HISTORY
Development & Design of The Ship
The Ship has been in development since the summer of 2003. A lengthy and detailed design doc was gradually scaled down into The Ship mod for Half-Life 1, which we released in June 2004. This mod was intended to prove that the game-play works as laid out in the design. Thankfully it did work, although early releases had serious problems and there was quite a bit of work involved in trying to plug the various exploits, which people immediately seized upon. Nevertheless the mod was hailed as a success, thousands of people have downloaded it and we received quite a bit of press.
It was inevitable that we'd have to stop adding to and fixing the mod at some point because our small team had to focus on other projects and of course the full version of The Ship. We were all surprised at the response The Ship mod got, especially considering the age of the HL1 engine and the consequent poor quality of the graphics. The forums were buzzing with enthusiastic fans, full of good suggestions but we could say nothing of the deal in progress - this was pure torture. The press also featured The Ship mod, from an article in Edge to a cover disc on PC Gamer and a finalist spot as one of the best downloads of 2004 at Gamespot, the coverage was all good.
After a lengthy evaluation process we decided to go with the Source (HL2) engine for the full game and we got the first code drop in October 2004. Getting to grips with this powerful beast has been a bit of a slog but early prototypes we produced for publishers hinted at the incredible art standard we could achieve and gave everyone a boost.
Chasing deals is probably the least fun part of game development. Publishers are very demanding and we had to prove that The Ship, which we always envisioned as a multiplayer experience, would work as a single player game, there was even talk of console versions. We produced a very basic single player demo with some functionality, which was well received at E3 2005 but didn't lead to anything concrete in terms of distribution deals.
We re-evaluated our approach post-E3 and decided that our original belief that The Ship is primarily a multiplayer PC game was correct. We returned to the original design, streamlined it as much as possible and set course for a complete multiplayer version of the game, released for PC in July 2006.
The game has now been released world wide as a retail boxed product and is also available for download from Valve's Steam network.
The company has recently signed a deal to produce the sequel to "The Ship" and have just started working on the product. The new game will be released on PC and XBox360 sometime in 2009.