You decide how deep you want to go in Starpath
After I wrote about the Starpath announcement, I reached out to developer Jonathan Smårs, best known for his work as lead engineer & designer on Valheim.
Screenshot from the Starpath trailer. / Credit Jonathan Smårs
The Starpath trailer showed a seemingly advanced spaceship, packed with switches, screens and instrument panels. It gave me the impression of heavy simulation mechanics. The kind of thing I imagine is hard to balance against a game that is actually fun.
Smårs corrects that reading.
“Simulation for this shouldn’t equal player friction,” he writes in an email. “More like immersive sim, and players will be able to choose which parts they want to go deep into, and which ones they would rather rely on auto pilot style solutions. It will be woven into the gameplay and still be quite accessible for most gamers.”
Relax, future astronauts! The player decides the depth. The way I read him, those who want to go deep can, while those who would rather fly on autopilot can do that.
It is a clear distance from pure hardcore simulators.
Mostly a solo project
Smårs also confirms that Starpath is mainly a solo project, but not entirely.
“I wanted to make something of my own, and this has been a dream project of mine for many years,” he writes. “It’s a fun challenge to be making it mostly on my own and easiest right now, but I may get some help from friends along the way also.”
Read my story on the announcement itself, or check out the official links further down.
Working computers inside the ship
Another detail from the trailer that caught my attention was the computers inside the ship running Minesweeper and Driftmania. On top of that, the music in the trailer stops the moment a floppy disk is pulled out.
The machines aren’t just decorative, and could house a lot of different functions.
“The ship computer and various terminals will have very many different functions, programs and games,” Smårs writes, “a lot with other cool things too that I haven’t revealed yet.”
I love Starpath’s retro aesthetic and the slightly eerie mood it gives me. It is another exciting thing coming from a Scandinavian developer.
Starpath has no release date yet, but it is available to wishlist on Steam. You can find the official website here, or join the official Starpath Discord server here.
