What does it really mean to make a "sci-fi" game? Santa Ragione's Pietro Righi Riva explored the question while giving a postmortem talk about his game MirrorMoon EP during the GDC Europe 2014 Independent Games Summit earlier this year. Riva critiqued the game's inspiration, design, visual composition and technical challenges in an effort to explain how the themes expressed in "hard sci-fi" literature and cinema influenced Santa Ragione's development process. It's an intriguing postmortem that focuses less on the economic and practical issues of game creation, instead reflecting back on why the team made MirrorMoon EP and how they struggled to design a game that evoked player curiousity and the human drive to explore. The talk is worth watching for all developers, from AAA to indie. The free video (embedded above) of 'MirrorMoon EP: A True Sci-Fi Game Postmortem' is now available to watch here on the GDC Vault.

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