Starship Mechanic

Fight fires, reroute power to your shields and fix hull breaches - all while receiving orders from your captain to take out that pesky enemy frigate. In Starship Mechanic, you will single-handedly man the all-important engineering bay of a mercenary ship!

As part of a mercenary crew, your ship will take part in a variety of jobs from bounty hunts to salvage missions, each more challenging than the next. Rewire and upgrade your engineering bay as you see fit, to deal with whatever challenges are thrown at you.

The engineering bay is your domain. The captain doesn't know what the state of your bay is (it's better for both of you this way), so you must decide what it is that needs to be done. It is up to you to give the crew everything needed to survive.

You are the fine line between success and destruction. On a starship, everything is replaceable except you!

Features

• Manage your systems to survive each encounter
  Your engineering bay contains a number of systems. Each is vital to your success. From the shields to the coffee machine, everything plays a role. Tuning the communications after they have been scrambled, rebooting the shields and scanning enemy ships are all tasks that have to be done while under (or on) fire.
• Decide where the power flows
  The engineering bay, and all the systems within, are powered from a central generator. Wires criss-cross under the floor and can be placed, pulled up and replaced at will. Without sufficient power, systems will cease to function and the whole crew will pay the price for your failure.
  
  
• Fully simulated battles
  Each encounter with enemy ships is dynamically simulated in real time. Different classes of ship have their own strengths and weakness and will respond to your actions appropriately during battles, flying with different patterns and attack strategies.
• AI controlled captain
  With your hands full in the engineering bay, the AI takes control of your ship's captain. Assessing the biggest threats, designating targets, flying the ship and giving you orders is all handled by the captain. If your starboard shields keep going down, the captain will no doubt tell you to give them more power. He can't see what's going on in your bay, though, and so whether or not you pay any attention to him is entirely up to you.
• Recover from internal damage
  Space battles leave their mark on your engineering bay. There is no time to retreat to a spaceport and so repairs have to be done mid-battle. Fixing systems, patching hull breaches and fighting fires all have to be done on the fly.
  
  
• Upgrade your ship
  Use scrap collected from destroyed enemies to build additional systems and purchase upgrades for the ship. Use these upgrades to survive the increasingly difficult challenges that face you.
• Multi-pathed missions
  Battles aren't entirely random. Each battle progresses you towards the final goal of your mission, but how you perform will change the encounters you face during each task. Playing the same type of mission more than once can result in different paths and encounters depending on your successes and failures each time.
• A multitude of enemies
  Fight 6 different class of ship, each with it's own strengths and weaknesses. From scouts which carry only a small selection of weapons but increase the sensor range of their allies to carriers which carry many smaller fighters into battle.
  
  
• Multiple enemy loadouts
  Not all enemy ships are created equal. Each class is given a number of weapon and utility slots to which they can assign modules. Gatling lasers, anti-shield torpedoes and a bomb that can disrupt your power supply are just some of the weapons in your enemy's arsenal.
• Space isn't safe
  Enemy cruisers aren't the only threat facing your intrepid crew in the vastness of space - random events can add additional challenge to your already chaotic fights. Electromagnetic interference, rogue asteroids and even black holes can all conspire to make your life difficult.

Current Roadmap

• Fully fledged tutorial
  Starship Mechanic is a complicated game to learn, with lots of interlinked parts. To get the most out of the game a player needs to understand all of them. The current demo/tutorial is designed to teach the basics in about 15-20 minutes - we've used it at game shows and don't have time to explain everything in that medium. We plan to add a full tutorial in the future to help teach players everything they need to know.
• Overhauling the engines
  Add additional interaction possibilities with the engine module to make them a more interesting part of the ship as well as to introduce another thing that can potentially go horribly wrong! We currently have a plan for the mechanics and are waiting on art before we implement this change.
• Art Improvements
  Some game mechanics aren't visually represented as well as they could be, which makes the game harder to understand if you don't already know what's going on. We hope to improve our current art and add more visual feedback.
• Adding saving and loading
  Currently there is no way for a user to save and load their progress. With each mission taking something in the region of 30 minutes and a potentially endless amount of missions (assuming you don't die), we can't expect everyone to be prepared to commit to finishing a game in one sitting.
• More mission types
  Variety is the spice of life, especially in video games. We already have bounty missions in the game, but have plans to introduce salvage and VIP escort missions to the mission pool, with potentially more to come in the future - each with its own set of encounters and challenges to navigate.
• Balance, bug fixing and further tweaks

If you are interested feel free to follow our progress on our blog, subreddit, Twitter or Facebook.