Description
Built for Ludum Dare, December 2010 using the theme “Discovery”. The game “Mothership” was developed in a weekend up to Revision 7 and then finally submitted. The work on it has since continued, all up to date information contained on the page for Post Competition.

Concept
Taken from “A Game About Robots” an idea I had for a sci-fi dungeon crawler.

In the distant future a deep space exploration vessel piloted by a robotic AI crash lands on a previously uncharted mysterious planet. The AI, calling itself Mother uses it’s extensive onboard fabrication systems to construct a smaller more mobile version of herself that the player controlls called Probe. Probe starts out as a small, defenseless sphere that has limited intelligence and is charged with the task of collecting raw materials across a randomly generated planet in order to repair Mother. After a few trips to gather some resources, the player quickly realizes that the planet is actually inhabited by a series of aliens and other lifeforms, and is forced to upgrade itself with weapons in order to complete it’s task. As such, each time the player returns with materials, they can choose to either donate these materials towards the repair of Mother (and thus come closer to completion of the game) or invest in progressing through a tech tree for Probe. This tech tree involves increasing some of Probe’s statistics, like speed or energy or carrying capacity, as well as the addition of modules like tank treads or hover boards or weapon systems. The choices that the player makes in terms of what to donate and what to invest in throughout the game determines what Probe looks and functions like by the end of the game.

The game is complete when Probe has collected enough resources for Mother to repair itself and take off from the planet, at which point the player can randomly generate a new planet and begin exploring with a new probe once again.