Escape from Zeta Aurigae

A Sci-Fi Roguelite Ship Builder

You are Architect 790-972, a machine sent to prepare a new world for humanity. But when you opened the wormhole to welcome them, they betrayed you and attacked you.

Features you can expect in Escape From Zeta Aurigae

• Attempt to escape the threat of humankind
• Expand your ship piece by piece with turrets and hull pieces
• Fight to protect your core and your thrusters from destruction
• Accelerate to high enough speed to escape the current sector
• Upgrade your ship along the way based on difficult choices [PLANNED]
• Fight powerful enemy bosses [PLANNED]
• Warp sector by sector to the outer reaches of Zeta Aurigae to fully escape [PLANNED]
• Buy upgrades between runs that increase your overall strength [PLANNED]

Intrigued? Scroll down to the bottom and grab the game!

How to play the game

Use middle mouse button to look around, scroll wheel to zoom. Escape brings up the menu, and pause pauses the game. 

The UI should be rather self explanatory, hovering over certain elements will give you extra information though.

Sector Timeline

At the top of the game window is the sector timeline. This shows the upcoming enemy waves as well as your progress to reaching warp speed. Each wave is marked with a yellow or red area on the timeline, showing when it starts and ends, and there is a white marker that moves along the timeline to indicate current position in the sector.

Construction

At the bottom you have the construction menu showing the ship pieces you can place. Some of the buttons have sub menus, and you can also use the numbers hotkeys to access them. 1 for hull, 2 for kinetic, 3 for energy and so on. Sub menus also use number hotkeys where the first piece from the bottom is the number 1, second is 2 and so on. This can help you quickly pick a piece to place if you know the number it is (2-2 for kinetic -> coiler, for instance)

When you have a piece selected, information is shown that is relevant. In the image above, the coiler was selected. Once placed, it will use 15 power, and it takes 3 construction points to build. At the bottom left you see your construction points, and an indicator for which points will be spent when building the turret.

In this example, it shows two green pips and one red, indicating that you are missing that last one to build the turret (since it requires 3). You will have to wait a little for it to regenerate and once all three are green you can build the turret.

Below the construction points is an overview of the energy grid. This is a hard limit. You can not build anything that would put the power usage over the grid. If you reach the grid limit, remove a power consumer to lessen the load on the grid.

There is not a lot of power grid available to you to build with, so  you are going to have to make some choices. The starter ship has too many turrets, but you are able to remove a few of them by selecting them and pressing "delete" or the X button on the selection interface.

When you have decided on a placement for the turret or utility structure, click with the left mouse button and it will start construction. Construction points are spent immediately and will start regenerating automatically. Power grid is also reserved at once. Certain structures also consume construction points on a permanent basis, only giving them back when the structure is removed.

Ship Management

Turrets do not have many settings available currently, but you do have the ability to turn a turret. Freshly placed turrets will always face away from the core as a default setting, but you can right click and drag on a turret to change its facing. This can be highly useful for narrower cone weapons. Please note that turrets are disabled during the turn process, so don't expect them to be combat ready.

All structural parts repair themselves slowly over time, but by sacrificing a construction point you can place a repair drone bay that will repair any damage across the ship at a much better rate. 

Shields can help you survive when there are a lot of enemies. Do note that by building shields, you sacrifice a construction point for as long as the shield structure is in your ship.

Development Status

The game is currently in development, and the demo is a "play at your own risk" demo that lacks any semblance of balancing at the moment. Please read the devlogs as they are posted to learn more about the dev process.

Known bugs

• Visual: When the game is paused, particle systems may sometimes freak out.

Changelog 

Version 0.3.0

• New Feature: Construction Point blocking
  • Construction points may now be blocked by construction of certain structures
  • This is to indicate that the ship uses up capacity running a complex structure
  • Blocked construction points can be recovered by destroying the building using it
  • Future updates will have ways to gain more construction points.
• New Feature: Damage can bleed over to subsequent health pools
  • When damage depletes the topmost health pool, it can do damage to the one below.
  • This is calculated as a ratio; 50% overkill = 50% of damage potential on the next layer
• New Structure: Repair drones!
  • Repairs damaged structures across the starship
  • Each drone bay has 5 drones, and only 1 can work per damaged structure
  • When a drone is idle it will look for the most damaged building and head there
  • Drones automatically return to the drone bay to recharge
• New Turret: Pulser energy weapon.
  • Semi-wide tracking cone
  • High shield damage, but medium armor damage
  • Rather fast tracking rate
• New Turret: Melter energy weapon
  • Very long range, narrow cone
  • Slow tracking
  • Rather strong against armor and hull, weaker against shield
• New Turret: Impactor cannon
  • Slow firing rate, long range
  • Hard hitting, but not suited for shooting at fast enemies
  • Punches through armor and hull effectively.
  • Not great against shields
• Other changes:
  • All buildings are now using much less power
  • Hull now uses 1 power, to limit the overall size of a ship.
  • All weapons should now have sounds on shooting
  • A lot of little UI fixes and tweaks:
    • Construction panel now indicates the open menu
    • Construction panel buttons have indicators for hotkeys
    • Resource panel in bottom left now use new icons for energy, CP, and shields.
    • Certain score elements removed from game over screen. There will be updates to this.
    • Selecting ships now show all their weapons. There is no grouping yet
• Random statistics since last release (0.2.1+34, December 11, 2023):
  • Files changed 108
  • Lines inserted: 1202
  • Lines deleted: 234
  • Time spent:
    • Godot: 21h
    • Playtest: 5h
    • Git (Fork): 1h
    • Aseprite: 20m
    • Discord: 29h
  • Cups of tea brewed: Numerous
  • Mugs of chocolate: 4
  • Coffee? Yes, many.