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System Shock RetroSpace - Immersive Disco-Punk Space-Horror Stealth-Shooter

cyborgboy95

News Cyborg
Joined
Aug 24, 2019
Messages
2,735


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ABOUT THIS GAME​

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IMMERSIVE DISCO-PUNK SPACE-HORROR!
You were but a simple janitor, now you are the last hope of all humanity! A traveling space station has been swallowed by a black hole. Weird mutants are everywhere and even time itself seems to have gone mad around you. Be sneaky or blast your way through the cursed station to find a way home. Can you save humanity? Or would you rather just save yourself? The choice is yours!

SURVIVING AURORA 5
Enemies in the game are all completely distinct from each other, and you will need different tactics against them. Understanding and memorizing the enemy's behavior, special abilities, and weaknesses will be key to survival.

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To survive, living creatures won't be your only concern. You will also have to deal with a variety of environmental factors. Security systems - for example - can be extremely deadly unless you find a way and turn them into allies...

STEALTH VS ACTION
Don't like conflicts? Would you hide in the dark or find a way around your enemy? Or rather go completely mental and attack your opponent with its own flaming body part? The choice is yours, cosmic voyager! RetroSpace allows you to solve situations in many different ways. Total avoidance is as legit as a diversion, trap setting, or full-on balls-to-the-wall action.

THE STATION
Aurora 5 is a massively interconnected and open space, that you are free to explore. As you discover new and new areas, shortcuts, and secret paths will open up to previously visited locations. All of this can be accessed through a (mostly) peaceful central HUB area, where you can return anytime when you can't take the madness and horror longer.

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MUTAMODS, DEATH, AND REBIRTH
Mutamods™ can make your life much easier and enhance your combat and stealth skills. Want to become a tentacle-armed, mind-controlling, shadow-lurking mutant? Be our guest. BUT BEARE! Mutamods™ may have unexpected and irreversible side effects...

Death will be an integral part of your journey, but don't worry! Aurora can produce an infinite number of clones of you. There is one little problem though since cloning is never perfect, you should be prepared for some severe cloning degenerations, and of course, it is highly recommended to get your stuff back from your former self.

BLURB
2177 - Humanity's last hope is the AURORA fleet, a convoy of floating space stations searching for a new home.
On this mission spanning several centuries, humans spend their lives in deep sleep, while robots, androids, and a dedicated team of personnel guard their dreams.
Until one of the gigantic city-ships derailed off its course...
Sucked into a black hole...
And now it drifts in the void, lost in the infinite blackness of space.
Corridors are infested with mutants, systems are jammed, and the ship is constantly jumping back and forth between two time periods.
What is going to happen next? Will the madness ever end?
The Nameless Man is looking for a way out. A way out of the endless loop, the evil void, and the cosmic madness...
This is... RETROSPACE!"


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KEY FEATURES
  • - Narrative-heavy, humorous and dark story - aka "disco-fever space-satire" with a surprising amount of depth and twists.
  • - Immersive sim elements - choose your way of solving problems and dealing with obstacles. Take advantage of light and shadow, lure enemies into traps, hack turrets and security stations, find hidden routes and create diversions.
  • - Mutations (Mutamods™) are at your disposal to enhance your average stealth-shooter experience with juicy superpowers. BEWARE: With great power comes great responsibility (and unexpected side effects).
  • - Retro FPS feel with low poly aesthetics, infused with the 60s and 70s retro-futuristic setting and atmosphere.
  • - Metroidvania-like, interconnected level design, and a meaningful death/rebirth system with a unique twist.

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See you in space, Cosmic Voyager...
 

Ghulgothas

Arcane
Joined
Feb 22, 2020
Messages
1,598
Location
So Below
Alright, I'm down for an Indie Bioshock, maybe even an Indie Prey if they're really ambitious. Gunplay looked pretty limp in the trailer, tho.

Is there a word for the visual style this game uses? Deliberately lower polycounts with pixelated textures, rendered sharply and applied to highly animated models, like they're trying to emulate the graphical quirks of Quake. Been seeing it in more and more games lately.

