Behind the Scenes

It started on a Friday evening. By Saturday afternoon there were six episodes of a cartoon series — about five minutes each, with drawn characters, voices, music and sound effects. A series set in our own game world, following the crew of a freighter called the Lifter 420. What happens to them, we're not telling yet. How something like this comes together over a weekend, we'll happily explain. It began with a sheet of paper. The crew wasn't invented at a desk, it came from Ju

September 9, 2026 Sometimes the good news just walks in. Starting tomorrow, glitch.fun hosts the AI Gaming Conference, the big online festival of the Glitch Festival — from September 10 to 30, three weeks, entirely in the browser. And Blocks Beyond the Stars is part of it. 🎉 Here is the festival page: go to the AI Gaming Festival And where do we stand? Number 1 in the Survival Games and number 4 in the Sandbox Games. 😮 We had to look twice when we saw it. One honesty paragr

September 2, 2026 Today was the day: our game-development club at the Kurfürst-Balduin Realschule plus in Trier West has its first evening behind it. Before we tell you how it went, a thank-you first: that this club can take place at KuBa at all is thanks to a very dedicated head teacher and the extremely kind support of the school's IT lead. Thank you both! 🙏 Just before the start: stage fright. Justus, Verena and I were honestly quite nervous once I had booted the first ma

We announced it here in July, and now it is really happening: on Wednesday, September 2, our game-development club at KuBa West has its first afternoon. Between "wouldn't that be something" and "Wednesday it begins" lay a conversation with the head teacher, a concept paper, a stack of worksheets, a rollup banner — and quite a few evenings at the kitchen table. And now? Now, honestly, we are pretty nervous. 😅 The dress rehearsal already happened. Last Wednesday I got to prese

The best ideas for this game don't come from a desk, they come from playing. The other day Justus was at the screen, flying from one planet to the next, and eventually out came the sentence that always starts things around here: "Dad, there should be bandits." His reasoning, roughly: it's all a bit too safe out there. You fly, you land, you build — and nothing unexpected ever happens. He was right about that, and honestly he had the better concept in his head straight away. H

Sometimes the wildest things happen when you just start. A few weeks ago, Justus and I were sitting at the kitchen table with one simple idea: "Let's build a space game." No plan, no studio, no budget — just a ten-year-old bursting with ideas and a dad who wanted to see how far we could get. And now the whole story exists as a book. 🚀 We've captured the complete origin story of Blocks Beyond The Stars — from the first sketch on a scrap of paper to the finished multiplayer ga

I just had a fantastic conversation with the incredibly dedicated headmaster of "our" school. The result: We've been given the amazing opportunity to present our game to the students right after the summer holidays, in order to gain more supporters for our open-source project! Who knows, maybe there will even be a dedicated club on "Game Development – Blocks Beyond The Stars" soon 😉. In any case, we are absolutely thrilled with the extremely positive feedback from our headma

We don't have a QA team. We have something better: friends who are honest. Bastian and the first hour. Bastian took the game on seriously — and died. Again and again, before the fun even started. Three reports came in a row: "I keep starving — and I can't even find seeds!" (The starter kit had no food, and the game never explained that you eat berries, not seeds.) "The robot shoots through the wall — and all I have is a machete!" (Enemies chased players through solid rock, an

Blocks Beyond The Stars has no studio, no budget, and no deadline. It has a family: me (Marcel) at the keyboard, Justus (10) as merciless lead tester and idea machine, and Verena, who keeps the whole thing grounded. How a game gets made under these conditions — a look behind the scenes in the literal sense. The rhythm. Development happens in the evenings and on weekends. That sounds like little time, and it is — but it enforces a discipline that bigger projects sometimes lack

"How do you come up with your features?" — Honest answer: mostly, we don't. The features come to us, while playing, at the dinner table, in conversation. Three examples of how a passing remark becomes a game mechanic. The camera. The wish: "I want to take photos like in real life." Not screenshots — photos, as an item in the game. So there's now a craftable camera: you stand there, take aim, the HUD disappears, click. The pictures land in a photo gallery in the menu. Since th

The credits of this game list no graphics studio and no sound studio. Yet every block has a texture, every biome its music, and every energy fence its hum. How that works — and how it feels — is what this post is about. The tools. We use generative AI as our missing team: block textures are made with image models, sound effects with ElevenLabs, and the music is homemade. On itch.io we write, with a wink, "100% AI-made, driven by a 10-year-old's imagination" — and both halves

The best features of this game aren't in any design document. They start with a sentence at the dinner table. This one was: "Dad, there should be real factories…" Justus (10, internally long since our "Lead Product Manager") had looked at the crafting menus and concluded: always clicking together single items at the workbench — that doesn't feel like industry. A factory, that's something with presses that stomp, rotors that spin, conveyor belts! So that's exactly what we buil

For weeks I had secretly been working on the game's look in the evenings. Anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, color moods per biome, light glinting off materials — all things that are invisible on their own and change everything together. And the whole time I showed none of it. Then came the evening of truth. I had Justus cold-start the new build — no warning, no "hey, look what I made". He landed on a planet, stood still for a second, and said: "Wait… is the water real now?" T

There are arcade machines in our space stations. Sit down at one, and you can play 20 little minigames — dexterity, puzzles, high-score chasing. Why is something like that in a space survival game? And what does a complete web browser have to do with it? A little story about detours. Why minigames at all? Because arcades belong to space stations like neon light — and because a kid who needs a break from surviving can stay in the game instead of reaching for the tablet. The ma

Some releases start with a plan. This one started with a camera. I had just built a little recording tool into the game — it flies the camera through space, lands on a planet, and records short clips without a HUD, with sound. Finally proper trailers instead of shaky screen captures! So I sat down with Justus to get some nice footage. And of course: the moment you point a camera at your own game, it shows off every bug it has. Justus spotted them immediately. "Dad, why is the

I'm developing an online game, and my son plays it. That sentence sounds harmless — but it's the strictest design constraint this project has. Because I sit on both sides of the table: as a developer who wants features, and as a father who knows what's out there on the internet. A few decisions that wouldn't exist without this dual role: Accounts without an email address. A kid shouldn't leave a data trail just to stack blocks. So our accounts don't require an email — what we

It started with a simple idea at the dinner table. My 10-year-old son, Justus, had a very precise vision for his dream game: "Minecraft, but in space. With self-built spaceships, procedurally generated planets, and base building." As an IT professional, I thought the idea was fantastic – but I also knew that, alongside my full-time job, I simply didn't have the time to write thousands of lines of code for a game engine in the evenings. The solution? We bring artificial intell