A Letter to Our Community
Hello!
I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and my team. I won't get into the names of everyone, as most are not on twitter or reddit— and the ones who are may wish to keep some level of anonymity; or at the least, may want to make themselves known at a later date. I will let them introduce themselves as they please.
My name is Scarlett Toney, aka Soliloquis. I am the lead developer and principal artist for Frontiers Reach as well as the co-founder of Blind Alien Productions. I started developing Frontiers Reach under the title “Pirates of Frontiers Reach” back in September of 2020. After solving the AI issue, I was able to get a bunch of custom artwork into the engine and release a stable if not rough game on to Steam. It was enough to pitch the game to potentially interested parties as a demo, and I could set a fair price so that only those actually interested in supporting the project would spend money on it. I also handed out a number of steam keys and ran a few campaigns to help generate interest in the project. I've managed to do a lot considering I started this whole thing with $500 in the bank, and while I was in the process of filing for unemployment.
Since then I've joined forces with the programmer who is responsible for the flight mechanics in the latest iteration of the game. I'm not sure how many of you have had a chance to dive into it, but I've caught myself getting sucked into playing around more often than I should. We've also added a character artist who is working on the design of our characters with me, and our writer, who we added a few months ago. Our character artist is a very talented young lady early in her career as an artist, and we love to see here work. In contrast, our lead writer is an older gentleman who has 20 years of experience, and has published some thriteen sci-fi novels. Aside from being old, he is also our resident comedian.
Recently we've also added a composer to our team who is extremely talented. I'm really looking forward to showing off their work here very soon. Additionally, our new composer has introduced me to a sound designer. I am talking to him right now, and hope to bring him aboard.
So, what is Frontiers Reach and who in the heck is paying for all of this? Well, if you've purchased the game, thank you! No seriously, thank you. We are at our core, storytellers and it is our desire to entertain in that capacity. But we also want to be story-listeners. I swear I'll get to the part about the money…
Frontiers Reach is an Arcade Space/Flight Combat game inspired by the games, movies, and books of the 1990s— favorite content from our childhood, and from our own personal life experiences. The story is set 200 years in the future, an alternate history timeline that’s yielded a very different future: Humanity has colonized hundreds of stars with the help of an AI and its awesome abilities. But humans will always be humans no matter how far we stray from home; and so our story begins on the eve of war between the newly founded Republic of Frontier Worlds and the old, corrupt Sol Confederacy of Planets.
Lore-wise, I started work on Frontiers Reach sometime around the beginning of 2015. Back then I wasn't sure what shape it would take and the lore timetable was a bit different; it was also mostly just notes and sketches. The aesthetic of the universe was different too, though many of the same themes of old and rusty starships remain. Around the start of September 2020, I got wind that a certain Star Wars game from the N-64 era was being remade with the UE4 engine. It got CnDed into non-existence. Needless to say I was upset.
So I resolved to finally make Frontiers Reach into some kind of arcade flight combat game in the vein of the above mentioned Star Wars project. But I had played so many other flight games over the years that had things I loved: Freelancer, Freespace, DarkStar One, Crimson Skies, Jane's WW2 Fighters… Then I met the now lead programmer who happened to be a lifelong Ace Combat fan, and before he started on Frontiers Reach, he was working on his own flight game, and he was about 6 months ahead of me programming-wise.
Back to the money. When it comes to who is floating the bill for development and production, well, that would be us. We're all dedicating our time to create this new universe out of a shared desire to make something uniquely awesome. Save for those people who have purchased the game, all other money has come out of my own personal finances. Oh, and there was a $30 contribution by the lead programmer to help purchase the new cloud tech that we hope you're enjoying. The rest of it is all hard work and dedication, and staring into a screen late into the night.
But this new universe will not be ours alone. Our aim isn't to just to tell you a story or feed you a bunch of generic content. Remember what I said about being story-listeners? Well, one day soon, we aim to expose some of our development tools for community use, and integrate the game with Steam Workshop. Players will be able to share missions and maybe even coordinates for secret places in the galaxy that are otherwise inaccessible if you just play the main story.
We've got a lot of things we’d love to do that we're not quite ready to talk about— and I feel like I've already written a wall of text. But maybe this wall of text is letting you all know what we're up to—and that’s a good thing, right? Let us know. We're going to keep developing and pushing to get our toolset up and running for the official release. Once we go into release, our feature set won't expand much. We'll switch over to production mode and work on delivering content that moves the main story along, on what we hope is a consistent basis. What that release schedule for new content looks like is admittedly difficult to pin down at this time. We've got a lot of the groundwork laid down for this already, but we need a more robust system that allows for greater ease-of-use and we're just not there yet.
Well, I feel like I've gone on long enough, so I'm going to stop here. Please do not hesitate to ask questions or suggest features that you think would be interesting to have. If it's something we think can get done within reasonable effort alongside our development goals, we'll definitely take a look at it.
Until next time though, fly safe!