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http://objectsgame.com/

The incredibly short version is this: it’s a space trading game where instead of pretending space ships are WW2 Fighters, we’ve built them more like Nuclear Submarines. A game about navigation and command more than piloting. A game trying to evoke the feeling of the nerve-wracking and cerebral battles from Star Trek II : The Wrath of Khan and The Hunt For Red October instead of the high action of Star Wars.

And all this wrapped in the retro-futuristic aesthetics of the ’70s and ’80s. This is a “future” of beeping displays, physical throw-switches and boot-up sequences. A future where extreme distances have taken the instant communication we’re used to in the 21st century and reduced it back to a world of bulletin boards and text communication.

When developers design a space game, they tend to take inspiration from whatever films, books or TV shows have formed their idea of what their brand of space combat is like. We’re the same, but instead of taking our inspiration from fast-paced action sequences, we’ve drawn from films as varied as 2010: The Year We Make Contact to Master & Commander to Serenity to Event Horizon. Rather than make a simulation, we’ve taken the tropes and concepts we found most interesting & engaging in these kinds of films, and created game mechanics based around those. What do we mean?

Asteroid Fields are tactical combat environments, stuffing up sensors and potentially damaging both your ship and the enemy’s. Scramming reactors will reduce your radiation signature. Entering High Polar Orbits might help muddle your signal to stop enemies from tracking you down. Jump Drives produce huge amounts of power and give away your position entirely before ripping you entirely from space and depositing you somewhere else. Nebulas are fields good for hiding in, muddling emissions and just generally trying to avoid being seen.

One of the major advantages of a text-driven game is that we’ve been able to build a system which allows a huge amount of narrative content. We’ve designed and penned a huge universe, and we’ve got a team of nine writers producing stories & content for the game – from conversations with passengers to in-game poetry, from narrative quests to tabloid journalism.

Overview

Objects in Space is a modempunk stealth space-trading game set in Apollo – a huge cluster of star systems dozens of lightyears away from Earth. You are a lonesome ship’s captain, buying and selling wares in order to keep your bucket of bolts afloat and stay one step ahead of pirates, organised criminals, corrupt governments and shady laws.

You will command your one-person ship from the captain’s chair. Encounters happen far outside visual range, so rather than close-quarters space shoot-em-ups, you’ll be poring over magnetic, gravimetric and radiation scanning arrays trying to locate tiny boxes of metal sometimes flying at millions of miles per hour massive distances away hoping against hope to get a missile lock.

Engineering

All this combines to allow full, top-to-bottom customisation of the player’s ship. They can have a completely solar-powered ship with minimal emissions which is lightweight and good for staying silent. Or they can have a ship with a powerful reactor which is capable of escaping combat with a jump drive that can spin up in seconds. Or they can carry their own weapons and give themselves more freedom to cause emissions without fear. The choice is entirely up to the player, right down to the smallest Hap Node.

Combat

You’re awoken by a comm from a nearby pirate with a missile lock on your ship. Do you agree to their demands and jettison your cargo?

New contact. Small, too small to be a ship. It’s fast and heading towards you. 3 minutes to impact. You scan the system and make way for a nearby nebula; you start to charge your jump drive. Your comm light blinks on again. The pirate repeats his request. The nebula is 180 seconds away. Time to impact: 154. You jump down to the engineering deck and quickly reconfigure your generator – all unnecessary systems offline – no scanning arrays, no main reactor. We’ll run off batteries, you think.

The Apollo Cluster

The SS Cassandra is the largest project humanity has ever undertaken. A massive ship designed to make a 10 year journey to the Apollo cluster, where preliminary scans reveal a bounty of mineral resources and potentially habitable planets. The ship reaches the edge of our solar system, escaping the grip of Sol’s gravity then make the first of many faster-than-light jumps. Families, children, scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers and more embark on the largest journey in humanity’s history. There are 700’000 souls aboard the Cassandra as she blinks out of existence in Sol, destined for Apollo.

Back Story

Jump drives, giving ships the ability to instantaneously shift from one place in space to another, had allowed humankind to explore farther than we’d ever dreamed, at least outside of the realms of fantasists.

But there were limitations. The further the distance, the more power it took – so large vessels were required. Very large vessels. And even they might take dozens of ‘short jumps’, having to recharge between each one, to make the journey to a relatively nearby star, such as Barnard’s Star, Epsilon Eridani or Lalande 21185.

 

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Custom controls at an expo