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Final Frontier: How a four-man indie studio aced space colonisation

No Rush Studios on boldly going solo

Final Frontier: How a four-man indie studio aced space colonisation

They say space is the final frontier, but for four-man indie operation No Rush Studios, it was the first place to explore. Their debut game Final Frontier: A New Journey is set in a universe where the depletion of Earth’s resources has forced mankind to take to the stars in search of a new place to call home, and it’s up to the player to guide them on this mission.

Ensuring the survival of our species is a case of playing your cards right up in deep space. Final Frontier is a role-playing adventure with a card-based interface, through which players respond to the wants and needs of their crew, alien races and their superiors back on Earth.

Like the human race in the game, No Rush Studios embarked into the great unknown when it began work on the project in the summer of 2017. The team, comprised of designer Manuel Castillon, 2D artist Nicolas Castillon, developer Jose Manuel Carmona and technical artist Jose Manuel Agudo, all work together at Genera Games, and they built Final Frontier as a labour of love in their spare time.

“The idea was to create a game that would allow us to develop a different type of product than we normally would on a day-to-day basis at Genera Games, with the intention of furthering our learning, having fun and being able to say to the rest of the studio and the world: ‘we’re able to do this,’” the team explained.

“We still don’t know how we found the time! It’s difficult working as an indie dev from home if you already work eight or nine hours a day in a professional studio. It took us about a year. We probably could have done it faster but, after all, we are ‘No Rush’ studios.”

Final Frontier tasks players with making weighty moral choices with far-reaching implications for your colonists. Pick the wrong ones and you risk dooming everyone and dying a grizzly death in zero G. The core concept was inspired by the dev team’s desire to try something new, as well as another mobile phenomenon: the Reigns series.

“Everything began with a need to do something. To tell the truth, everything happened very quickly. We had a really strong concept based on Reigns, and we wanted to adapt it to a more modern context. It was really easy to bring that concept to life in space and we were really eager to do something in the sci-fi genre,” said No Rush Studios.

“The actual art style and the universe we wanted to create took the longest to decide on; the characters to include, how they behave and what we wanted to communicate.”

Although indie values underpin Final Frontier, the dev team’s experience at Genera has proven invaluable. Indeed, the firm even stepped up to publish No Rush’s first solo project.

“Genera contributed their influence when approaching the app stores to let them know about our game. We’ve also been lucky enough to have worked with professionals from different transversal departments such as music, marketing and analytics,” the team added.

The game has been met with a positive reception on the app stores, with both Apple and Google featuring it on their front pages, and user feedback, on Android in particular, has been strong. No Rush Studios continues to add new content, but what’s next for them?

“We’ve already met several times to discuss our future. We have an idea in mind and we are thinking of even making the leap to other platforms, although they’d present a greater challenge,” the team revealed. “We want to keep making games that we love playing.”

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Final Frontier: A New Journey is available to buy from Google Play and the App Store.