Saturated Outer Space - Turn-Based Tactic Where You Control a Squad Responding to S.O.S Calls in Space

[cyborgboy95]

https://www.saturatedouterspace.com







Demo is available:

ABOUT THIS GAME​

"The future has a habit to unpleasantly surprise everyone who makes plans for it."
- Alastair Reynolds "Redemption Ark"

Whenever a threat emerges in outer space, a squad is coming to the rescue.
You are the Commander of a squad working for the S.O.S. Your primary task is to rescue civilians across the galaxy and to eliminate all emerging threats, ranging from raiders and ruffians to unidentified forms of being never encountered before. It’s up to you to go for a stealth run or to turn things into a bloodbath. But there’s yet another decision to take, the crucial one: when you finally make it to the civilians, you won’t be able to help everyone.

Choose who will live and who will be left abandoned - build yourself a name and get the privileges of a revered rescuer or make a fortune by saving those who pay and enjoy the power that money can give.
No matter what you choose, remember: SPACE NEEDS YOU!

Features:​

• Experience a captivating storyline inspired by sci-fi classics
• Sneak past your enemies or kill them all in a tactical turn-based combat
• Team up with various allies to make the most of their distinctive traits
• Build your own strategies to make it through boss fights
• Protect civilians, keep them safe and escort them to EVAC-zones
• Your decisions matter - it’s up to you to decide who is to be rescued or left behind
• Complete the story in your own way - 3 different endings based on your choices and playstyle along with an extra one

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Daaaaaamn nigger. Ages ago I had this idea about a game where you would command a team of rescue specialists that would go to wrecked space ships and stations to rescue the crew and sometimes also fight aliens/pirates/robots and such. You would use all kinds of equipment to put out fires and fix various technical problems, provide medical aid and such, and of course combat would also happen from time to time, so you would have some weapons too.

Its great when people sometimes make your wishes come true and this wish of mine seems to be coming true with this little game. I spent some quality time with the demo and finished all the missions and tutorials included. Here are my findings (keep in mind that this is supposed to be “pre-alpha according to the devs):

• You command a team of three rescue operators (so far they don’t have specialists skills, but I guess that might be coming later on), out of combat you move in realtime like in a top down shooter, you can move slowly or run, use equipment and interact with objects.
• Enemies (pirates and robots in the demo) have a visible detection radius, if you enter it they initiate combat and get to move first, you can initiate combat at any time as well and get to go first in that case – obviously what you need is to maneuver yourself into an advantageous position while avoiding detection and then initiating for maximum effect.
• There are both melee and ranged enemies, enemies can heal themselves and their AI is OK (they seek cover and try to flank, but its nothing extra), your operators have only assault rifles (I am sure more will be coming) and can throw grenades (enemies don’t do that in the demo), combat is fairly lethal (enemies go down in 2-3 hits, your operators can take a few more, but are also fairly vulnerable – downed operators become unconscious and will die in a few turns without medical aid). There are also explosive barrels.
• There are various environmental hazards, such as fires, vacuum, toxic gases, obstacles and mines, sometimes you run into locked doors, you can even breach walls with explosives in some cases. To deal with them there are various tools (fire extinguishers, “sonic tool” which destroys obstacles and lets you also disarm mines, respirators and space suits for civilians – your operators have armored space suits, so vacuum and gas are no problem for them).
• As far as the tools go, I would definitely like to see a few more types, ideally tied to specialized skills of the operators to make things a bit more complex
• The game has a simple but fairly nice medical system, you need to monitor blood pressure, pain and poisoning, there are again tools that help with each one (and they also interact, somewhat like IRL its not a good idea to just inject people with adrenalin when you want to get their heart going again – in this game simple representation of this is that adrenalin for example causes poisoning, so you should use it together with antidote, a simplified representation of adrenalin/adenosine cocktail)
• Your primary objective is always rescuing civilians, hostiles can take them hostage (there is a scripted sequence in one of the demo missions in which a pirate takes a civie as a human shield and threatens to kill him, while you need to get around him to get a clear shot) and they are also threatened by environmental hazards (in one mission part of the station is open to space, you have to search the area to find one space suit and then you give it to one civie, lead him through, take the suit back to the other dude and lead him through as well)

In the realtime mode you can order your team mates to follow you or stay put, same with civies – its simple but effective.

The game is obviously low budget indie (I guess its once more a bunch of Russians working out of somebody´s garage) and some aspects are a bit rough around the edges, as is to be expected. There are also some questionable design decisions (for example you can only pan the camera around in turn based mode, but not rotate it for some reason, you can only select operators by clicking on their portraits and not by clicking on the characters themselves), but all in all I am pleasantly surprised.

Thanks for posting this game. Its goes right on my wishlist.

 

[ArchAngel]

Graphics are nice but 3 guys with nuXcom like mechanics.. uhh

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Well its not so much nu-XCOM mechanics (as in you have 2 APs or w/e the deal is, didnt really bother with that shit much). You have 8 APs, 1 AP per move, shooting costs 3 per attack, throwing nades takes 2 along with using items.

