Startropy - A Space Faring Sci-Fi Adventure/RPG

[Startropy]

Update 28/05/2017 - A big self-contained demo is now available - http://www.indiedb.com/games/startropy/downloads/startropy-pilot-demo

Hi all,

My name is David and I'm the developer of Startropy, a new sci-fi adventure game with RPG elements in the making.

My background is in AAA games where I've worked on a couple of big games like Batman: Arkham Knight and Grand Theft Auto V, but I've left the scene about 2 years ago to pursue a personal passion project which is to become this game.

Startropy puts you in the role as the captain of humanity's first starship capable of FTL travel. Your task will be to explore the universe to discover strange new worlds, and then befriend (or blast) the aliens you meet.

Features:

• A Lucasart-style adventure where you can explore, talk and interact with the world.
• Away team missions will have you assign different crewman to explore hostile planets to gather resources and sometimes enter “dungeons”, where dice rolled against your party's stats play a factor in your success.
• Space combat that emphasises tactical choices over twitch reflexes, and sometimes feature environmental hazards and other quirks.

Expand for screenshots:

Spoiler

If you've ever played Star Control 2, then you'll have a pretty good idea of how the game plays out: You will have the ability to freely explore the universe gathering up resources so you can upgrade your ship to explore further out, and on the way you will encounter alien civilisations that will have a major “quest” involving them.

The plan will be that each quest will have a cool sci-fi plot kind of like an episode of Star Trek, but rather than just riding along the game's story, you will be able to have your say on the quest's outcome and/or ethical quandary, which will also have an effect on the game's overall storyline.

I've mentioned that this game is a passion project. Well Startropy is basically my attempt at trying to put together a lot of the amazing experiences I've had that made me go “wow, this is a great game” that got me into computer gaming, and that I hope will bring joy to others as well.

Lucasart-style graphic adventures were a big part of my childhood, and while I discovered SC2 much later during my college years, I was blown away by the sheer depth and charm of the game. The away team stuff as you can see is a nod to dungeon-crawling RPGs. For the space combat I looked towards Blackguards and the Etrian Odyssey games for engaging encounter designs, and as strange as it sounds I even threw in a bit of Virtua Fighter for the tactical decision making.

HERE'S THE BIG SHILL MOMENT: So I'm pretty happy with how my game is shaping out, but recognise that it is a niche game. If any of what I wrote sounded mildly relevant to your interests, then please show your support by voting for my game on Steam Greenlight to help spread the word to anyone else who also might be interested, with the link I have conveniently pasted for you below:

VOTE ON STEAM GREENLIGHT!

Thanks for reading guys. Let me know what you think. If you have any questions please ask and I'll do my best to answer.

The usual links:
Game Website
Facebook
Twitter

 

[Bester]

Aye aye, captain, I voted.

 

[CryptRat]

Looks very interesting. Good luck.

 

[Des]

Voted. Good luck!

 

[Startropy]

Hey everyone, thanks for your comments and support!

The demo is now out. You can grab it here:

http://www.indiedb.com/games/startropy/downloads/startropy-pilot-demo

Let me know if it's or .

(Also, can't seem to edit OP to add my demo link... do I need mod help?)

 

[Infinitron]

DarkUnderlord Give this gentleman a devtag (Startropy Games)

 

[Zarniwoop]

Star Control 2

 

[Andhaira]

lol why did you go for utter shit graphics and zero animation instead of using something like Unity?

What did you do at Rocksteady and Rockstar; janitorial services?

 

[Zarniwoop]

Unity is canceraids. I prefer this MS Paint style any day, at least it's original.

 

[CryptRat]

I played the demo, saved the alien.
It's very promising, puzzles, ship fights, dungeon crawling and many skill checks.

It's .

 

[Startropy]

Cheers CryptRat, and thanks Infinitron & DarkUnderlord for the fancy dev badge.

 

[epeli]

If you've ever played Star Control 2, then you'll have a pretty good idea of how the game plays out: You will have the ability to freely explore the universe gathering up resources so you can upgrade your ship to explore further out, and on the way you will encounter alien civilisations that will have a major “quest” involving them.

Copying Star Control 2 is already a promising concept, but after playing the demo I found the overall quality a bit lacking.

I don't know if this is a common issue with Adventure Game Studio or just an unfortunate happenstance on my system, but the game engine couldn't handle alt+tabbing from fullscreen mode. Sometimes doing so would freeze the display the game is played on. That would be very nasty behavior for anyone playing on a single monitor system. I also encountered a small scripting bug, apparently you can keep reviving the VIP any number of times just by returning to the planet.

At times the writing felt a little bit... I don't know what would be a good word, immature? For example, your crewmember talking about intergalactic travel to neighboring systems instead of interstellar, now that's quite the detour. Some typos scattered across the dialogs, nothing too bad - "that is cloaking are scanners", "has been sucessfully been opened", "surivivors", "we couldn't fine anyone on your homeworld" (lol), "scamnning", "we hadn't factor in" and so on.

