PAX West 2025: Interview With Adam Bromell, Creative Director Of Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions

Ed: Hello, everybody. This is Eddie V. from Boss Rush. I’m here at PAX West getting ready to try out Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions, and I have the creative director with me. Can you introduce yourself?

Adam: Hi everybody, I’m Adam Bromell. As Eddie said, I’m the creative director of Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions, and super happy to be talking about the game with you today.

Ed: Yes! How did you get into gaming, and what led you to game development?

Adam: So, okay. So I’ve been doing this for almost half my life. I’ve been doing it for 22 years now. So it’s been quite a while. Yeah, I’ve been around for a minute. You know, I started when I was 18 years old. I was self-taught. Back then, there were not a lot of courses in college. There was, maybe, Full Sail and one other course somewhere else. 

Ed: Were you on Flash? Like making Flash games too? 

Adam: No, I was doing mods using the Quake 2 engine and Quake 3 engine. So way back in the day, I actually wanted to become an animator for Disney. So I was dabbling on the side with game stuff, but also going to college to learn how to be an animator, and then I learned about the industry. I was like, “I don’t know if I want to work in the industry,” back then. I dropped out, didn’t tell my parents about it. Instead, I would wake up and go to an Internet cafe in the mornings and then continue my lessons in how to make textures and how to do 3D modeling. I didn’t tell them I dropped out of school until I got my first game job making textures for the Half-Life engine.

Ed: I can’t. I just can’t. I can’t. (laughing in amazement). Then you got into game development. 

Adam: Yeah, I got my first job doing texture art when I was 21 years old. It was for a team called Three Wave Software out in Vancouver. They were doing some stuff with Valve at the time. I forgot what it was. It was like a source software version of the Blue Force from the Half-Life DLC. I stayed with it for a bunch of years and then slowly worked my way up. I got a job at Ubisoft Toronto and was an environment artist there. That was actually the last AAA job I had before I started System Era. So I’m also one of the founders of this company.

Ed: Oh, nice!

Adam: At Ubisoft, I was an art lead and art director for games like Watch Dogs and Assassin’s Creed Unity, and worked on Rainbow Six a little bit. I started to do this little side project as an artist, which was about an astronaut who was alone on a planet. I thought I was going to do a webcomic. I started talking about it with a friend of mine, and I said, “You know, there might be a game here instead.”

We were really big into survival games. You know, DayZ had a big impression on me as a game. We’re just like,” Why don’t we try making a game here?” Then it just kind of took off from there. We launched on Steam Early Access. We were the number one game on Steam over the Christmas break, which was massive for us. That allowed us to ship that game with six people.  Now we’ve got 60 people working at System Era. 

Ed: And that was Astroneer.

Adam: That was Astroneer, our debut game. That’s right. And that game went on to do great. I think we have like 15 million players now across all the platforms. We’re out on everything except for phones at this point.

Ed: So this game is your follow-up game. 

Adam: Yeah, this game is a follow-up game. It’s not Astroneer 2. It’s a whole new genre. It’s a whole new kind of experience. So with Astroneer, it’s a base-building survival sandbox game. 

So what we’re doing here is we’re taking what you see with games like extraction titles or that roguelike loop where you risk everything you’ve got to go out on an adventure and hope you don’t die along the way. We want to do what we did with the base building survival genre. We really kind of take our approach here, which is accessibility, approachability. It’s co-op only. It’s you and your friends having a silly great time. Really evoking that sense of what I got from Star Trek. 

Call it like optimistic futurism, right? Like this hope for the future. To me, Astroneer as a franchise is one of the ways to usher that to players. StarSeeker really kind of goes after that on a whole.

Ed: What was the influence to get into this genre for this game?

Adam: My love for space exploration, my love for Star Trek, and like I said, hope and ambition for the future that, like Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek showed us, right? We have so much TV for that, but I wanted to have the game that does that, and we have the franchise and video games that do that. We can really understand what it means to work as human beings, what it means to work together and cooperate. So when I sat down with Mr. Brendan, who’s our CEO, he’s right behind us, I was like, “Hey, I want to make a game that feels like it’s massively connected, where whether or not you log in by yourself, or you log in with friends or you’re just logging with a community that you’re playing with, you feel like you’re contributing to something larger than you.” 

