Preface

Project Planets is a personal project that I’m developing in my spare time, and I decided to write a devlog about it.

The game is a roguelite about space exploration, where a race of technologically inept creatures (we are going to call them Galablin, from Galaxy and Goblin, until I find a better name) starts a space program without any consideration for basic safety. They developed an FTL drive that instantly moves the ship to almost any place in the galaxy. The only problem is that they can’t figure out how to control the destination and each time they fire it they find themselves in a different place.

Getting home this way is impossible, so they decided that each mission is going to be a one-way ticket to destruction somewhere in the galaxy, and the crews of the spaceships are ok with it (go figure…). There is just one problem with this: if the ship is not going to return home, how is that useful for the space program? The Galablin found a peculiar way to “solve” this problem. They developed a device that can send information back to their home planet from anywhere in the galaxy. There are only a couple of drawbacks: it has a limited capacity, meaning that not everything that is discovered by the crew can be sent back in one go, and it needs a huge amount of energy, so high that it overloads the ship’s reactor blowing it up almost instantly.
How do you think the Galablin “solved” this little blowing-the-ship-up problem? Well, they didn’t. Since every mission is basically a suicide mission, they decided to rig the device so that it starts transmitting when it detects the ships is on the verge of being destroyed. The ship is already blowing up, so it’s now a problem if we blow up the reactor, right?

And this is the clearly inefficient way the Galablin decided to use to explore their galaxy.