I remember hurrying to download the Halo CE demo, playing Assault on the Cartographer over and over for hours, I remember Secret Weapons Over Normandy's demo and memorizing the waves of planes there. Â
As much as I want to make the kinds of games I'd want to play, I always want to make games in the same way that I want to play them. So: OIP will have a Demo through Early Access and beyond. What can you expect from the Demo? Essentially, all the features of the base game...at a delay. When the game is on, say, v 0.2.1, the Demo might be on v 0.1.8. It will always be stable, and it will let you try-before-you-buy.
The year is 2035 on the old calendar; Year 0 of the new. The last embers of the Battle of Midway are still cooling and the Allies are looking out at the rest of the Orion Spur. The two homeworlds, Earth and Iyyestil, stand ready and eager to take the fight further into the stars! The only problem is...the Navy needs the ships to do so.
Office of Interstellar Production, or OIP, is a distillation of all the calm, chill nights I spent in my youth tooling around with building an interstellar empire. Lazy times in EVE Online or Sins of a Solar Empire, thinking that it would be neat if there was just a straightforward sandbox sim that let me build and build...and build, and build and build...without worrying about invasions or politics or the looming 'endgame'. Where numbers go up, and I get to just make neat spaceships while listening to gentle, atmospheric tracks and thinking about supply chains.
OIP is a sort of love letter to those quiet times and the many influences of sci-fi games I've played, all wrapped up in a science fiction universe more than a decade in the making. OIP tells the tale, through a more structured 'campaign mode' (to come!) or an open-ended sandbox mode, of the Great War as Humankind and Saeherid spread out into the stars of the Orion Spur to secure their futures, together.
The loop is simple: survey a new star system. The Navy secures access and the worlds are open to development. Build facilities, refineries, factories and assembly lines to dig deep into the mineral wealth of the system and churn materials for your ever-hungry shipyards. Process raw materials into refined products, and then turn those into high-tech components. Build starships, deliver them to the Navy.Â
Then survey a star system...
At its heart, OIP is a resource management simulator, with a touch of idler. Unlock procedurally generated star systems - and some that are unique and part of the bigger story of the Great War - and use the worlds to crank out more and more resources. You'll always need more, and the demands of the war machine always increase. Upgrade facilities to improve raw output, or to specialize into aiming for rarer metals and minerals. Build an interconnected web of production lines to feed to shipyards, as you research and unlock larger and grander classes of warships to launch from drydocks.Â
At the moment, the gameplay loop is simple; there are only a handful of warship schematics to unlock and only a few tiers of resource and product quality. However, contract, System Governors, expanded starship tech trees, higher and rarer qualities of resources, and even questlines are in the pipeline to come.
OIP is an Early Access title, and has only been in serious development for a few short months. Already there is a great deal of systems in place, but greater depth, balance, and features are still to come.Â
Basic Features
All listed are present in this Early Access Release
Procedural Star Systems: Featuring randomly generated planets and star types, with unique modifiers for both individual worlds and the entire solar system. Each planet also has randomized slots available for construction. Generation chances based on real-world studies of star classes!
Procedural planets: Multiple types, from living biospheres to vibrant gas giants, each with their own resources to extract!
Expansive, hand-crafted lore: Worlds, species, ships, people - discover the events that led to the Great War and the background on technologies and heroes, all part of a new scifi universe with more than a decade of development behind it!
Warship Tech Tree: A handful of low-tech warships ready be unlocked and rolled off the production lines for delivery to the Navy
Tier 0-3 Resources: From raw materials to processed products and industrial components, enough to construct your first starships and to build and upgrade facilities
Mining and Production Facilities: Extract gasses, mine metals, farm biomass; each facility has a specialization and an upgrade path, allowing you to build that stockpile of resources
Contracts: Individual 'reputational' contracts offered by the Navy and other sibling Offices, demanding resources or starships in return for influence to be spent on unlocking techs. More uses to come!
Five beautifully done, atmospheric and moody tracks to put you in the mood of chill industry by the talented Will o Wisp Productions
Development Timeline
Coming in the next update - very soon! - will be Tier 2 production facilities, capable of producing multiple resources at the same time, to build more advanced ships and products!
Shipping Routes - automate transferring resources between star systems within diving range, saving YOU the trouble of click-click-clicking! (Will you need to build ships to fly those routes? Maybe!)
Governors to lead your systems. Heroes and luminaries and famous individuals from across the history of the Spur, hire these Governors to provide unique bonuses to systems and planets they oversee
Art, and a great deal of it! My focus has been on getting the game working, clean and streamlined, which has left a whole lot of temp art or missing art! This update will bring icons for resources, facilities, starships and more!
Deeper conversation and interaction with Sarutahiko, along with a tutorial to guide you through your first steps, and a more active advisory role from him.
Moonchisel is a fully independent, one-man studio located in the United States
