About
SPL is Souls-like disguised as a 3D Space Sim, with realistic physics dogfights.
Join a hopeless struggle, against a cosmic entity, threatening all sentient life.
The following features are now in game:
Short, intensive, replayable game loop
The best indie can give
I solo designed and developed SPL with one consistent vision in mind. On the other hand, players feedback is also key, as it gives me a different perspective on the game.
Combat mechanics
You can get shot down quickly and easily, there are plenty ways to stay alive, many of them very soulslike:
On the offense side:
Join a hopeless struggle, against a cosmic entity, threatening all sentient life.
The following features are now in game:
Short, intensive, replayable game loop
- Respawn is instant, learn from failure and quickly get back into fight.
- Permadeath starts after 30 minutes.
- First playable chapter takes at least 30 minutes and is finished if you die, escape or defeat the Starborne Nexus.
- You can quicken the arrival of the Nexus by defeating enemies, however Nexus arrival will be delayed by your death.
- If you play well, you will achieve more with given time, and finish the run with high fame (score).
- 3 chapters are planned with total 90 minutes of playthrough per run.
The best indie can give
I solo designed and developed SPL with one consistent vision in mind. On the other hand, players feedback is also key, as it gives me a different perspective on the game.
Combat mechanics
You can get shot down quickly and easily, there are plenty ways to stay alive, many of them very soulslike:
- You and many enemies have an indestructible front shield. Shield drops when a ship takes action.
- If the shield deflects, your heat goes up (like stamina goes down), if it gets too high – you get overheated.
- You can quickly avoid being shot by dashing and barrel rolling in any direction.
- You can counter (parry) any incoming projectiles by overloading your shield. Missing a counter timing can overheat you!
- You can wrap yourself with full shield making you impervious to all damage, but you slowly heat up and can't do much else.
- You can heal up by hitting the enemy hard enough.
- The enemies need to see you, to know where you are. You can hide, or just use your jump drive to escape.
On the offense side:
- Your main guns never run out of ammo, instead your heat goes up, and you can overheat.
- Shooting is about positioning, and good timing, not putting the reticle at the perfect spot. You have the same aim assist system, as the AI enemies. However it still leaves a lot of agency and space for error.
- The enemies also know how to defend, you need to dogfight, flank or sometimes just overpower them with a bullet storm.
- With high enough DPS you will heal a lot, even over-heal, this will let you push forward, sometimes forgetting about defence as healing will soak the damage.
Story
The Mind Eater draws all sentient life towards itself. It devoured the ancient Natives, and now it knows of us, too.
Your resistance to it's call, however brief, is our glimmer of hope.- SPL introduces you to the world, your mission ahead and opens a promise of future story updates.
Tutorials- A well tested, polished set of 4 tutorial missions that will teach you how to make best of games unique mechanics.
Fame and leaderboards- Winning each fight earns you fame.
- SPL tells you how well you performed and what actions have been scored.
- You will loose all fame if you die after permadeath starts - when your time runs out.
- You can escape the game when your time runs out and take your fame with you!
- Steam leaderboards showing top 3 pilots and other pilots around your score.
Challenges- First boss - Starborne Nexus is finished, a challenge that will require both wits and skill.
- Three enemy ship archetypes: Terran Interceptor, Native Fighter and Starborne Drone.
- Each enemy uses respective species technologies and weapons.
- Enemies won't give you an easy time, you will die a lot, respawn, repeat but finally succeed.
- Enemies can organise in groups and wings and attempt to overwhelm you.
- You can soften the difficulty by grinding on asteroids, to improve you ships attributes.
- 8 more bosses will be developed in Early Access giving 9 in total.
Three ship's resource bars:- Heat - most actions generate heat, if you overheat it will take a few seconds to reboot the reactor!
- Armour - regenerates if you reactor is cool - at 0% heat.
- Structure - living metal that runs inside your ship, as well inside the enemies. If you hit enemies structure, it ejects from their ship and be collected to heal. Enemies can heal in the same way!
Ship upgrades- Four progression branches: Ship, Terran Tech, Native Tech, Starborne Tech.
- By defeating enemies of the 3 species, you progress in the respective technology and also in the Ship branch.
- 3 weapon archetypes: Bolter, Plasmagun, Hailgun, related to 3 encountered species.
- 7 weapon variants: Auto, Trident, Scatter, Sentinel, Raptor, Assault, Destroyer.
- Giving 21 weapon combinations: Assault Bolter, Destroyer Plasmagun, Raptor Hailgun ... and so on.
- 15 weapon modifiers which can be added to a composed weapon, without quantity limit, creating synergies and antisynergies.
Example modifiers: Flak - your bullets explode but have limited range - End result like in looter shooter, but here you get to choose, which keywords to compose your weapons from.
- 3 Ship tech attributes that can be improved during playthrough: Resilience, Heat and Power.
- Some weapon combinations with modifiers can be truly overpowered, try to find them.
- You can build and equip up to 4 weapons. Design them to have an answer to every combat situation. You can deconstruct and shuffle weapon type, variant and modifiers at any time.
Flight- There's no speed limit, if you accelerate you will maintain current speed until you decelerate or hit something.
- Ships warp reactor allows you to accelerate freely in 6 directions, without changing orientation, full freedom of motion. You can freely strafe or fly backwards, you don't have to look forward to fly forward.
- You can use jump drive, and quickly accelerate to thousands of kilometres per second, you can fly freely while in jump mode. Your ship will exit the jump when you reach a target.
- You are free to fly anywhere you want, the game will follow and give you challenges on the way.
- You are free to fly away from any encounter or combat.
- You can accelerate to outrun your bullets!
Join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/7Wb5XPS