Solo Dev. Two Kids. One Wacom Tablet. The Making of The Abandoned Planet

Between wrangling a full-time job and parenting two young kids (including one born smack in the middle of development), I built The Abandoned Planet from a tiny corner of a Florida bedroom that doubles as office, nursery, and general chaos zone. Picture a Moleskine notebook taking up the last bit of empty space on a […] The post Solo Dev. Two Kids. One Wacom Tablet. The Making of The Abandoned Planet appeared first on Xbox Wire.

May 8, 2025 - 21:47

Solo Dev. Two Kids. One Wacom Tablet. The Making of The Abandoned Planet

Between wrangling a full-time job and parenting two young kids (including one born smack in the middle of development), I built The Abandoned Planet from a tiny corner of a Florida bedroom that doubles as office, nursery, and general chaos zone. Picture a Moleskine notebook taking up the last bit of empty space on a small desk, each page scribbled with little hand-drawn rooms and arrows mapping every corridor, while my toddler occasionally “helped” by crawling over my laptop. What I optimistically pegged as a one-year passion project stretched into two and a half years of solo dev hustle—coding, drawing, animating, composing the soundtrack, and even conjuring a semi-functional base-7 number system and a bespoke alien alphabet to pepper through the in-game journal and subtitles.

Every pixel in The Abandoned Planet was drawn on my Wacom tablet. I poured over the detailed pixel-art, the frame-by-frame animation, and the eerie soundscape. Movement feels delightfully retro—four-way D-Pad navigation—yet polished with a certain snappiness and dynamic touch. As you progress through this alien world, you decipher cryptic glyphs and pick up bizarre objects. It’s 90s-style adventure nostalgia, reimagined for the modern gamer.

Modern Yet Retro: Immerse yourself in gorgeous pixel art enhanced by a sleek, high-definition UI.
Quick Gameplay: A responsive navigation system which gives a nimble feel to the gameplay.
Classic Point & Click Adventure: Leverage your items and the environment to awaken ancient totems, power up forgotten devices, and journey boldly into dangerous territories.
An Expansive World: Five Acts with over 300 unique areas to explore.
Haunting Animated Cutscenes: Dynamic, yet brief, cutscenes intersperse the gameplay, enriching the narrative.
Fully Voiced: Enjoy the game in 11 world languages, complemented by complete voiceovers in English…and a unique alien language!

While The Abandoned Planet is a standalone game, it fits into a greater saga following Dexter Stardust: Adventures in Outer Space and hinting at more spacey escapades to come. Every puzzle twist and every scrawled alien symbol traces back to my crowded bedroom-nursery office, which kept development delightfully unpredictable. If you’re craving an adventure that’s as much about exploring a lost civilization as it is celebrating the odd joys of solo game creation, splash down on The Abandoned Planet for your next weekend escape.

The Abandoned Planet

Snapbreak Games

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

$14.99 $13.49

Get it now

When a wormhole tears open in space, an astronaut is hurled down and crashes on a distant planet. But where is she? Where are all the inhabitants of the planet? And how is she going to get back home? Solve the puzzle and piece together the mystery in this 2D, pixel art, first person, point and click adventure. Inspired by games like Myst and Riven with a dash of the LucasArt adventures of the 90s, The Abandoned Planet is sure to scratch that old-school, adventure game itch. • Beautiful chunky pixel art • Hundreds of locations to explore • Classic point and click adventure • Fully voiced in English Text localized into the following languages: • English • Spanish • Italian • French • German • Japanese • Korean • Portuguese • Russian • Chinese Simplified • Chinese Traditional

The post Solo Dev. Two Kids. One Wacom Tablet. The Making of The Abandoned Planet appeared first on Xbox Wire.