of that station. And it looks like they are creating things for you to do on your ship besides fly so that adds to the overall immersion of you being on a ship and performing duties.

Another short video.  Continues to impress.

haha that is awesome, its the little things that matter.

Interstellar rift gets it own jukebox  But can you play your own tunes on it?.