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Posted February 12, 2014 by Peter in News
 
 

StarCrawlers Kickstarter kicks off

StarCrawlers logo
StarCrawlers logo

When StarCrawlers was first announced, it was with mention of a Kickstarter campaign coming soon; it seems that ‘soon’ is ‘now’, with the campaign having launched yesterday.

Pursuing what seems to be a relatively humble $65,000, the campaign also reveals some extra details of the proposed turn-based RPG, which will have you sending your team into spacecraft wrecks and so bringing a heavy sci-fi theme to the more usual fantasy-based dungeon crawl genre.

Among other things, the four classes seen in the trailer are identified, being a Soldier (straight up fighter), Cyber Ninja (sneaky fighter going for critical attacks), Hacker (useful out of combat for opening doors and deactivating traps) and Void Psyker (a nuke); four further classes are proposed as stretch goals.
StarCrawlers Ninja and Soldier
I contacted Elena Consacro from Juggernaut Games for a little extra on the game. As well as noting the turned based combat, I asked whether the classes would have much customisation or would be fixed according to there skillset (as the classes in the classic RPGs that seem to have inspired it often were).

“Players will have lots of opportunities for strategic decision making in combat, starting at the very beginning with which characters you choose to take on the mission and how you customize their abilities to adapt to your preferred style of play. [...] They will be very customizable, and players will be able to not only select which abilities their team uses, but to mod those abilities and change the way they work.”

She also promised further updates of how these customisations may work, hopefully something to be revealed during the campaign.
StarCrawlers screen
(I also asked about the promised dungeon randomisation, and was told it would be “on a per-mission basis”, which would hopefully give the game some longevity. Again, there was the promise of more solid detail on this to come later.)

As a fan of these types of dungeon crawler back-in-the-day, getting teams to work together round-by-round in combat, I will admit to looking forward with some optimism for what the game may become.

StarCrawlers is still due for release later in 2014, the success of their Kickstarter campaign pending; the game has also been added to Steam Greenlight hoping for inclusion there.


Peter

 
Peter can be described as an old, hairy gamer, a survivor of the console wars of the 1990s, and a part-time MMO addict. He has an especial fondness for retro gaming and observing the progressions in long running gaming series. When scandalously not caught gaming, he can also be found reading comics and fantasy fiction, or practising terrible photography.