Hi everyone,
The main focus for March has been our new opening sequence. Our goals for this are creating something that is a fun/cool introduction, making people eager to dive into the rest of the game all whilst having learnt the core mechanics along the way.
This prologue campaign is set during the initial moments of the Collective’s attack on Earth. You play a civilian engineer on an orbiting Listening Post (concept art of this is in last month’s Dev Transmission) who has to navigate the critically damaged station while it’s being invaded. Here’s concept art of this character, along with some dead bodies of fellow engineers (you’ll see a lot of these scattered around):
Much like our existing SENTRY characters, the engineer you play isn’t special or ‘The Chosen One’, they’re a body to throw into the grinder that hopes to achieve eventual success, one bloody step at a time :)
The station is trying to initiate the failsafe emergency SENTRY protocols, so when it realises you’re alive it tasks you with navigating your way to an area where crew are kept in stasis, along with access to a SENTRY suit:
The prologue culminates in the defense of a server that has the SENTRY program on it, and once completed allows civilian vessels to flee Earth. From there you’ll have a navigator sequence where you have to power-up the jump gates, which sets up the Initiate campaign to commence.
In terms of the teaching aspect of this prologue, we very much want players to learn while not feeling like they’re being taught (this is a game, not school!). Because we’re also planning our v1.0 release to re-frame our campaigns and provide a stronger flourish to their endings, we felt that we could provide this knowledge while simultaneously making this prologue feel like the natural starting point for the SENTRY story – i.e.
- The prologue tracks the opening attack
- Civilian vessels escaping in the Initiate campaign
- A new objective for Starfarer
- Getting to in a new campaign.
Here are a couple of other pieces of concept art and what they’re helping demonstrate.
First up are new doors that are locked with clamps. These can only be opened by destroying the clamps with explosions (i.e. the secondary fire mechanic on the P9X):
When you receive your Fabricator for the first time it isn’t calibrated so needs testing before it is fully unlocked (i.e. deployable placement):
(On the right side is a concept for the Server that acts as a mini-core, the thing you defend in the first combat)
From the Community!
This month Discord User BurgerTown made a SENTRY-themed version of that skeleton-banging-shield meme that was doing the rounds recently!
Watch on YouTube
We love seeing this kind of thing, so please send any cool videos/fan art to us and we may feature it in a future Dev Transmission.
Providing feedback is really important in helping us shape the game. Here’s a bunch of useful links to where you can reach us:
Thanks for the support!
