Matt: We made some sketches from an overhead view of a ship divided into different rooms and control stations (not unlike FTL actually, which we found out about later) but as artists we didn't want to spend our time animating the the tops of heads and shoulders of the crewmen, so Jamie suggested we switch to a side view and the concept of the micro-platformer was born.

Our only requirement going into the meeting was that we were going to make a co-op game, having been influenced by Damian Sommer's A Friendship in Four Colours and Spooky Squid's Cephalopods Co-op Cottage Defence. We wanted something to capture that sense of frantic energy. Somehow we got talking about the scene in Star Wars where the Millennium Falcon was being attacked by TIE fighters and Luke and Han had to scramble to the turrets. Where did the concept come from? Jamie: Our teammate Adam had been telling us about the game Artemis, which is like a Star Trek simulator–everyone has their station and duties. A few months later when we started on production of the 'real' version, we switched to Unity and started animating the new spaceships in Maya because we could be more dynamic with the implementation. What game development tools are you using? Jamie: We built our first prototype at the Toronto Global Game Jam in January 2012 using Game Maker, and we used Photoshop and After Effects to create and animate the sprites. I released my first game, Gesundheit!, on iOS in 2011, and since then I've been balancing indie projects like this with freelance game contracts. I got back into it when I discovered Adventure Game Studio around 2006, and continued working on projects in my spare time while I started working in animation. Matt: I got my start tinkering with Quake mods as a kid, using qME. I picked up programming through web development and eventually got into Game Maker and Unity. When I moved back to Toronto from Calgary in 2009 I joined the indie game community and made my first game at TOJam 2010, and since then I have been making small jam-sized games and learning various tools and pipelines. What is your team's game development background, if any? Jamie: I have a background mostly in illustration and animation. Today we speak to Matt Hammill and Jamie Tucker of Asteroid Base, the team behind Love in a Dangerous Spacetime, which is nominated for the Excellence in Visual Art thanks to its unique 2D viewpoint that is, in reality, taking advantage of 3D polygons. As part of our Road to the IGF series, Gamasutra is speaking to each of the finalists in the 2013 Independent Games Festival to find out the story behind the games.

Freelancer mods millennium falcon