We’re currently playing Innerspace for our review, so we got in touch with PolyKnight Games to talk about its development for Sony’s console.
PS4Blog: Hi! Thank you for joining us at PS4Blog.net. Could you please introduce yourselves to our readers?
My name’s Eric Brodie, and I’m the producer and community manager for PolyKnight Games.
PS4B: Innerspace is out tomorrow. How would you describe the game to someone who’s never played it? What sets this one apart from other games?
It’s a flying exploration game set within inside-out planets. As a flying game, it has really tight controls that encourage the player to experiment, rather than having to focus on keeping the plane in the air. So, you have plenty of health and a plane that’s built to cut, break, and ram into objects to solve puzzles. Of course, there’s also the added element of there being no horizon. In this world, there is no up, no down. It’s evolved into what we think is a pretty unique flying experience.
At its core, InnerSpace is about the experience of playing at your own pace. When you’re collecting relics and exploring the different biomes, you get to chill, learn about the world, interact with the space, and really just enjoy the flight. Then, we juxtapose that with encounters with huge demigod entities that challenge your flying skills. It’s that back and forth, bouncing between the chill and the epic that makes InnerSpace fun.
PS4B: How long did it take you to bring the game to life? Where there any particular challenges you had to overcome during development?
We started while we were still in school back in 2014, working part to full time jobs simultaneously, until we started working with Aspyr in 2016, which allowed the whole team to go full time on the game. From that point on, we were able to literally double the size of the game and add a ton of features that made it what it is today.
As for specific design challenges, building inside-out worlds from scratch presented some unique cases. For example, the worlds are handmade, not procedurally generated. So, taking the time to model and place structures in a curved, inverted space required a lot of communication between art and level design. But, in the end, it was worth it because it allowed us to do a lot of visual storytelling in the environment and in everything you see.
PS4B: Are you thinking about expanding on the story of Innerspace with additional content or are you now considering a new project?
We definitely have a few ideas to support InnerSpace after release that were jamming on right now. I’m also really excited to see what fans enjoy about the game, so we can integrate the way people play it into some of those ideas.
PS4B: And now it is time for us to go. Would you like to add anything else before we end this one?
To anybody reading this who either has or hasn’t played the game, I want to say, “Thank you.” This is our first game, and it’s really humbling and exciting to see people outside of our group of friends play it. I really genuinely hope that you enjoy it and what we were trying to do.