Disco-punk, the what now?
I'm more interested to find out what a
"disco-fever space-satire"
is.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2007
Messages
33,048
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I don't mind the visual style and I'm always up for more imsims. Dishonored also had a deliberately cartoony style and worked.

But I'm getting real tired of parody settings. Take your subject matter seriously for once you fucking faggots. Be sincere about it.
 
Unwanted

†††

Patron
Joined
Sep 21, 2015
Messages
3,544
Dishonored also had a deliberately cartoony style
That's the key word, deliberately. At the time it was a novelty, specially for an AAA game. Today indies all do the cartoony style because it's the only thing they know or can do.
 

jebsmoker

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Nov 17, 2019
Messages
2,578
Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In I helped put crap in Monomyth
this looks... promising, but i'm not a fan of the uninspired 1970s sci fi aesthetic. it feels like they just took everything related to that, stuck it in a blender, and then stuck with the end result. it doesn't feel as focused as, say, dark star, star trek: the motion picture, or alien
 

mkultra

Augur
Joined
Feb 27, 2012
Messages
469
Enemy design is cool. I hope it's more cheesy than too much parody. A bit cheesy is fun, too much parody and jokes and its just tiring.
Freedom Force balanced it really well i thought.

Disco-Punk is a rather lame name of a genre since it's just two music styles. I don't think that works well. Disco-something-not-music and something-not-music Punk can work.
 

Jarpie

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 30, 2009
Messages
6,603
Codex 2012 MCA
I bet it's full of fucking meta-jokes and self-awareness, because writers can't do anything else anymore, fucking retards, I'm on with JarlFrank with this, make your stuff with sincerity.
 

AndyS

Augur
Joined
Sep 11, 2013
Messages
395
as if you were the hero of a 70s B-movie that never existed...

I've seen many 70s B-movies and none of them looked or sounded like this.
 

toro

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Apr 14, 2009
Messages
14,023
POSTED
Mon, January 16
Dev Blog 01 - How it all started?
The vision, design philosophy, and the first steps on Aurora 5...

RetroSpace today bears almost zero resemblance to the first prototype versions, but the vision and philosophy were solidly in place from the get-go. Let's look at how it all started...

THE VISION:

What was the starting point? Well, we just imagined a convoy of ships heading for a new home with the rest of mankind in their belly. The journey is long and dangerous. The destination and the success of the mission are rather questionable, but humanity simply has no other choice. This is 2177, and the Earth has become uninhabitable... So, this was the initial idea, or more like the seed of the idea, the basic situation. The next step - which is still an integral part of the story - is that one of the ships (more like a space station with gigantic engines) breaks off the convoy and gets lost in the infinite vastness of space. And then comes the madness... and the mutants... space-time jumps, and so on.
You know the drill.

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In the original idea, we envisioned a kind of soviet, space-age, communist utopia, but in the end, we felt that the American science fiction world of the 60s and 70s - with its cheap TV series, great movie classics, and pulp science fiction novels - would be a much more exciting and (literally) more colorful setting for our story.

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screenshot from the first prototype version of the game

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some inspirations

DESIGN PHILOSOPHY:

While the world and specific narrative of the game were (and still are) slowly being polished, we found the style we wanted to follow and which we later will call "Disco-Punk", so the next step was to lay down the game design philosophy.

The immersive sim is a rather elusive and hard-to-pin-down genre, but it's the direction we've been shooting in from the start. Mainly because we LOVED games like the Thief or the System Shock series, games where you can live and breathe with the environment, where the world is amazingly immersive, sucks you in, and won't let you go. We felt it was most important not to create a linear game where the player could only choose which weapon to headshot the opponent with, but to give a more open, free-form experience where you can answer each problem with multiple solutions. - it was crucial for us from the start that avoiding enemies, sneaking, or using traps will be just as valid, as shooting or ripping your opponent's head off with a tentacle hand.

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However, we want to present all of this in a way that keeps the story and narrative at the center. By the time we had laid out our core ideas, it turned out that we were actually making a narrative-driven immersive sim single-player first-person shooter game with Metroidvania and soul-like(ish) elements. So... we've got our work cut out for us...

