Around the same era I was spending non-digitally enabled time writing story ideas for a Starcon 2 style game down on actual physical paper. I was doing a lot of travelling due to my then girlfriend's family (marriages were going down, people were hitting important age milestones, that sort of thing) so there was lots of sitting around in hairdressing salons and idly daydreaming about galactic civilisations, the rise of sentience and the stabilising effects of odd anomalies like the Earth's moon, punctuated by obligatory "ooh"s and "aah"s at the latest sculpted and flower-adorned majestic head ornamentation.

Once people got used to the idea of being married and the rampant ageing had calmed down, I got back to my regular base of operations and decided that I hated doing art for games and this dramatic space opera would require far too much of it. So I started messing with algorithmic approaches to generating spaceships. Prototyping revealed that the simpler methods were best and people that saw the resulting collections of polys were amazingly quick to give them recognisable characteristics: Calling them squid- or crab-like as often as they observed that this particular one should belong to a race of robots.

Both the huge galactic story and the random generation prototypes promptly went into the Big Stack of Game Ideas™ and didn't go anywhere for a while.

Now, I think it bears explaining that I am a Hack-and-Slash aficionado. I loved Rogue and ADOM. I have a MUD character with 4000 hours of existence. I played Diablo to death. Diablo II destroyed more hours of my life than I am ready to admit to yet. Darkstone, Fate, Sacred and eventually Titan Quest all scratched that itch. I'd always had ideas around a H&S of my own, but never any real base to build on until one day the racing game prototype stuck in my head during a Game.Dev organised DevLAN about procedural generation: Why not take that control scheme and build an action-heavy H&S designed to be played to completion in short sessions? Similar in execution to PlasmaWorm's Strange Adventures in Infinite Space (play that game if you haven't already done so).

That would serve as the germ concept that eventually became SpaceHack. Every once in a while I'd add to the game a little, driven by inspiration or a session of "what if the game was already done, what would it do?" mental masturbation. That's how SpaceHack got its unique elements: Things like combining skills and items into items with branching upgrade trees to streamline the play experience but still give players that thrill of random drops and customisable upgrades with options to explore differently next game; or the weapon preview scene to show players exactly what a newly acquired item would do when either equipped or upgraded, that way it wouldn't need huge and possibly ambiguous or, worse, confusing text descriptions that bothered me in other H&S games.

That was why I picked the concept as my entry into the first DreamBuildPlay competition in 2007. I wanted to make it a console game and the idea, then called Void Escape because I suck with names, really made sense in the console space – a platform devoid of a good H&S for me to play. DBP proved a perfect excuse to test out my ideas on procedural generation in a wider setting: The game would need randomly generated maps, events, enemies, weapons and there was even scope for a random story system; But as things turned out time was not kind to me… A design contract went a little south earlier in the year and meant that not only was I struggling to pay for food for a while, I was also limited to just under 4 weeks to finish Void Escape before the DBP deadline.