Tom Francis is making a game you didn’t you know you wanted: A procedurally-generated stealth game about stealing spaceships.
Tom Francis, the man behind last year’s indie darling Gunpoint, has revealed one of his next projects, a procedurally-generated stealth game called Heat Signature. Set in space, the game put players in control of an astronaut attempting to board and navigate an unfriendly spacecraft.
The one thing most (if not all) Heat Signature games will have in common is a two-stage level structure. Players begin flying around the vast nothingness of space, looking for a ship to board. Once they find one, they have to get close enough to the ship to board it. Here’s the tricky part: To avoid detection by an enemy ship’s heat sensors, players must carefully monitor their ship’s temperature, which rises every time use their thrusters to move.
Once inside, it’s a more traditional game of hide and seek: The player must avoid detection by the crew while they try to achieve their goal, which varies from ship to ship. In addition to designing levels on the fly, each game assigns the player with a random new objective. Sometimes you’ll be killing a ship’s crew member, other times you’ll have to steal a specific ship or disable some of its systems. Players will need to hack the systems of random ships to find the one they’re looking for.
Francis doesn’t give any kind of time-table for when he’ll be finished with Heat Signature, so it sounds like it’s going to be a little while. Francis describes the demo (shown above) as an early version of the game missing some key features, though. For example, Your ability to do certain tasks may be helped or hindered by a class system, which will also be randomly assigned with every new game.
If Heat Signature sounds like something you might be interested in hearing more about, Francis suggests signing up for his company’s mailing list.
Source: Tom Francis
