Iron Tower Studio Colony Ship Game Design Update #4

The folks at Iron Tower Studio have published a new design update for the CRPG they’re planning to release in 2020, which will take place on a Colony Ship traveling through space. This time, they delve into the planned design for the main quest, and also offer a brief progress report and some screenshots. An excerpt:

Naturally, we want to do better. So in the CSG we’ll get rid of the vagueness, move the main quest to the center stage, push the factions’ quests back, and allow you to make key choices earlier and thus enjoy the consequences earlier.

It will start simple while scavenging you stumble upon something clearly valuable, a long-forgotten device that wasn’t meant to be used until the ship lands (but can be used in-flight). Not being an expert on such things, you need to know exactly what this thing is to figure out what one of the factions will pay for it, which is a good way to introduce you to the three main factions in Act 1, whereas in AoD the Noble Houses were introduced one Act at a time for storytelling reasons

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Once you know what that device is (at about 30% of the game), you’ll offer it to the faction of your choice, at which point your relationship with the other factions will go down, introducing an aspect we didn’t really touch in AoD factions acting against you, attacking your base of operations, and turning locations under their influence against you, which will boost replayability.

At about 70% of the game, you might realize (via learning more about the ship if you’re smart enough) that what you’re doing might not necessary be what’s best for the ship (or you personally) and get an option to do things in a very different, “fuck all factions” way. The remaining 30% of the game will be dedicated to each path within this fork, presenting different challenges and choices. So far, that’s 3 ‘working for a faction’ paths, 3 ‘fuck ’em’ paths, and 7 different endings without counting permutations.

This way you’ll get to play through your key decisions, instead of being told about what happened next in the slides. Obviously, the slides will still be there but gameplay-to-slides ratio will be different.