Hello everyone!
This is our first post here on IndieDB, so we would like to start by sharing some basic info regarding our upcoming title, MOTHERGUNSHIP, as well as to talk a little bit about one of the most important features of this game, which is crafting.
MOTHERGUNSHIP is a frantic hybrid first-person shooter. It’s the product of a close collaboration between Terrible Posture Games and Grip Digital, and it pits you against hordes of sinister robots as you fight through randomly generated ships, working your way towards the ultimate challenge: the MOTHERGUNSHIP itself.
You take on the role of one of the last members of a resistance against an invasion of data-hoarding robotic aliens. They’ve taken Earth and now you have to take it back, one enemy ship at a time, dodging through innumerable waves of bullets and squaring off against some of the largest bosses ever seen in an FPS. The action gets pretty over the top, and in order to have the slimmest chance of survival you’re going to need some mighty firepower. That’s where crafting comes in.
Crafting systems and first-person shooters have a long history together, however the FPS genre is, by and large, saturated with some very serious, often grim, games...and that affects the tone of the crafting systems found within. Generally these systems are limited in their scope, beholden to realism, and reliant on fairly limited alterations to base mechanics.
MOTHERGUNSHIP is, by contrast, a game built around presenting the player with crazy, over-the-top situations; hundreds of dangerous things flying around...explosions everywhere..intimidatingly large bosses with terrifying ways to kill you.... So, it made sense to us to create a crafting system that encouraged the player to respond in kind; with craziness.
Crafting in MOTHERGUNSHIP is, at it’s base, a system with more in common with space-simulators than other FPS games. It’s a modular, component based system with sockets that plug into one another in any shape the player can imagine. The only limit? Barrels must face forward (yeah, we tried without that limit...it sounds more fun than it actually was). Otherwise, the player is given a bunch of puzzle pieces to fit together however they like. Generally, there are three main “types” of pieces; barrels, splitters, and caps. Barrels are obvious - they shoot things. Splitters tend to have multiple exit sockets, allowing you to branch your gun into strange shapes. Caps are where the magic happens, as they affect the behaviors of the gun itself.
Here’s a simple example: The player connects a splitter piece to their gun with 3 exit sockets. Then they connect two barrels to the gun, let’s say a laser and a chaingun. So now they have a gun that shoots bullets and lasers at the same time. To the third exit socket of their splitter, they connect a Cap that adds bounce to all barrels. Now they have a gun that shoots lasers and bullets that bounce all around the room, causing chaos.
Now imagine if you had ten barrels. Or imagine if you had Caps that added special damage, spread, shotgun effects, and other crazy effects...and now add in dual wielding. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to see the magnitude of choices we give the player here.
However, with great power comes great responsibility. While players have unlimited ammo in MOTHERGUNSHIP, every shot you fire drains a little bit of a rechargable energy meter. The crazier gun a player makes the faster that bar drains. So, sure, build that 10 barrel rocket-launcher..but be aware you might only be able to fire it once every few seconds...at least in the beginning of the game, before you’ve upgraded your player abilities a bit. But that’s a topic for another post.
We’ll be talking about that, as well as more details of the crafting menu, in the future. In the meantime, please feel free to contact us via the comments below or on Twitter and share your thoughts or ask any questions. But for now let’s close this blog post with a quick call to action.
If you haven’t signed up for the MOTHERGUNSHIP mailing list, please do so. In the future, that’s how we will contact people about closed betas and such. Also, please wishlist the game on Steam, like us on Facebook, and, of course, follow us on Twitter. We’re looking forward to sharing more in the future months!
Thank you for reading!
The MOTHERGUNSHIP Team!
