Chucklefish Starbound, a space explorer game, which has been described as a ‘story within a sandbox’ game, has brought in about $409,907 through it’s crowdfunding initiative. The pre-order service launched recently. The game is based on travelling around the universe to discover new places and complete quests. Apparently, if the funds reach $500,000, a new race called ‘novakid’ will be included in the game.
The game begins with the player’s character fleeing his/her home planet in a space shuttle, due to that planet being destroyed by an unknown evil force. After travelling in a random direction, getting lost, and finding an abandoned space station- the adventure starts, complete with quests and a story.
The planets are procedurally generated and completely unique, as the developers had one goal in mind while creating the planets- no two planets should be the same, and that includes the gravity, the difficulty level, the plant life, the appearance and behaviour of aliens, and even the weather. The player also has the option of choosing one of the planets as the new home-planet. After that, you can start populating it with the different characters you’ve met during your travels or quests, but you also have to take care of them.
Starbound will also have competitive multiplayer and cooperative options. So far, the game supports Windows, Mac and Linux.