We’re a sucker for familiar game ideas viewed from unfamiliar perspectives. Especially the first-person perspective. Speaking freely, we’ll play anything that sounds a bit odd and controls like an FPS.
Enter Flagship – a Kickstarter pitch as much inspired by the Bridge sequences in sci-fi television as space strategy games like Homeworld and Sins of a Solar Empire.
“It was summer, some time in the late 80’s, and we’d just finished watching Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” say developers Urban Logic Games. “It ended with one of the most thrilling movie showdowns we’d even seen.
“Ship-to-ship combat in Trek had always been heavily inspired by naval warfare, but this particular confrontation took place in a dense nebula that for all intents and purposes, may as well have been an ocean. It was a slow, methodical battle of wits. We were enthralled by it.”
That’s the spirit of Flagship – a big bang, a shaking screen, and a crew-load of men and women sprinting to their respective battlestations.
Players can seamlessly transition from the ship to fighting or power management using on-ship consoles. They’ll be responsible not only for their immediate crew, but a fleet of starships.
Urban Logic are planning a procedurally-generated galaxy, a fully-explorable ship, XP for your fleet, and native Oculus Rift support.
Clearly, they’ll need money. Should they meet their £95,000 Kickstarter target in the next two weeks, their new budget will be devoted to expanding the core game mechanics, building on Flagship’s procedural generation algorithms, and creating the art assets visibly lacking in early footage.
I do like the sound of staying calm and doing your duty while interstellar-scale battles rage above your head. Honestly, covering those glass ceilings would go a long way toward reducing stress on the bridge. What do you make of Flagship?