Space, that final frontier, is getting evermore crowded these days. Double Fine’s Spacebase DF-9 is now available via Steam Early Access with build Alpha 1. It’s a sci-fi colony builder akin to Dwarf Fortress.
It’s also got some roguelike qualities. Spacebase DF-9 was one of five prototypes revealed during Double Fine’s Amnesia Fortnight event, with JP LeBreton’s idea winning the popular vote.
We build a space station in 3D where our intellstellar denizens go about their days performing duties and taking in that sweet, sweet oxygen from air recyclers.
The setup is that galactic society has more-or-less collapsed and people need to start picking up the pieces. We won’t be just building a future home for humanity as other life forms will eventually migrate for the chance at a better future. It’s not all building and mining though as events will pop up throughout bringing interesting moments to the station.
“One of our artists was playing, and some of the people who were on guard duty showed up and tried to fight the alien, and it blew a hole in the side of the wall. And that created a breach, which vented the room and the alien got sucked out into space,” recalled project lead JP LeBreton. Apparently a colonist had a chest-bursting incident.
However the game is far from finished and so the little alien blighter could survive without oxygen. ”It ended up drifting around in this weird way, and it ended up on a construction platform that was still in vacuum. And these builders, they don’t have any AI for dealing with an alien out in space, so they just continued building, and eventually they build a room around this thing and it oxygenated, and they ran out of the room panicking,” he continued. Good times.
Life in Spacebase DF-9 is ”definitely very fragile” which Double Fine hopes makes us feel even more connected to our colonists as they go about their lives; their tiny, insignificant lives.
”There’s definitely this sense that life in space is quite dangerous and something really bad will happen eventually. In a lot of cases it’s recoverable, but the way we’ve tuned the game right now, the odds are definitely stacked against you.”
Check out the Spacebase DF-9 Steam Early Access page for more, where it’s on sale with 20% off right now.
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