Rose: For someone who has never heard of your game, how would you describe it without using the usual genre labels?
Honestly, "it's more than an extraction game" isn't specific enough, so let me answer properly: this is an MMORPG that grows, shows restraint, and knows its limits — just like a person should. And I have to stress this: the MMO genre has never lost its unique charm. The problem is that too many commercial projects only borrowed the surface of what an MMO is. We're not inventing a new genre — it truly is an MMO, full stop. If there's anything special about it, I'd say it's PTC: play-to-cool. As for those three words — grows: we're in our fourth playtest, and everything in the current build was improved through feedback co-created with our players. Restraint: we deliberately avoid the "we want everything" trap — we've gradually learned what fits the core framework and what violates it. Knowing its limits: we're clear about what matters in each version, which player feedback to act on immediately, and which suggestions are brilliant but must wait.
Rose: Where did the idea for this game come from?
I've always believed my first identity is "player" — "producer" comes second. As a player, I've spent nearly twenty years with many great games, and I won't deny it: I love MMOs. During the lowest, darkest period of my life, it was my companions in an MMO who stayed with me and helped me through it. So from day one of this project, the core framework being an MMO was never in question. The realistic space sci-fi flavor, though, comes more from film — warp jumps, ship dogfights, star destroyers... though actually turning those into a playable game has been brutally hard, haha.
Rose: What makes your game different from other games in the same space?
To be fair, by the labels we do have a category — but in truth, we don't really have a true counterpart. Take a typical extraction game: you loot, fight, and extract in a match, and everything you earn exists only to power your next match. What our MMO framework changes is this: what you bring out of an extraction run feeds back into a persistent multiplayer open world. And the reverse is also true — when the open world's questlines bore you, or on a weekday when you don't have the energy for a long story session, you can just matchmake into a few extraction runs for fun. Either way — inside the raid or out in the world — the game steadily catches everything you've earned. That might be the biggest difference between us and everyone else.
Rose: Was there anything you had to cut that you still secretly wish you could put back?
Mecha. Definitely mecha. In the original plan, ships were your vehicle in space, and mecha handled planetary landings and surface exploration. But going from concept to internal builds, we discovered our team simply couldn't develop mecha and ships at the same time — and worse, it meant two control schemes and two progression systems, which we couldn't polish in any reasonable timeframe. The ship systems were slightly more mature, so we gritted our teeth and cut everything mecha-related. To this day, the mecha art assets are still standing in the hub city of our test build — like a monument. I personally very much want to reboot the mecha system once the ship gameplay is stable, haha.
Rose: What is something players probably won't realize took an absurd amount of work?
The ship loadout system — it's the single most expensive thing in this project. The ship itself is the build system: four swappable component groups mounted on the core hull — five parts in total, if you count the hull, and we absolutely count it — plus chips you can hot-swap mid-combat, and a talent system tied into all of it. Every single adjustment means not just optimizing massive amounts of code on the systems side, but also art rework across models, animations, and VFX. It's also because of this system that players can build ship archetypes that are truly their own — and we'll keep polishing it, because it's the heart of the game.
Rose: What is the weirdest bug you've encountered that you almost wanted to keep?
We recently added a skill called Blink to one of the modification components. The design: if you have a target, you blink behind them; if not, you blink forward a short distance. The weird part? Right now, Blink can put you inside walls, where neither monsters nor players can hit you. And because the blink animation takes a while, during it you're basically an untouchable ghost that dodges all damage. This accidental bit of cleverness genuinely surprised us, haha — we'll probably keep it. Don't tell our QA I said that.
Rose: Is there a particular emotion you wanted players to walk away with from your game?
That cocktail of relief and greed in the last thirty seconds before extraction. Your cargo hold is full, the window is closing, and some voice in your head is whispering "one more container." If we can make a player's hands shake a little in that moment — and then have them laughing about it in the community afterwards — we've done our job. Oh, and one more: the pure thrill of hitting X and kicking into high-speed cruise. That feeling never gets old.
Rose: What's one piece of advice you wish you'd had before starting?
