Deep Sky Creations

Independent game studio

About Deep Sky Creations

I'm Mike, the founder of Deep Sky Creations.

I build games because I have always been fascinated by worlds — the real ones above us, and the impossible ones we get to create ourselves.

Deep Sky Creations began as the name I put on my astrophotography. Over time it became something much larger: the studio I intend to spend my life building.

What the Studio Makes

Deep Sky Creations is building four games now: Hide Tide, Starhauler, Kernel Command and OFF CUE!

They are deliberately different from one another. I am not interested in making four versions of the same idea. Each project gets to become the game it needs to be.

Alongside them, the Space side of the site keeps growing through original astrophotography, astronomy tools, reference work and the interactive experiments built around them.

It Started With the Sky

Before the games, there was a telescope in a Michigan backyard.

The sky there was never dark enough, the weather rarely cooperated, and most targets began as almost nothing on a screen. I spent night after night learning how to capture light that had been travelling for thousands, millions, sometimes tens of millions of years before it finally landed on a sensor behind my house.

That still blows my mind.

Astrophotography taught me patience, problem-solving and respect for details nobody else may ever notice. More than anything, it taught me how much can be hiding inside something that looks like noise at first.

Then I Started Building Worlds

At some point, looking at worlds wasn't enough. I wanted to create them.

Game development gave all of that curiosity somewhere new to go. Physics became mechanics. Systems became things a player could touch. Ideas that existed only in my head could become places other people could explore, master, laugh at, get lost in or remember.

That is why games and astronomy share the Deep Sky Creations name. They are not separate lives I happen to have. They came from the same need to look closer, understand more, and make something worth sharing.

How a Photograph Gets Made

  1. Capture

    It begins with patience: planning targets, waiting for clear skies, and collecting faint light for hours at a time until the telescope has gathered what an eye never could.

  2. Shape

    The raw data is refined to bring out structure, colour, contrast and depth. Nothing is added that the telescope did not record — the work is finding what is already in the frame.

  3. Share

    The finished frame goes into the gallery with its exposure, its gear and its conditions recorded beside it — and, for some of them, onto something you can hang on a wall.

What Exists Right Now

Everything listed here is live on this site today.

Games
Every title in development, plus the launch simulator and space trivia in the browser.
Space
An astrophotography gallery of original captures, a catalogue of deep-sky objects sourced from SIMBAD, NED and NASA, a live orrery of the solar system, and observing tools that answer for your own sky.
Store
Prints and goods carrying the photography from the gallery.
See the games See the space work

One last thought

Look Up

The universe has always made me feel two things at once: very small, and incredibly capable.

We can look across impossible distances, work out what is there, learn how it moves — and then turn around and create something that has never existed before.

That feeling is Deep Sky Creations.

If you want to talk about any of it, the contact page says where to write.