Sanctuary Shattered Sun: Kickstarter Live! T5 Titans, Shatter & Freeze (Ep.91)

Jack and Drexy sit down with nine2 and FoneE from Enhearten Media as the Sanctuary: Shattered Sun Kickstarter goes live, covering the game’s Dyson sphere setting, planet-shattering superweapons, colossal T5 titan units, and the five-year development journey behind an ambitious indie RTS built to last decades.

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This extended interview features Sanctuary: Shattered Sun creative director nine2 and lead programmer FoneE discussing the game’s Kickstarter launch alongside its accompanying free multiplayer demo. The conversation covers the game’s hero features, including a destructible Dyson sphere setting, ocean-freezing superweapons, and massive T5 “titan” units capable of ending games outright, alongside deeper discussion of the custom-built engine architecture, the studio’s Patreon-to-Kickstarter transition strategy, philosophy on competitive balance versus fun, and long-term plans for community-driven modding and game preservation. The team also addresses their decision to remain independent rather than sign a publishing deal, and outlines Enhearten Media’s broader ambitions beyond Sanctuary itself.

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Critical Moves Podcast – Episode 91 Show Notes

Episode Title: Sanctuary: Shattered Sun Kickstarter Launch Interview
Hosts: Jack, Drexy
Guests: nine2 (Creative Director, Enhearten Media), FoneE (Lead Programmer, Enhearten Media)
Episode Length: ~85 minutes

Episode Summary

Timed to coincide with the launch of Sanctuary: Shattered Sun’s Kickstarter campaign and accompanying free demo, this interview brings together Enhearten Media’s creative director nine2 and lead programmer FoneE for a wide-ranging discussion of the game’s ambitious features, five-year development history, and long-term vision. The conversation covers the game’s signature mechanics (a destructible Dyson sphere setting, ocean-freezing superweapons, and colossal T5 titan units), the studio’s custom engine architecture built atop Unity, philosophical approaches to competitive balance, plans for extensive modding support, and the team’s firm commitment to remaining an independent, PC-first studio.

What Is Sanctuary: Shattered Sun

nine2 introduces the game as a large-scale RTS set entirely on a Dyson sphere rather than a traditional planet, featuring two headline destructive mechanics: “Shatter,” where superweapons create earthquakes that collapse sections of the thin shell world along with everything on top of them, and “Freeze,” where destroying artificial climate infrastructure causes coolant to flood out and instantly freeze oceans, halting naval combat entirely and allowing land units to cross frozen water.

T5 Titan Units

The game’s colossal T5 “titan” units are described as extraordinarily expensive, game-ending superunits, with the “Chosen” faction’s flagship example, the Kiss of Death, unleashing a slow-moving disintegration wave that erases everything in its path. Only one T5 can exist per player at a time, tied directly to the player’s commander unit, making it high-risk (the game ends if it dies) but overwhelmingly powerful once built. The team designed T5s specifically to break multiplayer stalemates by representing an extremely inefficient but decisive “economic victory” condition, expecting competitive players to largely ignore them in favor of efficient play, while anticipating the community will create balance mods to make them a more moderate power-scaling step for casual and narrative-focused players.

Five Years of Development and the Custom Engine

FoneE details the studio’s five-year technical journey, describing Unity as essentially a framework atop which the team built a fully custom engine, including a Lua-based modding architecture designed from the ground up to support community-created content. Both guests emphasize that years of foundational engine work and multiple rewrites were necessary before development speed dramatically increased once the core architecture was finally solved, allowing the team to shift focus from technical infrastructure to actual gameplay content, which they identify as the primary reason the Kickstarter is launching now rather than earlier.

The Three Factions

nine2 outlines the game’s lore and three playable factions: the Chosen, technologically augmented “post-human” elites who rely on high-tech, hard-hitting units and shields; the EDA, unaugmented humans who compensate through stealth and jamming tactics; and the Guard, autonomous worker robots who gained sentience following catastrophic destruction and now field cheap units in overwhelming numbers. Each faction is designed with internal factional tension and morally ambiguous motivations rather than presenting unified, simplistic sides.

Funding History and Patreon-to-Kickstarter Transition

nine2 explains the studio’s prior funding structure through Patreon tiers (T4 and T5), with top-tier backers receiving lifetime access to all future builds. Existing Patreon supporters are being offered discounted upgrades on the Kickstarter reflecting their prior contributions, with the team strategically timing the Kickstarter launch to coincide with major new content (including the first full campaign mission with voice acting and cinematics) not previously available even to top Patreon backers, in hopes of generating strong first-day momentum.

