We’ll be working on a review for Nullstar: Solus, so I got in touch with Smash Attack Studios to talk a bit about the game and its development. Come check it out!
PS4Blog: Good morning! Thank you for joining us. Could you please help us get started by telling our readers a bit about yourself and your work?
Hello! I’m Ryan Gee, Art Director at Smash Attack Studios. We’re an indie studio based in Tasmania, but with team members all across the world. A lot of the team has worked together before on prior projects before coming together to make Nullstar: Solus; we’re all friends, so often it feels more like a band than a studio!
Nullstar: Solus is our first major title. We began development about two years ago with an early prototype, which we took to Gamescom 2024; shortly after, we signed a publishing deal with Indie.io, and have been hard at work since. We’ve come a long way in a short time, and we’re really excited to show everyone what we’ve been up to!
PS4B: On that note, Nullstar: Solus is launching on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5 on April 16. What can you tell us about this game?
Nullstar: Solus is a precision platformer focused on easy-to-learn, brutal-to-master gameplay. You play as a drone pilot, sent into the orbit of a crippled megastructure to collect fragments of an ancient energy source. There are over a hundred levels across 5 unique worlds to explore and master with a fleet of different ships, all tracked on global leaderboards so you can compete with your friends and make international rivals.
The gameplay is a unique mix of something like Lunar Lander meets Super Meat Boy with a dash of Tokyo Drift thrown in. You can fly in any direction, but disabling thrusters you’re not using will increase the power of your other thrusters, allowing you to save precious milliseconds on your leaderboard time. Additionally, an airbrake allows you to drift around corners, turning every level into something between a race and a rocket-powered ballet between lasers and exploding mines.
Every level is beatable by casual players just looking to experience the game, but if you want to climb the rankings, even the simplest levels will require complete mastery of the flight system and some innovation to find the fastest route. As you master levels and worlds, you’ll unlock Codex logs to unravel the story of a fellow pilot and learn more about the world Nullstar: Solus is set in, in addition to unlocking additional brutal challenge levels to force you to rethink your strategies.
PS4B: Did the game change much between the initial concept phase and the final version we’ll soon get to play?
We’ve spent just under 2 years developing the game since its earliest concept in summer 2024. We started off with a really simple prototype, quite literally just a box moving around the screen, and when that already started to feel fun, we had this moment of hang on, we’ve got something here.
Gameplay-wise, a lot of the features and puzzles evolved pretty naturally. We had some core ideas we knew we wanted, and kept an open mind as we played and designed more levels. Some levels even started out as physical paper sketches as we tried to find new ways to use the game mechanics and level design to enhance that feeling of always being just on the edge of control.
The art style is probably where the game has evolved the most. I remember the first prototype we made had these random purple boxes and sort of Y2K aesthetic; it was a bit of a mess. Over time, it evolved into a pixel art sci-fi megacity and beyond, into a whole world of profiteering megacorporations, dead planets, and fantastical space anomalies. We’ve used the world-building as a base to inform the aesthetics of the different regions of the game, and then packed them with lots of tiny details and atmosphere. Amazingly, none of the artists who worked on the game had done much (if any!) pixel art before, so shout out to their amazing work on illustrating the world (as well as the rest of the teams, of course!).
PS4B: Are there any plans for working on additional levels for the game?
We’ve talked about doing some DLC to add in some of the ideas we weren’t able to fit in the base game, so I wouldn’t rule it out! Because the game is structured around various “worlds,” it does lend itself quite easily to additional content, and I personally would love to get to show some of the concepts we had to leave on the cutting room floor to keep to our original scope for the game.
PS4B: And that’s all the time we have today. Would you like to add anything else before we go?
Thanks so much for having us! We’re really excited about the game we’ve made, and we hope you enjoy it as well. You can wishlist the game on Steam for now, and we’ll see you on the leaderboards on April 16!
