That flexibility means players can experiment with all kinds of approaches through the course of the game, whether it’s crafting new items from scratch, or retrieving and conducting research on the alien artefacts colonists discover on their journey through space Starmancer is a game designed to encourage experimentation, and Ominux has been careful to balance the game to make it fair rather than frustrating. So we decided to completely remake Starmancer from the ground up, with an emphasis on flexibility and modding.” I’m still not sure how things like modding would have worked in our old system. Adding new content would have been a huge pain. The internals of the game were… fine, but they were incredibly limiting. “If the Kickstarter didn’t do well,” says Millershaski, “we probably would have released Starmancer within a year – or sooner.

Starmancer has come a long way since it was first shown off publicly around three years ago a successful 2019 Kickstarter campaign – and the arrival of Chucklefish as publisher – gave the budget and time for Ominux to completely overhaul the game. If the player doesn’t care about a colonist, we’ve failed.” “We want the player to feel bad every time a colonist dies. “You could solve most problems by venting life support and killing your problematic colonist – but we don’t like that,” Millershaski says. This feeds into one of Ominux’s goals for the game: that the player will feel a distinct pang of guilt when things inevitably go wrong. Wirström’s sprite work, reminiscent of classics like Landstalker or Final Fantasy Tactics, not only helps immerse the player in the game’s futuristic setting, but also sells the idea that you’re taking care of a real colony of individual humans, each with their own skills and personalities. When all your colonists die, you can send out robots to clean up your mess (dead bodies, blood, etc) and then regrow everyone – like nothing ever happened.” Pixels in spaceĬompared to the somewhat austere-looking Dwarf Fortress, with its text-based visuals, Starmancer is also a much more approachable game from a visual standpoint, thanks to the sterling isometric artwork by Victor Wirström. This is largely due to our ‘purge’ system. It’s almost impossible to mess up so bad in Starmancer that it’s game over. “Your colonists are literally grown in tanks, and you can regrow them when they die – you’ll lose their memories and skills, but not the colony. “Starmancer is much more forgiving,” he tells us. Or worse, your entire space station could become overrun by pirates, or ravaged by a deadly alien slime infection.ĭeath and failure are everywhere in Starmancer, then – but don’t expect Ominux’s game to be quite as harsh as Dwarf Fortress, says programmer Tyler Millershaski. If things really get out of hand, you could end up having to deal with a full-on mutiny. You’ll need to keep a close eye on your colonists’ morale, too: if a colonist is unhappy about their living conditions, they might spread that dissatisfaction to other humans.

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