Fight fires, reroute power to your shields and fix hull breaches - all while receiving orders from your captain to take out that pesky enemy frigate. In Starship Mechanic, you will single-handedly man the all-important engineering bay of a mercenary ship!
As part of a mercenary crew, your ship will take part in a variety of jobs from bounty hunts to salvage missions, each more challenging than the last. Rewire and upgrade your engineering bay as you see fit, to deal with whatever challenges are thrown at you.
The engineering bay is your domain. The captain doesn't know what the state of your bay is (it’s better for both of you this way), so you must decide what it is that needs to be done. It is up to you to give the crew everything needed to survive.
You are the fine line between success and destruction. On a starship, everything is replaceable except you!
Your engineering bay contains a number of systems. Each is vital to your success. From the shields to the coffee machine, everything plays a role. Tuning the communications after they have been scrambled, rebooting the shields and scanning enemy ships are all tasks that have to be done while under (or on) fire.
The engineering bay, and all the systems within, are powered from a central generator. Wires criss-cross under the floor and can be placed, pulled up and replaced at will. Without sufficient power, systems will cease to function and the whole crew will pay the price for your failure.
Each encounter with enemy ships is dynamically simulated in real time. Different classes of ship have their own strengths and weaknesses and will respond to your actions appropriately during battles, flying with different patterns and attack strategies.
With your hands full in the engineering bay, the AI takes control of your ship’s captain. Assessing the biggest threats, designating targets, flying the ship and giving you orders is all handled by the captain. If your starboard shields keep going down, the captain will no doubt tell you to give them more power. He can’t see what’s going on in your bay though, and so whether or not you pay any attention to him is entirely up to you.
Space battles leave their mark on your engineering bay. There is no time to retreat to a spaceport and so repairs have to be done mid-battle. Fixing systems, patching hull breaches and fighting fires all have to be done on the fly.
Use scrap collected from destroyed enemies to build additional systems and purchase upgrades for the ship. Use these upgrades to survive the increasingly difficult challenges that face you.
Battles aren’t entirely random. Each battle progresses you towards the final goal of your mission, but how you perform will change the encounters you face during each task. Playing the same type of mission more than once can result in different paths and encounters depending on your successes and failures each time.
Fight 6 different class of ship, each with it’s own strengths and weaknesses. From scouts which carry only a small selection of weapons but increase the sensor range of their allies to carriers which carry many smaller fighters into battle.
Not all enemy ships are created equal. Each class is given a number of weapon and utility slots to which they can assign modules. Gatling lasers, anti-shield torpedoes and a bomb that can disrupt your power supply are just some of the weapons in your enemy's arsenal.
Enemy cruisers aren't the only threat facing your intrepid crew in the vastness of space - random events can add additional challenge to your already chaotic fights. Electromagnetic interference, rogue asteroids and even black holes can all conspire to make your life difficult.
Starship Mechanic is a complicated game to learn, with lots of interlinked parts. To get the most out of the game a player needs to understand all of them. The current demo/tutorial is designed to teach the basics in about 15-20 minutes - we’ve used it at game shows and don’t have time to explain everything in that medium. We plan to add a full tutorial in the future to help teach players everything they need to know.
Add additional interaction possibilities with the engine module to make them a more interesting part of the ship as well as to introduce another thing that can potentially go horribly wrong! We currently have a plan for the mechanics and are waiting on art before we implement this change.
Some game mechanics aren’t visually represented as well as they could be, which makes the game harder to understand if you don’t already know what’s going on. We hope to improve our current art and add more visual feedback.
Currently there is no way for a user to save and load their progress. With each mission taking something in the region of 30 minutes and a potentially endless amount of missions (assuming you don’t die), we can’t expect everyone to be prepared to commit to finishing a game in one sitting.
Variety is the spice of life, especially in video games. We already have bounty missions in the game, but have plans to introduce salvage and VIP escort missions to the mission pool, with potentially more to come in the future - each with its own set of encounters and challenges to navigate.
If you are interested please vote for us on Steam Greenlight and/or follow our progress on our blog, subreddit, Twitter or Facebook.
Well it is that time again. Another fortnight another update. We have some progress on the UI, and an announcement on an upcoming event so read on.
As we mentioned in the last up date we have been renovating the UI. Jordan has been hard at work pulling in all the new menus that Mo has designed. You may remember that last week we showed you our shiny new buttons.
Jordan has spent the past couple weeks switching over the UI to this new style, and so we have a shiny new set of working menus. These are looking a lot better than the old menus, and mark the start of on going UI changes.
As well as the change to the buttons, we've also added a new menu. Now when starting the tutorial you will be given the oppprtunity to select which tutorial you want to complete. This allows you to redo parts of the tutorial, or resume the tutorial part way through without having to redo everything each time.
The changes are in the new version of the demo, available onIndieDB and Itch.io.
Not to go too long without carting our latest build around, we are coming to the Southampton Game Fest!.
Showing our game in Southampton will be a nice chance of pace to the larger shows we've recently done, and should allow us to spend more time chatting with people. If you are in, or can get to Southampton, drop by and say hi!
(Mirrored from Blog.resonancestudios.co.uk)
Starship Mechanic v0.4.1_demo. Currently in active development. Includes: First iteration of full tutorial. Full first mission from the endless mode...
Starship Mechanic v0.4.1_demo. Currently in active development. Includes: First iteration of full tutorial. Full first mission from the endless mode...
Starship Mechanic v0.4.10_demo. The first publicly available, early access demo of Starship Mechanic. Currently in active development. Includes: First...
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