Joakim Hedström likes making "weird stuff" with his coworkers at Frame Break. Weird genres, he says, or mash-ups of genres that haven't been done before. Like, say, a farming game set on an alien planet…with a mech.
"The core experience is this searching for weird genres, new genres or mixing genres that hadn't really been mixed before," Hedström tells me. "So that's kind of the philosophy brought into the studio framework, making games to break the mold."
Hedström is the CEO of Frame Break, a five-person studio based in Skövde, Sweden currently working on Lightyear Frontier — the aforementioned mech farming sim that was announced at today's ID@Xbox event. He and his fellow studio co-founders cut their teeth on weird genre mash-ups in school together, where they first made a mobile game called Cossette's Cassettes about fixing broken cassettes to funky ’90s tunes.
After their graduation in 2018, they joined an incubator program, where Frame Break went through a long list of ideas that didn't work. During that process, Hedström and his colleagues had an ideas document that included a deep research dive into farming games. They had determined that farming games basically fell into two camps: the more relaxing escapism of Stardew Valley, and the hefty realism of Farming Simulator. The team wanted to explore something somewhere in the middle of that, but weren't sure where to take it.
But there was another line on the same document. It just said, "Mech." And thus, Lightyear Frontier was born.
‘Mech space farming sim’ prompted a lot of questions that Frame Break quickly had to answer. They opted for a fantastical look and style because, as Hedström put it, "you can't do realism with a mech; it will fall over and nobody will be happy." They didn't want to make a top-down, grid-style game, so they opted for third-person 3D, but had to find workarounds to make sure players didn't just trample their plants.
Those workarounds led to gameplay that they discovered also made them feel delightfully overpowered while farming, like spraying water from a giant hose to water crops, or planting seeds with a machine gun. The necessity for more space for a mech to roam was what prompted them to set Lightyear Frontier on an alien planet, but that also opened the door for all kinds of weird crops to grow.
Hedström walks me through a typical loop of Lightyear Frontier: like most farming games, it has a day and night cycle and weather that impacts your farming. There’s also wildlife you can tame, resource management elements, and base building. And there are survival vibes, too, but it's not your survival that's the issue.
"It's definitely survival-inspired, but you're not [threatened] – you're in a mech," he says. "You're fine. Nothing can hurt you. What you're worried about instead is your crops; they can be hurt by the weather, by the wildlife, and by mismanagement. So that's kind of where the tension is. Like, 'Oh no, my cabbages,' instead of the more straightforward 'Oh no, I'm being eaten.'"
On a typical in-game day, he says, you might wake up, take care of your crops, then pick a direction to wander and start exploring. You'll stumble across new resources to bring back home with you, which could include new plants you can grow, or materials you can convert into parts for your base, or mech upgrades that will improve your farming or traversal abilities. For instance, you might upgrade your mech's boosters, letting you jump higher and reach new areas next time you explore.
One element that's a bit atypical for the more fantastical camp of farming games is that, except for a sentient AI guiding you toward "anomalies" it wants to explore, you're alone on your planet. You might get communications from NPC explorers on other planets requesting resources you can send them, but Lightyear Frontier isn't about building a society on an alien planet. If that sounds a little too lonely, don’t worry, you can bring up to three friends to your game and play the entire story in online co-op with them.
Hedström says that he wanted to cultivate a sense of wonder in exploration, but wanted to avoid playing into some of the harmful narratives that tend to come with that. For example, the choices you make in how you interact with your planet's environment might have adverse effects, but the game wants you to experience that in an effort to achieve balance. Lightyear Frontier isn't a game about stripmining a planet — it’s about living in harmony with it.
"We don't want you to exploit the planet you're on," Hedström says. "We want you to assimilate with it. So, sure you go there and you start taking these plants to start growing. Of course, now these plants are growing much greater in number than they were before. And that's going to possibly attract some wildlife that's pretty hungry…[it's] not a threat to you, personally, but you created your own problem by making their food in surplus, so obviously they want to come eat it. So it's up to the player to find the right balance of living in harmony with these creatures."
But beyond the environmental impacts, Hedström is conscious of the colonialist implications inherent in the idea of exploring "unknown" worlds, and doesn't want to embrace those with Lightyear Frontier. He wants it to be about fitting in, not fitting something already established to the player's vision.
"There's the whole frontier myth, which is a bit problematic in that it was created in retrospect to justify some… stuff that happened during the American Western expansion," he says. "And that's not really the vibe we want. [We want to explore] the final frontier of space – the other worlds, these completely unknown spaces – and get that sense of discovery and wonder. That's what we want to instill in Lightyear Frontier, because a lot of farming games are about escapism in some way. And I'd say going to the other end of the universe is a pretty good way to escape from everything.
"But even if you go somewhere completely different, there's still some history, some life here on this planet. So going there and staking out a home for yourself shouldn't necessarily mean you push away what's already there, but instead it should be finding your spot here where you can feel like you belong."
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