 

[ArchAngel]

Well its not so much nu-XCOM mechanics (as in you have 2 APs or w/e the deal is, didnt really bother with that shit much). You have 8 APs, 1 AP per move, shooting costs 3 per attack, throwing nades takes 2 along with using items.

Cover mechanics that modify hit chances.. that is nuXcom.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

*yawn*

Moonbreaker looks more interesting.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

Well its not so much nu-XCOM mechanics (as in you have 2 APs or w/e the deal is, didnt really bother with that shit much). You have 8 APs, 1 AP per move, shooting costs 3 per attack, throwing nades takes 2 along with using items.

Cover mechanics that modify hit chances.. that is nuXcom.

people complain about that, but what else are you going to do? Not use cover? Not have cover provide cover? People being shot at should use cover, and cover should provide cover..what is the alternative?

I am not trying to be snarky or whatever, if there is another answer I have not thought of or seen, I would be interested to hear about it.

 

[Strange Fellow]

Ballistics simulation. It's not even hard to do.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Well its not so much nu-XCOM mechanics (as in you have 2 APs or w/e the deal is, didnt really bother with that shit much). You have 8 APs, 1 AP per move, shooting costs 3 per attack, throwing nades takes 2 along with using items.

Cover mechanics that modify hit chances.. that is nuXcom.

people complain about that, but what else are you going to do? Not use cover? Not have cover provide cover? People being shot at should use cover, and cover should provide cover..what is the alternative?

I am not trying to be snarky or whatever, if there is another answer I have not thought of or seen, I would be interested to hear about it.

Same thing that PP and the old xcom games did; ballistics instead of rolling dice.
Rolling dice is probably easier to do though as it just comes down to RNG. No animation of projectiles, no programming in physics, etc.

Personally I prefer ballistics as seeing your elite soldier miss a point blank shot because the RNG decides to shit on you that day gets old really damn fast.
Especially when most modern xcom-likes give you few soldiers but really lethal enemies.

 

[ArchAngel]

Well its not so much nu-XCOM mechanics (as in you have 2 APs or w/e the deal is, didnt really bother with that shit much). You have 8 APs, 1 AP per move, shooting costs 3 per attack, throwing nades takes 2 along with using items.

Cover mechanics that modify hit chances.. that is nuXcom.

people complain about that, but what else are you going to do? Not use cover? Not have cover provide cover? People being shot at should use cover, and cover should provide cover..what is the alternative?

I am not trying to be snarky or whatever, if there is another answer I have not thought of or seen, I would be interested to hear about it.

Same thing that PP and the old xcom games did; ballistics instead of rolling dice.
Rolling dice is probably easier to do though as it just comes down to RNG. No animation of projectiles, no programming in physics, etc.

Personally I prefer ballistics as seeing your elite soldier miss a point blank shot because the RNG decides to shit on you that day gets old really damn fast.
Especially when most modern xcom-likes give you few soldiers but really lethal enemies.

And if new Jagged Alliance 3 can do ballistics, other games can as well.

 

[udm]

Hell, indie games like Project Haven and Urban Strife are made by small teams, and they feature ballistic simulation.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

Ballistics simulation. It's not even hard to do.

ballistic simulations is still RNG, I don't understand how its not, its like 50% chance it lands inside some ring and 50% outside some other ring (or something like that, it has to be RNG, its a computer), and if you are hiding behind something, its going to provide cover

 

[ChaDargo]

How's the demo?

 

[Parsimonious cook]

How's the demo?

It has a few tutorials showing the basics and like five short missions that further demonstrate what the game intents to do. As I mentioned above it is a bit rough around the edges, but perfectly playable - try it and see for yourself.

 

[ArchAngel]

Ballistics simulation. It's not even hard to do.

ballistic simulations is still RNG, I don't understand how its not, its like 50% chance it lands inside some ring and 50% outside some other ring (or something like that, it has to be RNG, its a computer), and if you are hiding behind something, its going to provide cover

Sure but it does not have cover that gives arbitrary hit chances reductions and you can do friendly fire and missed shots that do other stuff like hit others behind the target (which is something that happens fairly often in Phoenix Point)

 

[Norfleet]

ballistic simulations is still RNG, I don't understand how its not, its like 50% chance it lands inside some ring and 50% outside some other ring (or something like that, it has to be RNG, its a computer), and if you are hiding behind something, its going to provide cover

I prefer to see things in terms of prescriptive vs. descriptive chance-to-hit. In a prescriptive CTH system, if it says you have a 30% chance of hitting something, you have a 30% chance of hitting something, even if the game has to twist the very nature of reality and make the shot fly 90 degrees off axis to achieve that miss. This tends to create results players find absurd and ludicrous. In a descriptive CTH system, the estimated chance is much more of a spitball, if it is displayed at all (perhaps because the factors that govern whether a shot will actually "hit" the target cannot be easily calculated). "Ballistics Simulation" tends to be more descriptive in this way, because off-target shots have to go SOMEWHERE and may still end up hitting the target, maybe not exactly the way you were hoping, but hey, good enough.

