In Pollen's world president Kennedy was never shot

We've talked to Finnish indie developer Mindfield Games about the interesting alternate history backstory to their upcoming space adventure Pollen as the game heads into the Steam Greenlight process.

The basic turning point in this alternate history scenario was that John F. Kennedy managed to survive an attempted assassination in Dallas. Afterwards the US and the Soviet Union combine their efforts to build a manned station on the moon, and man's exploration of space takes a very different path from the one we've taken in the real world.

"We began with this idea that all these great classic science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov and all those," explains co-founder and project lead Olli Sinerma. "So we took pretty much their world and decided that that is what happened. What they thought in the 50s and 60s what the year 2000 would look like. So we went with that idea. The world changed so it became as the design was in the 1960s in Dallas when in our world [the world of Pollen] Kennedy was not shot, but actually his bodyguard took a bullet."

"In our world [the US and the Soviet Union] joined forces and 30 years later human beings have moved to space and we have outposts on Mars, on the Moon and one of them is on Titan. On the Saturnian moon. It's pretty much common place in Pollen that you have a job in outer space. It's something comparable to have a job at the Arctic circle. It's not totally unheard of, it's pretty common and of course it's really isolated."

You can check out this new gameplay trailer below:

Mindfield Games early on identified attention to detail as key to delivering a great VR experience, to further help the player immerse themselves in another world, and no effort was spared in this regard:

"We have two story writers working along with us and they pretty much imagined sort of like a dollhouse, the whole station, and they played out two years of developments in the station," says Sinerma. "What kind of people they would hire there? What would be their areas of expertise? What would they be doing? What kind of personalities would these people have? And what would background would they have? So it's a really extensive world that was built behind it."

"And then as I was saying about the dollhouse. What would these people do on the station? And pretty much all the time they did something they were thinking 'okay, would it leave some kind of mark? Would there be left something, of course, post-it notes are really a common place thing, but would they bring something from Earth with them? Where would they have these objects? That is pretty much how the world was populated."

We were also given these two exclusive new screenshots that you can take a look at below (more non-exclusive screens can be found at the very bottom):

If you're interested in the project you can show your support over on the Steam Greenlight page.

Pollen is scheduled for release early next year alongside the first VR consumer devices including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and OVSR. And later in the year it will land on PS4 and PlayStation VR. It should however be noted that VR is not needed to experience the game, as it will be fully playable without any VR device.