Billified

Yes, we worked about six months into Steel Harbinger 2 before they laid off the entire dev team and others (IIRC they eventually cut all in-house development). I have some of the early material we made for that game, which picked up exactly where the first left off, with Miranda Bowen stuck on the automated alien planetoid as it visits other inhabited alien worlds to try to transform like Earth. So it would've been like the first but with whole different worlds and alien races to try to save, but the worlds would've been smaller and quicker to complete. It would have ended with the player figuring out how to pilot the planetoid and reprogram it to attack the 'bad' alien homeworld where it originated. 

The first game didn't sell well for a couple of reasons (one of them was that the marketing department didn't care at all for the game or its content, thought Miranda was a teen male misogynist fantasy) so I suppose it was easy for them to kill the project. Also, I had a rather specific vision for the game originally - I was the initial concept and primary designer. But about halfway through this executive producer took over when I was out for a couple of weeks due to an injured back. I wasn't able to take control after that and he made what I'd conceived as a serious, dark and tragic story more campy and silly... Which, I guess, gives it some appeal years for that B-movie sorta appeal. My original intent was to portray a teenage girl becoming this permanently altered being fighting to retain her humanity with her scientist dad behind the scenes, fighting self-blame and grief trying to help her. The original promo poster for the game actually had the slogan 'Daddy's Little Girl is Out to Save the World'. I kid you not. And then the marketing team, pissed at her revealing design outfit, drew a white body stocking on the game case art (you can see the little white crosshatches they did in Photoshop). LOL, it was a bit of a clusterf_ck. 

Still, an amazing couple of years to work with folks who became good friends and some great talent. Some of them are still in the industry, some went on to other stuff.