[ Purchase on Steam ]
Starship Rubicon is a modern take on the classic space shooter genre. It’s a smart and challenging rogue-lite that features a unique control scheme, pixel art remixed with real NASA photographs, and an existential crisis about who is REALLY the monster.
"While the basic gameplay doesnt look like much (Just flying around in space, killing enemies), the way HOW they structured this game and how the movement/navigation feels makes all the difference. The game is perfectly tuned for that "just one more round"-attitude since no stage takes more than 3-5 minutes, which also alleviates my biggest issue with open world games that use similar combat schemes. ... Here, every encounter is a fight for life and spoils, incredibly rewarding and equally tense."
“Starship Rubicon, to my surprise, combines the nostalgia of old arcade shooters with the complexity of modern space simulators to create an altogether amazing game that will have you playing, and dying, for hours on end.”
“On the surface, Starship Rubicon looks like a basic arcade style space shooter with some roguelike elements. Underneath there are a lot of fun mechanics that will feel familiar to experienced gamers. It would be easy to simply call this game a mashup of many other titles, but that wouldn’t do justice to what Starship Rubicon delivers.”
“Starship Rubicon is like FTL, Asteroids, and Luftrausers all got busy inside of a wool sleeping bag.”
Postmortem writeups:
[ Bundle Stars | Steam Store | Greenlight Campaign | Kickstarter ]
Rubicon (original)
[ Download (PC) | (OSX) | (Linux) | Source Code ]
The summer of 2012, I ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to turn a dinky little asteroidsy demo into a game that I envisioned having EV Nova/Mechwarrior-like galaxy exploration, multiplayer, the ability to control fleets, and a fully-fledged campaign. Over that one summer.
Needless to say, halfway through I realized I needed to scale down my ambitions. I instead focused on making Rubicon a juicy arcade-style space shooter. It taught me the most valuable lesson of a game designer (kill your darlings) and launched my career as a game developer, so all-in-all I consider it a resounding success.