“Meanwhile in Exo you're kilometers in the air going 100s of miles per hour, pushing the terrain generation to its limits the whole way, and making it very hard to get everything looking nice at all altitudes.” “Most game engines are more designed for a 3rd person shooter or something like that, at head height,” he says. He says that Unity ensured the physics worked fine, but what was more complex was getting everything to work and look right when the craft reached incredibly high speeds and heights. Weston started out with the idea of being a ball on a hilly planet, and from there began adding in complexities like the craft’s different abilities and ways of movement. And as he added story and cutscenes, he says he “tripled or quadrupled the number of skills required.”
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Exo One took five years to make, Weston says, in part because he didn’t even know how to code when he first started out – he just had basic 3D modeling and texturing ability. Exo One was also part of the program, which Weston says “takes a lot of pressure off” since he was guaranteed a payout on the game before it had even launched, and had the benefit of visibility on Xbox stores and Xbox marketing.Įven so, though, Exo One’s vision and journey was shaped at least somewhat by Weston’s small team size and low budget. Weston mostly made Exo One as a one-man team, with his friend Rhys Lindsay doing the music and later with the help of David Kazi coding and Future Friends for publishing. For me that meant space, science fiction, a meaningful story and bags of melancholy atmosphere.”
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“So along with that inspiration I received from Journey, I decided I wanted to make a PC game, and something personal and creative that could really elicit a strong reaction from players. Having spent a year prior on Unknown Orbit, I felt a bit hollow from forcing the game into a rigid ‘standard game that most gamers will like with all the usual features like scoring.’ It was formulaic, and something I'd possibly never play, and I wasn't really even a mobile gamer. “So I mostly wanted to craft something that was unique in as many ways as possible.
“Perhaps more than anything with games, I love to play very unique things I've never experienced before, possibly to the extreme where I'll not play as many games as I should,” Weston says. Then, one day, he threw a metallic shader on a “ball” he’d been playing around with in Unity, threw down some cubes and pillars to roll around on, and realized he had the fun he’d been looking for. Exo One, he tells me, was inspired by Tiny Wings and WaveSpark, and began as a short “3D Tiny Wings” of sorts called Unknown Orbit that was small and score-based.Īs Weston adapted his vision, he was aware that his prototypes were growing increasingly complex and less instantly, obviously fun.
Jay Weston, its creator, has worked on a number of projects over the years as well as run his own business photographing specialized sky hemispheres for film, games, and architectures – which maybe explains how he honed his eye for striking celestial portraits.
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