There’s a sense of self and a sense of contributing to something like a larger community. Starseeker is really a game about that. You know, we’re not going to see all of it today when we play. We’re just going to play a bit of an expedition where we’re going to go down on a planet and run around. There’s a whole space station, which is called the ESS Starseeker. That’s what the game is named after. You can see it in the artwork. You’ll see it on the screen there. That’s the space station. We have 100 people who are walking around on the space station. It’s this idea that we’re all astroneers. We’re all in this together. There’s no competition in this game. Even our looting is cooperative.

So if you were the first person to find some loot on the ground, you open up the chest, you get your first picks out of it, and you get an extra star. If you don’t get your first picks, you can still get a little reward out of it. You can take your option, and then that opens it up for all the other Astroneers that are on the same planet with you to come and get that same stuff. So it’s just like a way to cooperate in that space as well.

Ed: Do you feel this is a casual game for anyone? 

Adam: Astroneer is certainly a casual game. A lot of folks describe that game as a really good one to chill with. This one’s a lot more action-oriented. I think it takes some of its cues and some of its inspirations from games like Breath of the Wild. It’s a little bit of Helldivers in there as well. It’s got the bones of an extraction game, where you’re planning and packing before going off on it. We don’t call it extraction. We really view it as an expedition. It’s you and your friends gearing up for that adventure you want to go on.

You can say, “Hey, who’s got med kits because I’m going to be bringing water”, and you’re all communicating that way together. When touching down, hopefully, you brought the right stuff. If not, you understand the systems of the sandbox on the planet that you’re on. One of the things that I really took inspiration from games like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. As a player, you can kind of stand in the world, look out, and kind of see how the sandbox works. 

You can see that the enemies are afraid of fire, and you might think about, okay, I’ll use that. Rather than burn them, I’ll just use fire to scare them. Or you think about, like, how fire propagates across the grass that you can do. And so for our game, we want the same thing. We’re like, when players are in our sandbox, the sandbox isn’t just waiting for the player to do something. It’s there and it’s thriving without you participating in it. 

Ed: I consider Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom science games. Breath is the chemical designed title, where Tears is the physics and engineering game. 

Adam: Yeah, I love that. Exactly.

Ed: So, how has the playtesting been for the game? Has it been exciting? Have there been funny moments with the playtesting?

Adam: There’s a story behind this answer. I was thinking about this game since 2020. It was myself and another engineer. Now, I’m not an engineer, I’m an artist. It was myself and an engineer named Evelyn. We worked for almost a year on just the physics of this game. We never really had multiplayer going for the first time. It was just us trying to figure out, does it feel fun to pick up something that’s heavy and then throw it like a heavy object or should it feel a little bit lighter when you go to throw it?

It wasn’t until a few years later that we really started getting people on our space station. The first thing we did was start to stack each other up on top just to see how high we could go. People were climbing because you could climb like Breath of the Wild. People would climb on the outside of this thing all the time. So right away, just in that little social space, that little promenade, it was fun.

Ed: That had to be something amazing to see where you just put the controller down, and everybody on the team just had to laugh.

Adam: Yeah, that’s the thing that we love about even the demo that we have here today. There have been moments when we laugh when we watch people play it, and laugh too. We don’t have to necessarily participate in it to get the joy out of it. That’s really fun for us as well. 

Ed: Has anyone broken any systems or tried to break a system?

Adam:  I broke a system today.  (We both laugh) It’s an alpha build, I should tell you right now. So we’re in alpha, but everybody who plays the game has a glider. So you kind of look like Buzz Lightyear. These little wings pop out, and you can go gliding around. I did something, but I don’t know what I did today. I interacted with one of our carrotlings, which is this creature, and my wings want to go away. So all of a sudden, I’m walking around looking like Buzz Lightyear with these little wings popped out. I called over one of our QA guys and was like, “There’s a little bug here, just to show you.” It happens. People, we’re not afraid.