Experience with these sorts of games tends to let you spot the telltale signs of these behaviors.

Sure but it does not have cover that gives arbitrary hit chances reductions and you can do friendly fire and missed shots that do other stuff like hit others behind the target (which is something that happens fairly often in Phoenix Point)

It's actually more compilcated than that. For instance, what even is "hit chance"? In a full simulationist system, we'd have to determine two major factors: The chance that the shooter aims correctly on target and would thus hit the target if he was wielding something like a lazor pointer, and the chance that the shot released from the gun actually follows the intended trajectory and doesn't deviate because of mechanical imperfections. Then you have the issue where targets are not simple points, but rather, shapes, and some margin of error will still achieve what the player will perceive as an acceptable, or even superior hit (if I aim at an someone and hit him in the head instead of center of mass where I was aiming, that's even better, even though it technically might be a miss).

So now when we're analyzing how cover affects CTH, we have to consider a large number of issues which might not even be explicitly part of the game. If I'm aiming at target's head, and he crouches behind a box such that only his head is visible, then my chance to hit shouldn't actually be affected at all: My target is the head and the head is still fully exposed. But if the game doesn't even have called shots (or perhaps even locational damage), then what happens? Arbitrary modifiers will somehow enter into play, I imagine. Plus, the notion of what constituted the base chance to hit by the shooter in the first place was, itself, arbitrary. While the precision of a weapon as fired while held rigidly in a clamp can be based on real world data, or at least fictional arbitrary statistics, there's no corresponding data for shooter accuracy based on an unknown "skill value".

 

[cyborgboy95]

Devlog #31
Hello everyone!

The S.O.S. project team is on the line! The most steadfast, dedicated fighters, loyal to their crazy and courageous cause.

It's been a while since we last shared news from our workshop on the edge of the galaxy, Hekata. However, there has been plenty of news, and it has been diverse. Let's take the last diary we released a year ago as a starting point. It was published for issue number 30. Since that day, we have:

- Shrunk to six people and four to five permanent "orbit" helpers.

- Built a new ship sub-level on which an entire space expedition disappeared. It was later captured by pirates and turned into a junkyard, a warehouse of plundered junk and a home for outcasts, all in the best traditions of space criminals, like those in The Stainless Steel Rat.

- Rebuilt the battle system from tile-based to free. That is, our soldiers run around freely like in Gears Tactics. In the screenshot below, you can see the floor divided into cells, but it's just markings to which objects are not attached. However, units are happy to stick to cover and walls.

- Successfully implemented the system of remote skills, path calculation, and base AI.
- Rethought and redesigned the rescue game mechanics and transformed it into a turn-based system. Without false modesty, we can say that nobody has seen or done anything like it before. Someone might say to me, "Well, no one did it because you came up with nonsense." Maybe so, but we believe in this system! Oh, if only we had the strength to lift it up.
- Applied for a grant from the Institute for Internet Development. We even adapted our lore to their agenda. We'll write about the results a bit below.

- Made our own 3D models based on our own concepts. Well, as best we could, as they say.

- What else... what else... there was definitely something else... let's see... We decided not to take Unreal 5, it's too simple for us, we want hardcore and pain. So... well, the logs were erased, memory clusters crumbled, and some working files were written over them. Access is closed.

If something else happened, it's not important. We'll keep fighting by participating in any local contests that remain and not lose hope of creating an MVP version.

"So, if you've done so much, why don't you show us this miracle?" you might ask. And we'd answer: "The implementation of our game is only at the concept and prototype phase. We still have a long way to go before a demonstration version, even as far as walking from Berlin to Beijing."

Why did we write this diary? Just to show that we're still alive and want to make an awesome turn-based strategy game! We didn't win the IRI contest: instead, Peter & Wolf, The Three Bogatyrs and Vasilisa with Baba Yaga surpassed us.

On the one hand, we're upset that S.O.S. wasn't rated highly enough to give us money for development. On the other hand... whatever.

As long as there is a core team of developers and as long as we don't give up, there's a chance that we'll finally crack this wall with our heads and produce a cool game. On our own dime or on money raised, but we promise to show it to you someday. It's a shame we can't show our development progress more often since it has slowed down even more than last year. We often have nothing to write about. But we promise that if there's something significant, like losing a contest at IRI, we'll definitely whine about it and remind you of ourselves)))

Stay tuned. Thank you for your attention.

We'll try not to disappoint all the fans of turn-based tactics and release this long-awaited game someday.

In the meantime, support us with a like or add the game to your wishlist. It would be very helpful!

Yours faithfully,
Saturated Outer Space's unwavering developers.

Seriously, add the game to your wishlist so you don't forget about it.