Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Role-playing Game – Early Access Content Overview

Iron Tower Studio’s Colony Ship RPG is set to enter early access on April 6, 2021. The initial build is going to feature the game’s first chapter, which means three areas, three potential companions, and plenty of dialogues, skill checks, and combat encounters. This recent Steam announcement tells us more about those.

Here are the text parts:

We’ve been working on Colony Ship for 5 long years, modifying the engine, building tools and systems (character, combat, stealth, dialogue, inventory, AI, pathfinding, etc), creating thousands of assets, and – finally – the first chapter of the game:

Turn-based combat with action points and different attack types with different pros and cons. Gather a party of adventurers or explore the Ship alone.

Turn-based stealth: action points, noise and alert meters, and takedowns.

Dialogues with various checks: stats, skills, reputation, items, deeds, etc.

You start the game in the Pit, a container town sitting in one of the Ship’s cargo holds. From there you can travel to two nearby ‘locations’: the Armory and Hydroponics. These and other locations will change and evolve throughout the game.

The Pit. The Free City. Ever since you were a kid, this has been your home: a sprawling heap of vacant cargo containers slowly getting filled up with those who couldn’t afford to stay in the Habitat or needed to get away from its bosses and factions. Out here, folks have lived free and died fast, with those who survive earning their keep by either “diving” into the wreckage of Mission Control and bringing back valuable relics of the past, or figuring out a way to make money off the fools who do the diving.

Your destination lies ahead – a triply reinforced door flanked by twin auto-cannons drawing on a seemingly inexhaustible power supply. No one made it past during the Mutiny, and no one’s made it past since. Like the proverbial flaming sword outside of Eden, it sits as a guardian, a symbol of ancient strength, and a promise of marvels beyond.

The Hydroponic Division was originally conceived to adapt Terran plants to the anticipated environment of Proxima Centauri. Extensive gene-editing was employed to develop resistance to alien fungi and pests, and accelerated adaptation hacked into the plants’ genetic code.

Like many other critical systems, Hydroponics was abandoned during the Mutiny. The carefully cultivated flora and fauna was left on its own in harsh environs designed to propagate rapid and brutal evolutionary cycles. When men returned to reclaim Hydroponics, they discovered an environment as wild and hostile as any Earth jungle.

Party members with personal quests, development arcs (reflected in changing portraits), agendas, and beliefs. The first chapter gives you 3 party members out of 10[…]

… and introduces a party member who might join you later[…]

Overall, the first chapter represents a design template (how things work) in every aspect, except for the main quest which will branch into different directions in chapter 2. Before we apply this design template to the new locations, we’d like to show it to our core audience and see what you think. So if you don’t mind supporting games still in development, welcome aboard.