I cut features like crazy and used everything I'd already learned about .NET from my previous DirectX 9 work, but it wasn't enough to get anything nearly complete out there. I slept roughly 14 out of 120 hours in that final crazy stretch before submission. Void Escape didn't place anywhere, but it did lay the engine groundwork for a lot of what would eventually become SpaceHack.

That November when I started my company, Quarter Circle Forward, to formally take over from my previous contract-based consulting, DBP 2008 was on the company schedule as something we were going to do. Whoever "we" ended up being at that point. Ideas for the next competition entry constantly spiralled their way into my design file: A much expanded Monochrome with a film-Noir story and multiple endings; a good way to do RTS on console natively instead of porting mouse/keyboard issues; a bevy of puzzle game concepts that I hadn't seen done anywhere else; numerous game mechanics inspired by or hinted at in other games I played during that period; etc.

The part of the file marked "Possible DBP" grew large. Thus it was that in May 2008, when my longtime friend and nearly-longtime house-mate Marc "Aequitas" Luck quit his job to live off his savings and finally make games, DreamBuildPlay was high on the list of what we talked about. We'd spent our varsity days designing mods and games that never saw the light of day (but would have been awesome had they done so), which meant that we already had a good understanding of how each other's design sensibilities worked. Together we fleshed out the ideas already in the file and added even more: Aeq had a zombie-based survival mechanic that bore exploring; Monochrome became Ninja Noir, developed a combat system and started growing a storyline; the RTS concept turned into a space-based considered tactical system set in a hard Sci-Fi future where you'd have to rely on information that got to you as fast as light travelled, we called it Redshift and prototyped the time-lagged fog of war effect; Void Escape was talked about, but rarely did we consider it on the short list of games we'd like to make for DBP. It had already "been done", in a way.

When the competition was announced in June 2008 and the theme completely failed to help us make what had become an increasingly hard decision as to which game to do, we ended up choosing Redshift. What better way to make a splash as a small studio than to finally make a workable console-based RTS? We began working, Aeq was tasked with learning about shaders and getting his teeth into XNA, while I built a map system that would index by time as well as position and start on the scene framework we'd need for the game.

Aeq made good progress. This was his first real game project (sure, he'd been to DevLANs before and produced the odd Game Maker prototype while there, but this was in a completely different league), so there was a lot for him to get up to speed on. 3D programming in particular, hence being set the mission to understand shaders – I'd worked with him at university before, so I knew he was up to the challenge. And up for it he was, pretty soon we were attempting to write shaders that would draw the smooth curves we'd need for unit prediction paths in the game – he'd supply the shader code and I'd work on the math.

A few weeks passed and we learned a lot, but made very poor progress. Redshift just didn't feel like it was gaining any momentum at all. I was running into a lot of stupid issues with the engine (at one point I simply couldn't get textured quads to render correctly at all, yay) and our forays into parametric line shaders proved only marginally reliable. It was time to re-evaluate the entry and see what we could get done realistically in the time we had. Void Escape and Monochrome started dominating our conversations, but most of the people we asked still liked the sound of Redshift. We were right back to where we'd started, unable to reach a decision…