Pitch
Drill, craft, and blast your way through winding caverns. Upgrade your utility pod with plasma cannons, missiles, and laser drills. Build an army of tireless drones to do your bidding. You are going to need every advantage to venture deep into the asteroid's secrets if you want to repair the ship and make your escape. Discover the genesis of this place, or become its lunch.
Description
Veridian Expanse is a sci-fi themed, single player crafting and exploration game with strong twin-stick arcade shooter elements. The player finds themselves marooned within the caverns of an asteroid teeming with unfamiliar space-borne life. They must battle with the local fauna and collect resources to upgrade their space pod and escape. Part of a terraforming expedition that crashed on the asteroid, the game's action is pushed along by the demands of the manipulative AI that is in charge of the mission, but the player must decide if it can be trusted. Aiding the player is an army of mini drones they will construct and command.
Veridian Expanse's huge map features many biomes each with their own unique creatures and resources. To keep things fresh while exploring the map, the upgrades will give the player a constant stream of new mechanics to try throughout the the whole game.
Development
The game features HDR lighting/shadows based on a new fourier lightfield rendering algorithm, and a custom sound engine to help the game look and sound it's best. Even so, the game was developed from scratch to keep it's requirements very low. Veridian Expanse should run just fine on 10-15 year old hardware. The game has lower system requirements than it's own website running in a modern browser!
Though earlier prototypes exist, the game's development began in earnest in 2019 as a passion project of Scott Lembcke. The dream game he's always wanted to make. Similar to how Howling Moon Software self funded Verdant Skies (Andy Korth's dream game), Scott has been working on the game part time since 2021. He is expecting to finish the game in late 2025.
Open Source
The C source code of Veridian Expanse will be available under the GPL 3 license and ship with the game. The intention is to allow the game to run on interesting hardware or OSes, and future systems to aid in game preservation. Beyond the usual Linux/Mac/Windows PC platforms, Veridian Expanse plays great on the Raspberry Pi, RISC-V, the BSDs, Haiku OS, and even many legacy OSes. Games are meant to be played anywhere!
