Rocket Rat Games co-founder John Guerra remembers the exact day he started working on Cobalt Core's first prototype. He and his fellow co-founder Ben Driscoll had just spent a week playing Daniel Mullins' mysterious roguelike deckbuilder Inscryption at the end of October 2021, but the combination of a bad storm and a power outage ended up forcing Guerra to decamp from his home in Massachusetts and stay with some family until it all blew over. "I got back late on Halloween, just in time to put out a bowl of candy for some kids, and then the next morning we started Cobalt Core," he tells me.
The pair had been working on a range of different prototypes in the months leading up to this lightbulb moment. As development on their debut game, the spaceship building puzzler Sunshine Heavy Industries, began winding down, "we were throwing all kinds of stuff at the wall," he says, including games in 3D, a platformer, with Driscoll revealing they even had "a Terraria-like one for a couple of weeks" with a grid-based world that characters bounced around in. But it was playing Inscryption that brought everything to a head. Both had spent hundreds of hours with Slay The Spire, but "Inscryption proved to us that there was still a lot of space to explore in the genre," says Guerra. And with increasing calls from Sunshine Heavy Industries players begging them to let them fly the ships they were creating in its shipyard sandbox, "you can kind of see how that went from A to B".
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