Solar Ash's eerie, alien game design

gamedeveloper.com:

Alien adventure game Solar Ash is the latest creation from Heart Machine, the development studio behind the critically acclaimed Hyper Light Drifter. Like its predecessor, Solar Ash combines the moody technicolor vibe of a science fiction world with tight and focused movement mechanics--but this time in a three-dimensional open environment, instead of a top-down two dimensional world.

The open desolate areas and ominous behemoths go hand-in-hand with gameplay that sometimes feels inspired by Sonic Adventure 2. Instead of memorizing and reacting to enemy attack patterns, players are encouraged to glide, grind, and grapple across open terrain as they quest to save their home planet from a supermassive black hole.

Woven into those high-speed challenges are a number of tragic character moments where player character Rei and a handful of NPCs grapple with what feels like an intensely personal apocalypse. 

We reached out to Heart Machine co-founder (and Solar Ash lead designer) Alx Preston for a quick chat about the game's design direction, and to learn what choices helped bring this unique title to life.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity

Game Developer: What were some of the biggest design decisions that have guided you through the development of Solar Ash?

Preston: We had to cull our ambition in a lot of ways, and we still ended up with an incredibly ambitious project. It was an extremely challenging game to make, with anti-gravity, massive creatures that move and even walk, the size of entire levels which you can traverse on. You can imagine the enormous (figuratively and literally) set of problems they presented. So, deciding to keep pushing on these elements, to keep them in the game, were major decisions that