Dropping Anchor

So we finally made it! Albeit nearly a week after we thought we would dock but the seas of handmade.network are rough to sail, and the S.S. Overreact lacked sufficient navigational tools to make the trip any shorter. So many thanks to Abner, Jeroen, Andrew, Matt and Martin for all of their work guiding us into port. We are excited to officially be a part of the gregarious community. We strongly believe in the handmade movement, and we wish to head towards quality rather than taking the easy route. With moonstone in hand, we will be sailing day and night towards that destination. For us it is an honor to join such a proud fleet of principled developers.


Who is Overreact You Ask?

Overreact is no single artist, developer, musician, or designer. Overreact is a conglomeration of humble developers who do whatever they want... because it's the right thing to do. You see, over the years of playing god awful games we came to the conclusion that we need to change the course that games are on. One of our biggest philosophies is that every game we create should break ground in some respect. Borrowing ideas from other developers is totally acceptable but what isn't acceptable is cookie cutter games. We're here to ensure that games aren't given a bad rep.


What Drive? Cipher Drive!

That's right: Cipher Drive! So what exactly are we talking about when we say "Cipher Drive!"? What we're talking about is a space shooter, point and click, card game set a long long time from now in the Covaris galaxy, where "smuggling goods from star system to star system while dodging bounty hunters, Elven police, and surviving the Denglorian Onslaught" is your middle name, and that's not all. Cipher Drive is also a game unlike any other in that rumors, reputation, and NPC interaction actually matter.

The Overreact philosophy clearly states that we should break new ground in our work. So how are we doing that in Cipher Drive? Pfft that's an easy one. Cipher Drive involves experiments on both technical and artistic fronts. On the technical front we are looking for new ways to improve programmer and artist productivity as well as quickening development cycles to continue making better games. On the artistic front we are looking for a unique aesthetics that are under represented in games.

Technically speaking our experiments include an in game editor that features hot reloading both for code and assets so that all team members can iterate at top speeds. We also have a totally modular approach to the programming so that our programmers can operate independently to accomodate for long distance collaboration.

Visually we are looking to create an aesthetic that is true to the pages of an old school comic book. Musically we are trying to crack the dynamic music problem without excluding the composer by procedurally generating all of the music and without composing songs in segments. Mechanically our aim is to flip quest oriented game play on it's head by making a living world full of potential quests rather than a static world filled with predetermined quests.


Bye Bye For Now. Stay Tuned Folks.

There are many channels by which you can stay in the loop with Cipher Drive. Obviously there is this fantastic blog (thanks again handmade.network) which we will try to update about twice a month. There are also the forums here where we will invite others to discuss the game and ask questions. We have several accounts on twitch for live streaming the development. There is artist Connor Hart here, programmer Allen Webster here, and even programmer Tyler Camp may begin streaming soon.

There are also plenty of places to follow Overreact across social media:
On twitter
On instagram
On facebook

If you want to see exclusive content, or you really just like us, you can support us on this Patreon.

We don't want to put ourselves in a position where we won't be able to update as much as we'd like to. Let's be realistic here... That's like the word of the project. But we'll definitely be in touch.