StarCrawlers Kickstarter Scuttles Halfway Towards Goal
First-person dungeon crawlies
It was just a couple of weeks ago that we wrote about StarCrawlers, a first-person dungeon crawler set onboard derelict spaceships. Now the Legend of Grimrock-style game is up on Kickstarter and almost halfway towards its $65,000 goal. It has endless, procedurally generated levels, and enemy scuttlebots who talk in emoticons. Climb aboard to watch the pitch video below.
The game is being made by Juggernaut Games, a team of indie devs formed by people who previously worked on projects like PlayStation Home. Their animation experience makes the game look, in spite of its rusting-spaceship aesthetic, a bit lovely. Like this:
In between the Grimrock-style movement and combat, the game has a "Narrative AI" which generates the procedural ships based on the story of the mission you're running. You'll help shape your characters with your responses to mission plot points, with the classes of your squad of characters defining the options available to you.
These kinds of games - first-person dungeon crawlers - have always felt restrictive to me. For years, I couldn't get past the idea that they were old first-person shooters, from an era when pre-rendered graphics required limited movement. But then, I'm quite dim. I like dungeon crawlers. I like turn-based combat. I like RPG systems. StarCrawlers seems like it could be fun, and mercifully moves on from the more typical orcs-and-goblins setting to the marginally less typical robots-and-pipes setting.
If you want into the game as soon as possible, you need to back at the $23 tier to receive the beta when it launches in September of this year. Alternatively, there are a bunch of lower tiers if you want the finished game at the end of development.