STEAM EARLY ACCESS
Note the date in your diary: 21 October 2015. This is the day we will activate ‘Early Access’ on Steam for Shallow Space.
This is the culmination of 18 months of work, though is only the first of many steps to a full released game.
You can check out the Steam page here
As with any Alpha release this is by no means a complete game but it does have a stellar system to explore, many ships to control and fly and a taste of what is to come.
A recent post over at Shallow Space goes through the controls for the game: How to Play
If you like the look of Shallow Space, you may want to pre-order. This helps us developers carry on….”developing” the game. Its the only income we make from the project, so the support helps 
Clicking on the banner below will take you to where you need to go:
BACKGROUND AND FICTION
A large part of my input into Shallow Space is the flavour, background, texture, the narrative to the game. I am taking ships blowing each other up and wrapping it up in plots, characters, vengeance, history, in short: breathing life into it. Its fun, hard and rewarding.
Like the game itself, a lot of effort has gone into it but a lot more work is still required. I recently finished the last installment of ‘The Tale of Samuel Shallom’ a notorious pirate who hit the headlines a couple of decades before the start of the game. The Shallom Tale was fun to write -each installment is through a different medium, but together gives a real flavour for many parts of the worlds of Shallow Space.
The story is told in six parts, all available on the website, or on the links below:
(Pirate’s Diary)
(Newspaper Articles)
(Official TCN Reports)
(Bulletin Board Messaging System)
(Shallom’s Personal Diary – Audio)
(Extract from the official history of Shallow Space)
The events of this story link in with the first short story I wrote for Shallow Space, – The Gift. This is available on Smashwords and Amazon. Click here for more information.
The major factions have all been well developed and we have started putting teasers up on the website for your reading pleasure. We have logos and developed stellar systems:
So already we have many different stories, powers and people with their own motivations that will become interwined and create conflict on the stage that is Shallow Space. I’m bloody pumped.
On a Personal Note
I’ve been very quiet this year on the writing front. In fact I didn’t do any writing of any sort for many, many months. I’ve had a couple of gut punches this year. One of them was cancer, the other one was even harder to deal with. I’m writing this from my hospital bed in the Plastics Ward, post surgery. I’m pretty much cancer free now, but a few more tests are needed to confirm that.
I spent a lot of this year mentally curled up in the foetal position, unable to express any creativity but slowly I’ve come back to life. So again apologies for the silence, but expect to hear more from me as Shallow Space takes off. I’m in negotiations wit the team behind ‘The Seed’ to crank up my contributions to that game, I’m in conversations with another game producer to do some writing for them and I have heard on the grapevine that Robert Garry might be getting involved with the Children of Raxxla. So things are heating up here again. Watch out!
The post Shallow Space Alpha Imminent, Free Fiction for Background Flavour first appeared on John Harper - Writer.