Interview with TREXJET from Dreamwave Labs about Perihelion

If you’ve ever catapulted yourself through space in a sci-fi game, you know how awesome gravity can feel when it's done right. In the upcoming roguelite Perihelion, everything revolves around those orbital physics. No simple fighter jets in a vacuum here, but clever use of planetary gravitational pulls to outsmart your enemies. Developer TREXJET from Dreamwave Labs took the time to answer my questions in detail. We talked about the challenge of balancing physics, co-op with friends, building deep relationships with your crew, and a rich list of inspirations: from Battlestar Galactica to classic shmups like Gradius.

To kick things off: could you briefly introduce yourself and share your role within the team at Dreamwave Labs?

I'm TREXJET from Dreamwave Labs. I mostly play a game design and programmer role on the team. One of my favorite things about being on a tiny team with your friends is that everyone gets to do a little bit of everything. The team and I are passionate about building focused games with fine tuned mechanics. We all have regular day jobs so Perihelion is something we've been chipping away at for several months now. We're just getting started on our journey and we hope to continue making unique, highly polished games in the future.

Gravity mechanics are clearly the beating heart of Perihelion. How did you come up with the idea to put orbital physics center stage in an action-packed roguelite?

Gravity mechanics are fun! We love space games, and also games that have satisfying movement mechanics. It seemed to us that not a lot of people were really bringing the two together, and certainly not in the roguelite genre. Space and flight are beautiful backdrops that spark the human imagination. Our goal is to make the physical reality of space feel like a major factor in the gameplay while keeping things fun. Gravity wells play a major role in the game mechanically, but we've got other fun space mechanics in place too! One example is the nebulae: you can use them to avoid enemy detection, but your radar and targeting sensor don't work while you're inside. That's a classic sci-fi movie/show concept that we were really excited to build. We hope players also get excited about that sort of thing when they play the game.

Balancing physics in action games can be tricky. How do you ensure that slingshotting around planets feels intuitive and fun without becoming overly complex or frustrating for players?

Yes, balancing physics has been a challenging journey, and we're not done yet. Our approach has been to simply playtest everything, early and often. There is one fundamental question we ask at the end of every single playtest: "Are you having fun?" Early iterations of the game were FAR more technical. Almost a 2d fighter sim. We are constantly trying to find the line of fun that exists between simulator-like and arcadey. It's hard to find that balance when you want the physics and ships to feel real without having to hand players a DCS-length instruction manual. We're still tuning, but the feedback from playtesters almost unanimously has been: they love the feel of the physics and slingshotting, and boy are they glad there was a tutorial to teach them stuff. It's taken us a while to get to this point, but we aren't satisfied. We love really intuitive games that onboard you smoothly, so we're going to continue playtesting and polishing.

Beyond the space combat, the mothership and crew relationships play a major role. How do you weave these narrative elements into the core roguelite gameplay loop?

Crew relationships: We took a lot of inspiration from Banner Saga, Hades, and Mass Effect. Our playtesters fall into two categories: people who read everything and talk to everyone vs people who are not interested in anything but the gameplay mechanics. We hope to tell an interesting story, but we want to make sure it doesn't become an inconvenience to the latter group of players. Right now, you can pretty much ignore that it exists. That's convenient for playtests, but as we get deeper into development, some story aspects will become a core part of the gameplay. Every time you complete a major portion of the game, you unlock big story beats. Some endings and story beats will be based on which characters you were closest to and what decisions you made throughout your journey. While the story does have an "end" state, the galaxy is at war, so there's no shortage of stuff to shoot at once you're done.

Supporting up to four-player co-op completely changes the dynamic in space. How does having teammates around affect gravity and combat tactics?

We've received a lot of positive feedback on the multiplayer so far. People seem to love cruising through gravity wells at high speed with their friends and comparing notes on who managed to set up a faster slingshot. Co-op also increases the chaos. Instead of one type of weapon arcing through gravity wells, you have multiple. When it's something that has friendly fire (like a summoned strike), you get a lot of funny and unexpected moments. We have some dedicated co-op abilities that lets players buff and synergize with each other, but they only work when you're within some distance of your wingmen. So depending on your preferences, you can divide and conquer, or you can fly together and focus on a goal. We're trying to make sure the scenarios are varied enough that you end up having to do a bit of both. If I had to sum it up, the thing I hear most when observing multiplayer playtests is players asking their friends "did you see that?" Super satisfying to us as developers.

Perihelion has a very distinct sci-fi vibe. Which classic or modern space games, books, or movies served as your biggest inspirations during development?

For Perihelion specifically, our biggest sci-fi inspirations are:
- Technically, Asteroids/Space War: our movement system uses the same basic principles.
- Battlestar Galactica: (mostly) grounded military sci-fi fantasy of being a fighter pilot on a space carrier and having a crew that feels genuine.
- Descent: Freespace: Those briefing menus were a thing to behold in 1998 and boy did we take inspiration from them. Again, military sci-fi, mystery, and building a surprisingly sophisticated game.
- Mass Effect: Building relationships with NPCs, exploring their backstories, and investigating a mystery together.
- Gradius/Biometal/UN Squadron: I think we get some of our movement sensibilities from these classic top-down shoot em ups. Snappy movement and fun weapons.
- DCS, IL-2, flight sims. The old school cockpit HUDs and MFDs are a major inspiration for us. We designed our entire UI around that sort of retro 80s milspec aesthetic. Some others that I'll list out but spare you the gory details: The Culture books by Iain M Banks, Wing Commander, Star Fox, and in some ways, Mega Man.

The game was recently announced with a 2027 release date. What do the next steps on your roadmap look like?

We want to make sure a slice of the game is as polished as possible before we dump a bunch of new content in. So we're going to spend more time fine tuning our core functionality based on feedback and data. Once we have the fundamentals tuned, we can do fun stuff like adding more enemies, more story, and and just more content in general. Here's a rough overview of our roadmap:
- Balance the build through playtesting and feedback (our current push).
- Publish a demo to give more people a chance to play and provide feedback.
- Finish the content buildout.

Perihelion will be released on Steam in 2027. Please add Perihelion to your wishlist.