FIRST STEPS ON AURORA 5:

First, we had to sell the idea to the team. So we started to create a loose prototype to ensure that the project was worthwhile. Because after our first game, Chicken Police: Paint it RED! (a noir satire adventure), we started to brainstorm and prototype several projects, in several genres.

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a small part of the team is brainstorming in our first office, circa 2020

Even though the first prototype was almost nothing like the game looks like now (which is still not the final form!), this version already had some scripted story scenes, hacking, audio logs, computer terminals, turret avoidance, basic enemies with a basic AI, three simple weapons and of course a relatively open space, which presented a linear story, yes, but the player could already decide the progression order and gameplay-style in which they wanted to play through the demo.

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screenshot from the first prototype version of the game

This was huge for us, and the team loved the idea! Of course, making an immersive sim game is quite challenging, but we like to challenge ourselves with near-impossible goals, and we've managed to grow our team from 6-7 people to almost 20 in two years, which has allowed us to experiment more and even work on several projects at the same time.

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screenshots from the current (still not final!) version of the game

The next highly important element was humor. We definitely wanted to create an absurd, sci-fi satire, but in a way that the humor never overwhelms the horror elements, which we also have big plans for. This delicate balance and sharp contrast is another risk that we added to the mixture, but by the time we finished the next version of the demo (an internal pre-alpha tech demo) and started implementing our own assets (with the new look and feel), everything in the project just clicked and seemed to work perfectly. This was probably the moment when it became clear to everyone on the team that we were creating something special and that we had to see it through!

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concept art for the game

So we had a style, a genre, a vision, a philosophy, and even an initial prototype. It was time to get serious and take the plunge. And so "RetroSpace" was born, which at the time had a very different name and went through a series of iterations before it was given its final title...

...but that's another story, which I'm sure will be covered in a future dev blog!

If you haven't already done so, please, Wishlist RetroSpace!
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,157
Dishonored also had a deliberately cartoony style
That's the key word, deliberately. At the time it was a novelty, specially for an AAA game. Today indies all do the cartoony style because it's the only thing they know or can do.

Allow me to disagree here i think the cartoony style in Dishonored was always a detriment to the visuals. The game didn't look exactly bad but i still didn't like it.
 
Joined
Mar 18, 2009
Messages
7,304
well... it's easier to say that, than say "the era of games released for ps2, gamecube and xbox 1"
It sure as shit isn't easier to make yourself understood that way though. I wager most people around here have no clue what that "generation" faggotry means, I definitely didn't. And I'm not about to go look up which generation means what when somebody speaks that way.

Anyway, this game looks retarded. Not interested. I've had my fill of this cutesy parody shit for a lifetime. You can immediately tell when a game is made by soy faggots/women.
 

Ryzer

Prophet
Vatnik
Joined
May 1, 2020
Messages
5,213
Why do they always put immersive as a plus to the game? Of course it's immersive, it's a video game.
 
Unwanted

†††

Patron
Joined
Sep 21, 2015
Messages
3,544
Allow me to disagree here i think the cartoony style in Dishonored was always a detriment to the visuals. The game didn't look exactly bad but i still didn't like it.
If you read the post you're quoting, you can see I was never praising the visuals. I don't consider the word "novelty" a positive necessarily.
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,157
Nostalgia porn without a cause seems to be a desease specific to zoomers. You never lived the era you are trying to resurrect or pay "omage" to, so how the fuck do you know what things were actually like back then?

To me it just feels like a different variant of post-modernism. Games in the past were inspired by things game developers actually enjoyed while growing up and were familiar with. Games in the 90s all reflect stuff the devs watched or read during their formative years. Popular movies from the 60s, 70s and especially the 80s, famous sci-fi or fantasy novels, comic books and so forth. Chronologically there may have been something of a discrepancy in some of the media the devs were influenced by but it still didn't matter as even though someone like Robert E. Howard wrote his stuff in the 30s you still read his books while growing up in the 80s so it still counts as a formative experience.

Thus, there was something organic about the way developers in the 90s expressed those formative experiences.

But with those "retro" zoomer omages? It just feels the attraction is precisely that the zoomer devs never actually experienced the media they are trying to recreate. The point seems to be that of reveling in the feeling of cultural alienation of experiencing something you never actually lived yourself or were even exposed to during your formative years.
 

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