Less than a year out from a successful Kickstarter campaign, Lightspeed Frontier is nearly ready to make its Steam Early Access debut. The project managed to surpass its extremely conservative $2,500 funding goal, but just barely.
In our initial coverage we’d wondered how such a modest budget would translate to development. A similar project at the time was asking for nearly seven times what Lightspeed Frontier was seeking. It seemed like Riveted Games’ ship building sandbox experience wouldn’t be able to compete. That may very well have been the case if Riveted’s CEO Philip Devine had been relying solely on the outcome of the Kickstarter campaign.
Lightspeed Frontier was one of the crowdfunding projects exhibited at PAX South in San Antonio. Sadly, I’m abysmal at space shooters. Thankfully, Philip stepped in and took the controls so I could actually see some gameplay. Instead of just me flying in circles backwards (yes, that happened and no, I didn’t record it).
The galaxy is vast and brimming with criminals and corporations for the player to encounter. Ship modules are added in real time with a quick drag and drop. This becomes especially useful when salvaging destroyed enemy vessels.
Getting Just A Little More
During the demonstration Philip explained the logic behind their small funding goal. The majority of the game had been self-funded by the developers. The campaign’s goal was never meant to fund the entirety of the project, rather it served to support a specific goal.
He explained that he thought it was dangerous for developers to rely on Kickstarter too much. Especially if they didn’t already have a bunch of progress to show. After all, win or lose those campaigns would continue to show up in search results indefinitely. “Putting your game out there at such an early stage,” could be detrimental to newer projects.
Lightspeed Frontier was very fortunate in that regard. It was far enough along in development to have a demo available and plenty of assets to show off. The upcoming early access build will already have plenty of single player missions with satire infused quests and content for players to check out.
If you’ve been looking for a quirky ship builder in a galaxy not so far away, Lightspeed Frontier may be right up your nebula.
