This has been a project we’ve been working on as a team since the beginning of this year, and we’ve made some pretty significant progress on it. Figured I’d drop a thread on here and see what you guys think so far.
Centration is a multiplayer round-based online survival sandbox horror game set in a solar system far from our own. You’re a crew-member on board a state-of-the-art futuristic space station that’s been established in orbit of a potentially habitable planet.
Your goal is to survive. How you do this is your own choice, but generally speaking you’ll be keeping the station operational, working together as a team, and sprinting through sections of the station attempting to escape [masked killers/fire/meteoroids/a very angry monkey].
What is Centration?
Centration is set in 2152, where after centuries of development and growth, corporate entities have essentially taken control of humanity. They patrol the skies and the streets… and they control who lives or dies. UniTech, the biggest of the corporations, owns or directly controls more than 60% of the world’s economy. They have established a government-like entity with a military and fleet of combat-ready spacecraft in order to police the band of squabbling corporations.
Humanity is desperate to escape and UniTech is going to provide that escape. The Centration expedition is a corporate-funded endeavour to colonise the moon of a gas giant in the Keplar-16 solar system. It is proven by probes to be capable of sustaining human life, and will provide a perfect starting point for a human colony in a new solar system.
The launch of the expedition goes well, they arrive and set up space stations and habitation modules in orbit while UniTech investigate the surface properly.
How would a typical game of Centration play?
You start a game of Centration when everything is swell and dandy, nothing in the world could go wrong on such a beautiful day in outer-space, right?
Wrong. You’re a crew member on board one of the state-of-the-art space stations in the Keplar-16 solar system, on a mission of vital importance to UniTech. You have duties to carry out, whether you’re and engineer or a medical technician, you’ll go about doing what you need to do to make sure the space station stays in working order. We call this the maintenance period. It’s also nicknamed the calm before the storm.
Sooner or later, someone inevitably breaks something. Someone might have a mission to kill you, or one of your crew. They might be tasked with sabotaging the station, stealing some chemical or data, or they might just be doing it because they want to.
The station’s security will naturally try to keep order, protect the crew, while the engineers will keep the station functioning mechanically. The medics will heal and the officers will lead. We call this the active period; nicknamed the storm.
Centration is played your way, and what happens during a round will differ massively from one to the next. A quiet shift where you don’t even realise something’s gone wrong until it’s all done and over with. A crazy shift culminating in the death of the entire crew. A really long shift where everything goes wrong, and you and your crew try your hardest to keep on top of everything and it just seems never ending… then comes the conclusion period. The end of your little story. Have you survived this long? Will you survive to the end? There’s a shuttle on its way to rescue you. There are escape pods, space suits, and there’s also death.
The round or ‘shift’ ends when everyone is dead, the shift ends (time-limit), everyone has left the station permanently (shuttle or escape pods), or the antagonist has successfully fulfilled all of his/her duties.
Can I play now?
Not yet. We’re working our way towards alpha testing though.
Free to play? Monthly?
Centration is intended to be a commercial one-fee game, sold for a small price and then free thereafter forever. We are maybe looking into a free version or including some kind of free-to-play functionality though.
Want to help out?
We’re more than happy to bring on the right kind of talent to help us make this project an awesome success, most particularly C# programmers and 3D modellers - if you’d like to help drop me a PM or email me at aaron@centration.co and we’ll talk. 