Starship Kepler - Out Now!

I’m pleased to share that Starship Kepler - my game inspired by Geometry Wars and Magicka - is now available on Steam.

In Starship Kepler, you pilot a ship and have to survive against hordes of shapes, while combining elements to customize your ship’s weapon and defences.

Beginnings

The first commit for Starship Kepler dates back to June 7th, 2020.

I started the project during Covid, following a tutorial for how to build a “neon vector shooter” in XNA. However, I wrote the game in Go, so I had to translate the code and make my own judgement calls for how to proceed in the Go progrmaming language.

Here’s a gameplay video from the early stages of development. It looks pretty similar to the final game, only at this stage I didn’t have Free Play mode or Labyrinth mode in the game.

Back then, you were able to summon different elements by using the keyboard, just like in Magicka. You’ll see in the gameplay footage that the weapon and “ward” surrounding the ship is changing constantly.

Eventually I settled on making elements drop from killed enemies. This simplified the game and allowed it to work better with a controller, which was an important change.

Music

I composed and produced all of the music for the game using Logic Pro.

Here’s the soundtrack: