Take Control of an Interdimensional UFO

Visit a vast array of worlds. Each has its own variety of lighting, ocean, foliage, sky, day and night cycles, terrain, resources, and enemies.

Fight the enemy! Or run away. Scholars maintain that the most effective ultraterrestrials sometimes choose to run.

Customize your ship by adding modules. Make it stronger, more efficient, or more specialized.

Collect resources in combat or by tunneling through terrain and chopping off mountain tops. Because they’re in the way. Or because they’re there. Or for the cause, or whatever reason you’ve got.

Jump from one world to any other any time you like. To say there are infinite worlds is going too far. The number of possibilities has just twelve commas, but every one of them is accessible from any other.

Store absurd amounts of resources and pre-configured ships in your personal null-space dimension. Just be sure to take some with you to help with repairs and mods when things get real in the “real” multiverse.

Alternatively: Fly around with no particular goal in mind. You’re in a ship that could power San Francisco, does zero to ludicrous in no seconds, and jumps at will to your choice of more than an inverse femtobarn [Ed: Taking some creative license here?] of worlds. Resources are easy to find. Resistance is easy to evade.

You don’t have to fight anyone or anything if you’re not in the mood, and it’s easy to build a ship that has your back.

So do what you want:

Ship Building:

In Simian Rising, progress generally means building ships that work with your play style and goals. This is made possible through a build system which allows more module configurations than you could comfortably shake a stick at.

Modules available in the free demo (coming soon) will include:

• Avoid Ground and Avoid Collision. Align to Gravity. Follow Ground. Beam Systems and Mods. Field Systems and Mods. Fuel Reservoirs. Basic Targeting and Sensors. Basic Interfaces.

Some planned modules include:

• Advanced Interfaces. Advanced Targeting and Sensors. Repair Augmentation. Spectrum Masking. Drive Efficiency and Amplification. Visual Obstruction Cancellation. Projectiles and Missiles. Fleet Logic and Information Sharing. Teleport.
• Hardened, Compact, and Efficient variations of most modules.

Post Scarcity:

With access to this many worlds, resources will always be readily available.

Build & Twitch:

Once Simian Rising is fully balanced, in order to drill through terrain at full speed you’ll have to build a ship specifically geared towards mining. In order to clear a difficult world you’ll need a ship made for PvE, and to beat an advanced player in PvP you’ll need to be quick with your guns and have a ship built to counter theirs.

It’ll Always be Cheap:

To achieve maximum performance you’ll need to use some modules that come with a relatively heavy price tag, but fear not: We’ll always steer clear of situations where you’re constantly searching for that “one last” resource, and losing a ship shouldn’t ruin your day.

In Simian Rising, your ship’s components make sounds according to their state. When a module is damaged, you’ll hear it. When a module is at full capacity, well you’ll know about that too.

Ultimately, the idea is to provide an experience similar to listening to your car as you’re driving down the road.

• Anti Grind: Grinding in modern games is often used to cover holes in design or generate revenue in the absence of meaningful content. I’d prefer to keep this mechanic out of Simian Rising at large and add some very real challenges in place of it. However, I’m not sure how many will agree with me on this point, which brings me to…
• The Players Are Right: I believe in making it easy for a player to supply feedback, and in prioritizing features and fixes that are in popular demand. By making feedback an easy process, I hope to be guided continually towards tasks that do the most good for the most players.
• Adaptable User Interface: Wherever practical, the user interface can be modified to suit your needs.
• Single Player Is Not Multiplayer: An account or internet connection will be required only for multiplayer modes.
• Game Scalability: Simian Rising has been designed to make it easy to add and tweak content. It requires minimal effort to add a new module, a new enemy, a new piece of foliage, and even new player characters. Coding this way is not the fastest way to get any software to market. It means you’re building engines, which is far more complicated than building instances, but this is the best way to design if you’re in it for the long haul.
• Inventory Management is Fun… Until It’s Not: Limitation of resource storage and transportation can introduce an enjoyable amount of strategy within a game, but you shouldn’t have to spend hours on it or throw away what you’d rather keep. I intend to maintain an environment in Simian Rising which keeps this mechanic in check.