I called it a Supporter system, and set a fixed price for all the games in the series. Each game would build upon or branch out from another game, allowing me to add features and explore new directions without messing up the games that people already owned. After consulting with my community I decided to split the game up into a series. Toward the end of this period I started thinking about growing the game, and how I would expand on the minimum-viable-funtime of the prototype to create the vast Elite-like spacescape that I felt the game wanted to become. A few weeks later a friend stayed up all night playing an early build, and on hearing this I decided to knuckle down and commit a month to building a release-grade prototype. I didn’t expect my first prototype to succeed so I picked Captain Forever, mostly because I wanted to play it. I hoped one of these prototypes would be my Crayon Physics / Tower of Goo, which I could build into a Crayon Physics Deluxe / World of Goo. Having studied the successes of Petri Purho and 2D Boy, I figured I would follow their lead and create a series of prototypes. Riding high from my freeware release ROM CHECK FAIL I had recently quit my job to live the fulltime indie dream, and now I had to choose my first project. Enjoy!Įarly one morning in June 2009 I opened a fresh text file and poured into it every game idea from the back of my head. I randomly generated the enemy ships to avoid designing them myself, and to create interesting and surprising challenges in my own play sessions.Īs a reward for reading this far you can now go play Captain Forever in your browser, for free. I adopted a flOw-inspired progress system, allowing the player to determine their own level of challenge by deciding which randomly-generated enemies to fight. The rest of the design fell out from these core concepts and my desire to get the game finished. In particular I wanted to defeat enemies with more capable parts, then equip those parts and hunt down even more powerful foes, and so on along a high speed RPG hamster wheel. Whereas Battleships Forever has an RTS-like interface, I wanted to fly my space ships directly, and whereas it had a separate ship editor executable, I wanted to modify my ship as I flew. The core idea was inspired by Sean “th15” Chan’s Battleships Forever.
Captain Forever is “Lego Asteroids” – you fly a space ship in an Asteroids-inspired fashion, adding and removing functional parts from the enemy ships you destroy.
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