As developers who make games like this, we’re not afraid when people break things. Exploiting is not a bad word for us. If you want to exploit our systems to get to the achievement that you have, the goal that you have, do that.  That’s you having fun with the systems that are in front. That’s truly, I think, giving you agency over how to interact with that sandbox. I feel like the worst thing in a sandbox game is when the game says no.

Whether it’s like an invisible wall or if it’s you trying to see if something is made out of wood, it should probably catch on fire, but then it doesn’t catch on fire.  That’s a feel-bad kind of thing as a player. So we’re really trying to make sure that we can always say yes as much as possible. 

Ed: So just two more questions because I’m going to get ready to play the game. I’ve been writing an article about games that have earned their stripes. Games that have not only influenced or changed the industry, but may have caught the attention of the industry and communities. It may have made a niche genre into something big. What is a game that you personally feel has earned its stripes? 

Adam: So I don’t mean to be cliché because it’s kind of hot right now, but I did just talk with the guys at AgroCap last night.  You know, Peak, right? That’s a game where you understand that the story was that they all got together over the course of a month, and they made this game really, really quickly, and they put it out.

It gets called a friend slop, which I think is an interesting way to say it. They’re killing it right now. One of the things I was saying to one of the fellows that worked on that game was like, it’s clear to me as another developer, based on certain actions that you put in the game, that you guys knew what you had when you were making it. Even though it might have been made in a month or just a few months, I can really tell that they were able to take a step back and understand that they had this thing that could feel special in front of them by certain little mechanics that they put in front of the game. One of which is how your characters pose with each other. Have you played Peak?

Ed: No, I haven’t. Not yet.

Adam: Oh, you should play Peak. It’s a wonderful game about climbing a mountain as a bunch of Scouts who crashed onto an island. It’s really, really cool. It’s wonderful. It’s cooperative, it’s proximity voice, and then ragdoll physics, and it’s kind of sloppy in how it does everything, but it’s so much fun. I think that a lot of folks, when they see a game like that, you can’t help but compare it to those high-budget AAA games, tons of polish on there. When I think about a game earning its stripes, it’s like you don’t have to shoot so high to be so fun. Right?

You can put the effort that you need to put into it, as long as you have that vision for what that joy is that you’re going to take away from there. I think that’s what people really resonate with. So I think Peak is such a good example of, we’ve got this idea, it’s silly as hell, and we can do it really quick because we don’t need to do it with a lot of polish, and grind it until it’s this polished marble. We can put it out a little bit rough. As long as those little nuggets are in there. So to me, Peak is one of those games that is definitely one of those strikes. You see the potential and you see the idea that the game has. 

Ed: People could look at that and be like, “Oh, they could expand on this. Oh, they got something going.” Games like that, as time goes on and as they grow, you’d be like, “yeah, they started something silly”, but it just started a new genre, or it really got unexpected players into gaming, and this was their debut game.

Adam: Absolutely, yeah. So it’s not their debut game, but it is one that was a follow-up to a game that I think they would have hoped for a lot better. Kind of tail between their legs, what are we going to do now? Then they just rolled up their sleeves and got this other idea out and then kind of redeemed themselves.

Ed: That has to be such a good feeling. So, my last question is, what is your go-to snack while making the game, playing with the team, or doing something on the weekend?

Adam: I got to answer that for you. If you can’t tell, I really like peanut butter-filled pretzels. 

Ed: Yeah! (really loudly)

Adam: You know what I’m talking about! A huge fan of those. Salty, sweet, can’t go wrong. What’s your favorite? 

Ed: Mine is definitely sushi. I was just talking to the developers at Rogue Labrynth, and he said Zebra Cakes.  I was like,  Zebra Cakes is my go-to sweet treat. Also, the vanilla Oreos with the lemon in them. They’re dangerous. Well, Adam, thank you so much for this interview. Everybody, I am getting ready to play Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions by System Era Software. Once again, thank you, Adam.

Adam: It’s my pleasure. 

You can wishlist Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions on Steam with planned release for 2026. You can checkout the website here and the game is planned for Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox. No Nintendo Switch 2 plans at this time.

Featured Image: System Era Software

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