Hi there! Most likely almost no one knows us, we’re a small team of 2 people, with no funding, no Kickstarter campaign, no publisher or editor behind us, and no time to attend 200 fairs and events or manage 5 social networks posting every day. Could we do it? Probably, but then a project that would take a few months would turn into a years-long project.
With all that said, you probably get an idea of who we are. Just to add: we’re not a professional studio, meaning we don’t dedicate all our time to development. We do this in our free time. That makes small projects like this one, which could easily be done in a couple of months, turn into something that’s taken 6. That’s also why we don’t go to fairs or run social media.
Also, this particular project has been done solo, by a programmer, which means… it might look to some of you as ugly as sin. Sorry, I really tried, but designing interfaces, environments, and that kind of stuff just isn’t my thing. Add to that the fact that I used assets I already had lying around, so I had to adapt what I had to make everything kind of fit together.
That said, if you like how it turned out, awesome :D.
Weren’t you going to talk about the game?
Getting to it, but I thought some context and an introduction were important.
Truth is, I like the result, it’s the kind of game that really gets to you, and when you realize it, the 15 minutes you were going to play with a friend turn into a “dude, should we stop? It’s been 2 hours.”
It’s simple, you have one magazine, kill everything on the ship.
As a single-player game it’s a bit bland, though challenging due to the don’t miss a single shot premise, since there are no extra bullets. The game is very punishing, so much so that 2 missed shots = you’ve lost.
For multiplayer, with 2 to 4 player games, you’ll feel the pressure of “shit, I missed” or “crap, this is doomed because someone missed,” so cooperation can quickly turn into every-man-for-himself because no one wants to die.
Is that it?
Yes, simple premise, simple game. Play it, have fun, move on. We’re not going to keep it in development for years and years adding new content, we’re not a factory.
Obviously we’ll be very attentive to bugs and requests. We’re open to adding small changes and improvements that may have slipped through, but if there end up being lots of requests and there’s room for something bigger (and better), we’ll do that in another game.
Anything else?
The NPCs have more reaction than Ubisoft’s, the bar wasn’t very high, but still. They might seem kind of dumb, but again, I made this solo, they react to sound, the death of nearby teammates, and to seeing you. What more do you want?
IMPORTANT, sometimes in multiplayer, if you switch from one friend’s lobby to another, the connections stay open due to asynchrony issues. I’ve fixed everything I could, but some things are out of my control since it’s made with Mirror and FizzySteamworks. I’ve read tons of documentation, tested endlessly, but there comes a point where no matter how much I code it to close everything, it just doesn’t. Just restart the game and you’re good. It usually breaks if the Host leaves before the others do.