The visuals are serviceable. I love crisp nearest-neighbor filtered low-resolution pixel style and the basic scene compositions are good, but honestly your art isn't very good. I don't know if you plan to iterate and improve, but this project would certainly benefit from having an artist to redo the scene details and characters. I hope your game finds enough early success to afford that!

That said, those are all relatively minor things. Then the good parts:
The core gameplay is solid and the demo scenario was a good introduction to the game. Depending on your ideas, the finished game could end up being excellent. However, there was one design decision I really don't get: Why did you make the ship-to-ship combat realtime? As you said, it emphasises tactical gameplay over twitch. It's quite slow on default settings and the way action costs & encounters were set up in the demo fights, it felt like it would work much better with discrete turns. Attacks already happen sequentially and the game is effectively paused during the attack animations, so wouldn't a turn-based system fit better?

 

[Startropy]

.

Hey epeli, thanks for the post.

The alt+tabbing issue may be an AGS thing I'm afraid. There is an option to play the game in windowed mode as a workaround. Not ideal of course but its there if you're of the habit of multitasking while playing.

On the general roughness of the writing/art + demo bugs: There came a point where I had to consider if I should keep polishing that last 10% of the demo to be just perfect, which in practice would mean several months of work, or I could get it out in a pretty good (at least in my mind) state and can say "Hey guys, check out my game. It has a cool demo to show off the mechanics too." I'm aware that there are a few funny bugs in the demo but so long as nothing crashed the game or stopped you from being able to complete it, then I didn't consider it bad enough to delay releasing the demo.

Similar deal on the art, and with just me on the art it's a slow and iterative process. It would be great to get a talented pixel artist on board, but that's gonna cost money and I need to show to people that this is a project worth doing, and to sell people on that idea I need to show off the project etc... so it's a catch-22 of sorts.

The writing, I was sure I caught the typos and any inconsistencies like the "intergalactic" line you mention, but I guess some slipped in there anyway.

I'm glad you brought up why ship combat is in real time when it seems like it would work in TB: I went through a bunch of combat models when trying to decide what would work for my game. SC2 was a main reference point which had an arcade-y style combat where you directly controlled the ship in battle, but I wanted to create the distinct feeling that your player character is the captain who is in command of the ship, giving out orders, etc. And as part of that feeling, I also wanted to reproduce the tension of being the captain of a large starship, who in the game may be staring at another large starship, being kind of worried about what the other guy is about to do. The reason why I didn't just go full TB was because I felt it would remove some of that simulated tension if players got too comfy in thinking they have all the time to decide on the best action, and instead I wanted players to strike a balance between sound but prompt decision making. The advantage mechanic and how quickly it alters and drains adds another wench that players have to juggle in RT while they are waiting on energy.

 

[thesheeep]

Voted, of course. Very interesting concept!

Also...heh, reminds me of some fun app I once wrote that generated Star Trek-like technobabble nonsense dialogue
(lost the code, though )

 

[HoboForEternity]

Tag. Gonna vote on greenlight after coming hoem from work

 

[ghostdog]

Voted. Looks very promising. I hope you'll be able to successfully combine all those gameplay elements because that's a hard thing to do.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

 

[Startropy]

So is the ship combat RTWP like FTL or what?

Not sure what system FTL uses. In this game space combat is in RT, but your actions have a resource cost that slowly regenerates.

 

[Startropy]

So is the ship combat RTWP like FTL or what?

Not sure what system FTL uses. In this game space combat is in RT, but your actions have a resource cost that slowly regenerates.

RTWP = real time with pause. There's a distinction here with real time.

Really not sure what to make of developers who haven't played games in the genre they are operating in. It's like making this game without knowing Space Quest or 25th Anniversary.

Ah right, I know what RTWP means, but I dont know how exactly FTL implements it if that makes more sense. FTL is on my to-play pile, but that's a pretty big "to-play" pile to be frank.

Edit: mkay I see, the energy system seems to be similar, no compartment targetting though and there is no option to pause.

 

[epeli]

So is the ship combat RTWP like FTL or what?

Nah, it's nothing like FTL. There's no crew management or any subsystems. Basically you just fire weapons when tactically appropriate as in FTL. It's very crude in comparison, but ship-to-ship combat is only a small part of this game rather than the sole focus.

 

[Startropy]

Startropy has now been greenlit! Thank you so much for your support everyone!

 

[thesheeep]

Too bad Greenlight is no more

 

[Startropy]

Too bad Greenlight is no more

Yeah, I was pretty surprised since they closed greenlight haha. Guess they are just going through the remaining submissions now so I just made it through.

 

[Roscoe Scaggs]

Update 28/07/2017 - A big self-contained demo is now available - http://www.indiedb.com/games/startropy/downloads/startropy-pilot-demo

Something you want to tell us Startropy? Or should I say Xarnox, master of time travel???

But seriously you had me at Starcon 2

 

[Startropy]

Update 28/07/2017 - A big self-contained demo is now available - http://www.indiedb.com/games/startropy/downloads/startropy-pilot-demo

Something you want to tell us Startropy? Or should I say Xarnox, master of time travel???

But seriously you had me at Starcon 2

Thanks, I'd brofist ya if I could.