Pistol Shrimp Games, founded by Toys for Bob veterans, have today launched the Kickstarter campaign for Free Stars: Children of Infinity which is a direct sequel to The Ur-Quan Masters (Star Control 2).
Developers include the original creators of The Ur-Quan Masters, Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford (the original founders of Toys for Bob), Ken Ford, and Dan Gerstein.
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From the press release: "Happy days and jubilation, captains! Traversing the universe may be an endless venture, but we have finally reached the next destination in our long quest to bring Free Stars: Children of Infinity to life," said Pistol Shrimp Games’ founders Fred Ford and Dan Gerstein in a joint statement. "Help us complete this journey through the stars, and — with enough backers, we might even get to infinity plus one."
Even if you haven't played the original, which is free and open source and recently had a Steam release, plenty of games you've likely played were in some parts inspired by it. The Ur-Quan Masters has been called "one of the greatest games of all time" and praised by the likes of Tim Cain (Fallout, Fallout 2) of Obsidian Entertainment, Ken Levine (BioShock, System Shock 2, JUDAS) of Ghost Story Games, and Mark Darrah (Mass Effect), alumni of BioWare. The Ur-Quan Masters inspired countless other creators in the video game industry, including the devs behind No Man’s Sky, Subnautica, and Stellaris — to name just a few.
They plan to have it highly moddable, as they said it "supports modding out of the box", and accessibility is a key issue for them too as they hope to include keyboard and controller support, co-op play, multiple difficulty modes, avoidable or automated combat, generated voice-over for vision-impaired players and so on.
They're seeking at least $100,000 on the Kickstarter campaign, with Native versions for Linux and macOS at a $220,000 stretch-goal. At time of writing, it already has over $80,000 and the Kickstarter has only been up for about 2 hours. So it's clearly got a lot of people excited.
See more on the Kickstarter.
I don't know about you, but I'm quite excited for this one!
Anyway, looking forward to this.
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 16 April 2024 at 4:43 pm UTC
the sequel had some awkward crappy 3d
Ahh, the [what's the opposite of golden?] era of computer gaming.
apocalyptech Apr 17
Anyway, I guess I'll probably break my own "don't Kickstart videogames" rule and contribute to this one regardless. I can be bought via nostalgia, it seems!
Oh, this is interesting. I read through some of what they were saying about the game, and this caught my eye:
The Ur-Quan Masters is from an era of printed manuals and maps, where players took their own notes to solve puzzles and mysteries. Our plan is to translate the classic experience into the new game, where you can consult your interactive Star Map, and build your captain's log with a combination of personal notes and automated tools.That sounds kind of neat to me. And yes, I definitely did take notes playing the old game, including a piece of graph paper on which I'd roughed out the, um, shortcuts-through-space map with notes about which hole brought me out where.
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 17 April 2024 at 4:49 pm UTC
I don't like platform support as a stretch goal, but it is made in Godot and they do go on a big tangent about only using open source tools they can control, so they would have a very hard time shirking responsibility if they decide not to deliver on Linux support.Incidentally, looks like we're gonna find out whether their word is good--they've hit that stretch goal.
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