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Spark Rising is a build & battle FPS sandbox game. This action conquest game has you conquering worlds, plundering resources, and building fortresses, all for the purpose of taking down a mad god. The game is now live on Steam early access! Get!

Post feature Report RSS Reenvisioning the Spark Bot

Now that Spark Rising is live on Steam Early Access, it's time to explore a redesign of the titular protagonist, the Spark Bot!

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It's time to explore a redesign of the titular protagonist, the Spark Bot!

Ah, the infamous Spark Bot. The character you play in the game. Just a simple bot, going about his duties, tracking down rare crystals from planet to planet and protecting them. There's almost a child-like innocence to such willingness to follow through on your duties without question, hoping to appease your master. That is until the Spark Bot recognizes a threat, and jumps into an exo-suit to lay waste to whole armies, bases, and armadas. It then becomes brutally efficient in carrying out its tasks.

But all this warfare raises a rather poignant question: Just who is giving you this mysterious prime directive? And if your character is a bot that becomes sentient enough, what if it starts to question its purpose? This is something that we want to explore in more detail as the game develops.

So here's what's cool about this story exploration. Even at this early stage of the game, we'll gradually reveal elements of why you exist, and world around you. Elements that only exist in the now. These are story elements that might get removed in later builds even. The whole idea is to reward people to play through the game and feel like there's a world gradually revealing itself each time you play a new update.

This is a pretty experimental approach to story telling, one made all the more risky because the final outcome of the game and character still are being locked in. But one thing I always felt like most early access games are missing is a reason to play a new update. Sure there are new features to explore, but rarely is the update centered around those features in a way that completes a gameplay loop. So this experiment is to wrap a reward around new features, and the reward is to reveal some story elements for you!

Because we want you to care about the Spark Bot you play as, we've been dabbling in redesigning the character at a concept art stage. Now that we launched on Steam Early Access, we wanted to dedicated a bit more time to this effort now. We took an interesting approach to this effort: We got asked a few great artists to come up with different ideas and see which one resonates with you! Here are just a few samples below.



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OvenSlug
OvenSlug

this is going for a very good start, i like the concept
and i can't wait for more of the story.

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