This story centres around James Eagle, a boy in his mid teens who longs for freedom from the confines of his planet (a waste disposal site). He's lived with his sister and her surly junkyard worker husband ever since his dad suddenly left their planet two years ago. James is not too popular at school, and doesn't have many friends, unless you count the mischievious and stuck up rich girl Sora, daughter of a mysterious corporate big-wig. One day while sifting through rejected parts, James stumbles upon the shell of an old shuttle and it's prototype cargo: AR goggles that teach the wearer how to build almost anything. United through a common need to escape the wretched planet, James and Sora set to work constructing a makeshift spacecraft. Then it's off into the wild black expanse of space, to find action, adventure, but above all answers.
The Junkship Project is about filling a hole in the current games scene, about distilling all those ideas brewed while playing games that inspired us, and realising a vision of our own. This project is not focused on following technology trends, nor is it meant to compete directly with anything that currently exists. It is merely an exercise in creating what we would like to play, and furthering the parts of games we feel are often passed over in mainstream development in favour of pretty lighting and polygon counts.
The characters and specifically the character development throughout the game is important. We want them all to grab a piece of your heart in a different way, and be memorable for their strengths and weaknesses. We want them to feel human, and expose the humour in being human. It's the little moments that matter, those moments of everyday life onboard a flying junk heap.
Freedom to explore is also important, creating an environment that provides vibrant and varied experiences. Letting the player see things at their own pace, deviate from the story and experience the world. But unlike many western RPGs, this is not JUST a world created for the player to live in, it is also a journey with direction. The characters are not you, they are your shipmates in a way, you get to direct their growth and fight battles with them, but their inner battles are still their own. The idea is to incorporate the Japanese RPG style, which is something akin to an interactive version of a good anime.
Gameplay is about variety and size, but also simplicity. Battling in a ship is not as simple as flying and pressing shoot, but neither is it as complex as a simulator, or as slow as turn-based systems. There are many ways to battle based on what your ship is made up of, including hacking other ships and using specialist types of weapons. As you walk around on a planet's surface, you use your team's diversity to overcome obstacles and gain access to content both compulsory and secret. There are many planets and some require considerable skill to land on, or even to get to if in more dangerous and pirate-infested regions of space.
The whole junk concept is about creation, and the lasting satisfaction that creating something brings, so modifying and swapping out bits of your ship will be the emphasis of the RPG style level progression. Instead of stat-heavy characters, the ships effectiveness in combat is based on the stats of its parts, and the parts require certain levels of experience from the characters operating them (and a decent chunk of cash to buy). Not only will you compose a ship from parts, but you can compose parts from the junk which litters the galaxy. Crafting is not just for MMORPGs!
We like to think of it as Cowboy Bebop meets Final Fantasy, with a side of Asteroids :)