Kickstarter Stretch Goals

The stretch goals are structured to unlock progressively: finishing the core land-battle experience (roughly 90% complete already), followed by air units (fighters, bombers, gunships, already partially built), a five-mission initial campaign centered on the EDA faction, expanded commander hero upgrade systems (including a teleporting “dash” ability), mod management tooling, naval combat, and finally the game’s signature Shatter, Freeze, and Warfront multiplayer mode features.

Approach to Game Balance

FoneE distinguishes the studio’s balance philosophy from typical AAA approaches, which rely heavily on telemetry data due to massive player bases that make individual feedback impractical. Because the EnheartenMedia team are themselves serious players of their own game, they combine telemetry with direct playtesting feel, aiming to avoid both the “vocal minority” problem and the tendency of over-balanced AAA titles to strip out fun, discoverable strategies in pursuit of uniform fairness.

Teaching Players Through Training Missions

nine2 acknowledges the game’s steep learning curve, particularly given the demo’s decision to present complex mechanics immediately rather than through gradual, incremental missions. The team plans to introduce standalone training exercises focused on specific skills (such as recovering from an economic stall), gated in difficulty tiers, as an alternative to relying on external multiplayer communities or YouTube tutorials to teach advanced play.

The Flow Economy System

FoneE describes the game’s core economic mechanic, a continuous “flow economy” where resources are gradually poured into construction rather than paid upfront, allowing players to pause projects without losing progress and reallocate workers to accelerate specific buildings. This system is designed to reward strategic pivoting and is expected to keep the game’s competitive meta evolving over time as players discover new approaches.

Multiplayer-First Development Philosophy

Both guests explain the team’s early decision to prioritize multiplayer development, driven both by the founders’ own multiplayer gaming backgrounds and practical engineering logic: building multiplayer infrastructure first makes single-player content easier to add later, while the reverse is not true. They note that surviving RTS communities tend to be multiplayer-centric long-term, making a strong multiplayer foundation essential even for eventually supporting robust single-player and co-op campaign content.

Modding, Map Editor, and Long-Term Preservation

The team confirms a working map editor is already in development, alongside a community member’s already-functional randomized map generator ported from another game. nine2 cites modding support as the single most important factor behind games maintaining active communities for decades, and states unambiguously that the studio has turned down substantial publishing deals specifically to retain full independent control and avoid scenarios where corporate ownership changes could threaten the game’s long-term playability, noting multiplayer is entirely self-hosted through Steam rather than dependent on company-run servers.

Post-Kickstarter Roadmap

nine2 outlines plans to reach early access approximately one year after the Kickstarter closes (targeting August 2027), with beta backers gaining continuous multiplayer access and a private Discord channel throughout the intervening period. Both guests acknowledge the studio’s historically inconsistent community communication, attributing it to limited indie team resources and a deliberate strategy of withholding flashy content for the Kickstarter’s launch, and commit to more frequent, incremental updates going forward now that the “big reveal” strategy is no longer necessary.

Competitive Culture on the Team

In a lighter moment, nine2 shares his intensely competitive background in the RTS title FAF, including hiring coaches and writing custom analysis software, contrasted with FoneE’s originally casual, co-op-oriented background, which he says has shifted noticeably more competitive after playing PvP against nine2.

Enhearten Media’s Future Beyond Sanctuary

nine2 reveals the studio’s broader ambitions extend well beyond Sanctuary: Shattered Sun, citing interest in exploring mechanics that didn’t fit the current game (such as terrain height affecting weapon range), a factory-automation-style game with heavier combat focus, and potential future titles inspired by both Command & Conquer and Starcraft-style RTS design. He confirms the studio has been primarily financed through direct investors who bought equity stakes after engaging with community content like podcast interviews, rather than solely through Patreon or Kickstarter funding, and states this investment opportunity remains open.

Staying PC-First and Protecting the Core Game

nine2 firmly states that Sanctuary itself will never be diluted for console or mobile release, explicitly contrasting this stance with Civilization VII’s reported struggles tied to simultaneous console development, though he remains open to separate, derivative titles built for those platforms in the future.

Contact & Links

Episode Verdict

This interview succeeds as both a promotional vehicle and a genuinely substantive look at indie RTS development, with the hosts pressing for concrete technical and business details rather than settling for surface-level enthusiasm. FoneE and nine2’s candor about past communication failures and the deliberate content-withholding strategy leading up to the Kickstarter lends real credibility to their claims about the studio’s priorities going forward. The extended discussion of the T5 titan units’ design philosophy, framed explicitly around breaking multiplayer stalemates rather than simple power fantasy, demonstrates a level of systemic thinking that distinguishes this from a typical feature-listing interview. The team’s repeated emphasis on independence, long-term preservation, and refusing console or mobile compromises gives listeners a clear, differentiated pitch for why this project deserves backing beyond its impressive visual spectacle.