"Your community will find the fun faster than you will — build the channels to hear them before you need them." We started as a 36-person team in Guangzhou with a lot of opinions, and our playtesters corrected a shocking number of them within weeks. I wish someone had told me on day one that listening to the community — feedback loops, translation pipelines — is not marketing overhead. It's a core game system. And I'll be honest about where that lesson stings right now: building our overseas community has been rough. Reddit's strict IP-based review, for one — at the moment, players outside China genuinely have a hard time even reaching us. We're fixing it, but it's our current boss fight.
Rose: Five years from now, what do you hope people remember about this game?
I hope people remember it as the MMO that brought everyone into space — and as proof that an MMO doesn't have to be a pay-for-stats game. You can have the adrenaline of high-stakes runs and a galaxy that remembers your name — your ship class, your faction, your hangar full of hard-won history. And honestly? I hope they remember the moment the capital ships entered the war. That's on the roadmap. It's going to be ridiculous.
Rose: Why should someone reading/watching this go play your game today?
Because right now is the most interesting moment in the game's life: with Early Access just around the corner, the game is still young, the meta isn't solved, and the players who show up now are the ones who will define what it becomes. We're watching everything, every day, and our update cadence is borderline irresponsible. If you've ever wanted to be a founding father of a star-realm instead of a tourist in a finished one — this is the window.
Rose: Finally: can you officially confirm that your game is, in fact, probably a game? Why should we believe you?
I can confirm it is probably a game. Our lawyers advised us to stop at "probably." Consider the evidence: across four playtests, real players have assembled their ships in four different loadout UIs — and their feedback in our QQ group (our Chinese community) is what shaped the build you see today. That level of detailed suffering could never be fabricated. And for the record: it is definitely not an NFT product. Probably.
Rose: How has previous experience in making games in a large scale setting prepared you for a solo or small indie team game making?
I have to flip this question around: I have no large-studio experience at all. This is my first game as a producer — before this, I had never worked in the game industry. The closest thing to a relevant past life is visual design. But that turned out to matter more than I expected: visual design trained me to hold a complete picture in my head and to communicate intent precisely — at least to artists. What it did not prepare me for was everything else: systems, audio, code, community. I walked in knowing how the game should look, and the last few years have been about learning how it should work — usually the hard way.
Rose: From your previous employment at a larger studio, what is one thing indie devs would learn that would break them out into the modern algorithm?
Again, no larger studio on my resume — so let me answer from the only employment that counts: shipping this game. If there's one lesson, it's this: finishing something complete beats perfecting something unfinished. A complete, imperfect game gives players real stories to tell — and stories are the only fuel the algorithm actually burns. Perfectionism produces nothing to show, nothing to clip, nothing to talk about. The algorithm doesn't reward the best game; it rewards the game that exists and keeps showing up.
Rose: What's a common mistake you see across all size developers you would warn new or current devs about?
The mistake I see everywhere, at every scale: developers trying to educate their players instead of listening to them. Games, like any product someone pays for, generate a flood of voices — and yes, you must learn to separate the signal from the noise. But once you've filtered out the noise, you'll find your players have already told you exactly what they want. Your job is to respect that, not to lecture them on what they should want. The customer is god — and god is never wrong.
Rose: This industry is known to be unforgiving, what are some event tips you have for indie devs?
Two things. First — and this goes beyond events: if this is your first game, don't build a big one. Break your grand vision down into small games and prototypes, and validate each piece as efficiently as possible. That's how you earn the experience you can't skip. Second: go to indie expos, as many as you can. You'll learn an absurd amount, and you'll meet developers who resonate with you — that matters more than any panel, because I firmly believe a game should never be made by one person. It's the crystallization of a team that has ground itself together. Here's a concrete example from my own blind spot: I'm an art-background producer. I can brief the VFX team precisely — but I cannot, in three sentences, tell the audio team what a skill should sound like, or what music should carry the emotion of a scene. I simply don't have the language. But after a team has worked together long enough, something changes: you stop needing the language. The audio team brings you a surprise you never could have specified — and it's exactly right. That surprise is what a team is for.