Hi guys, it’s been a while since we've had anything to say here, but I’m very happy to be able to talk to you about our new project. We’re calling it Beacon at the moment. It’s a Science Fiction Action Roguelike, where you have to mutate your way to victory through repeated cloning.
Played from a top-down perspective, similar to The Binding of Isaac and Nuclear Throne, Beacon will have the you working your way through a series of randomly generated levels - from the forested planet surface down to a strange underground facility - eventually collecting enough materials to fix a distress beacon and get off the hostile planet that you’ve found yourself marooned on. As per usual, you’ll find new weapons and items to help you on your way, giving you new abilities and a better fighting chance against the enemies each level produces. Alongside these, you can also choose to harvest DNA fragments from the enemies you kill - and this is where we deviate a little from the more standard Roguelike structure.
As in all Roguelikes, when you die in Beacon, you’ll be sent back to the beginning of the game, losing any weaponry and items you might have picked up along the way. However, rather than losing it, the DNA you harvested in that life is sent back to your personal clone bay (one of the few pieces of your ship still functioning), and spliced together with your own for your next life. This adds a level of permanence to Beacon, as each subsequent life will stack more harvested DNA on top of what you had before, resulting in stat augmentations and (in extreme cases) full-fledged physical mutations. Different enemies will drop different types of DNA fragments, allowing players to experiment and begin to harvest DNA that specifically meshes well with their preferred play style - whether that’s being a slow, lumbering damage sponge or a fast, agile sharpshooter. Be warned, however; not every mutation will be a positive thing.
We're still early in development for Beacon, but we wanted to get this out there and start talking to you about it. We’re hoping to keep our development process pretty open, so keep an eye out on here, as well as our twitter feed, for frequent updates on how the game is coming along. I’ll leave you with some quick FAQs, and some WIP screenshots should follow just behind this post.
