Terrarinaut: Edge of Space Hits September 17th
Starboundbut.
The work of a little team built by former developers of the ever spacey Fallen Earth and EVE Online, you might recognise Edge of Space [official site] from its successful Kickstarter campaign a few years back. It racked up just over $35,000 at the time, with the team providing regular patches and updates ever since. Now the game has finally gotten its official release date, September 17th - My birthday, Gera Fact Fans!
Edge of Space has been in the works for two years now, left to mature on the vine of Early Access during which time its makers at Handyman Studios and Reverb Triple XP have been tinkering away. From the offset it looks like it comes from the same gene pool as Starbound. Edge of Space is an open-world, dynamically generated sandbox adventure game. You're given a mining pick and basic gear to collect resources and build equipment. You go head-to-head against laser sharks and genetically evolved polar bears. I mean, it looks and plays a hell of a lot like Starbound.
We actually asked lead dev Jake Crane about this early on in development. It's something that, as expected, the team is aware of.
"We definitely made strides to make sure that, while Edge of Space does take roots from Terraria, that we are trying to take our own unique direction," he told us back in 2013. "[Y]ou see a lot of things that are really close to the same thing you came up with, and that’s because people are having to solve the same problems as you. But you’ll see different directions that those things take. It’s like a feature is ice cream, but there are different flavors of the feature."
But then, Starbound's influences come directly from Terraria, which itself splinters off from the Minecraft family tree, which can be found in a grove of Metroidvania. So, y'know, whatever. It looks good regardless.
And perhaps most importantly I think tonally it has a leg up on Starbound if only for its laser shark animation:
