Defect

Introduction: Just the right amount of thoom, but no more.

Defect is a game where a player builds many almost-supreme ships, as the central conceit of the game is to defeat the player's old ship at the end of every level. Take, for example, a completely original "interdiction cruiser" (from a beta quite a few months ago). Each part is placed around a central core, sized, rotated, and powered to achieve some desired objective of space, design, and thoom. (Not to mention pew! pew! and ka-zorch.)

The game iterates between ship-building and mission-playing. Each mission demands different characteristics of the designed ship in terms of manoeuvrability, weapons range and load-out, and enemies -- not to mention the inevitability of facing the previous mission's "invincible" ship.

Gameplay: Build ships, fly around, shoot things, focus on different bits.

The game has a fairly simple build-shoot-reward gameplay loop. Missions grow more complex, ships grow more complex, and the options... grow more complex.

Building ships: It's all about the core

The OW68 Robo Gap (names and designations are generated randomly) pictured here is a completely representative early game "The player has attempted this mission too many times to care about aesthetics" ship. The centrepoint of the ship is the core, which provides limits on the amount of energy available. Exposed cores provide more energy at the cost of being really easy to blow up. Sometimes this "defect" is an advantage.

The cores need to connect to the rest of the ship. If components overlap, they lose efficiency. The OW68 uses a very cheap connector-piece scaled up to be it's primary hull. The connector-piece is very flimsy but very energy efficient. Design then proceeds by spending energy on weapons, engines, stabilizers, and crew modules. Everything can be rotated and (to a point) sized to taste. This ship is a very bad ship, but it's very representative of the iterative design process some of the tougher missions almost require a player to do.

Flying around and Shooting things: All defects in design are features -- not bugs.

Different ships have different weapon and flight characteristics suited for different environments. All problems are the fault of the designer (the player) and the fault of the pilot (the player) and the fault of the enemies and the player's prior ship (the player fifteen minutes ago). There is nuance here because different sub-systems can be controlled (and repaired) through direct player action, allowing heightened efficiency on the bit that the player is focusing on at the moment. Guns, focused upon, allow manual fire and aim. Engines go faster. Stabilisers provide more nuanced maneuvering, and so on.

Defeating the prior ship

The end of (almost) every level is the appearance and (probable) destruction of the player's prior ship. Different players have different means of introducing weak points into the ship, but making sure that the ship is horribly slow if it doesn't have focused-upon engines, or doesn't aim well without human intervention is a feature, not a bug. The "handy exhaust port" on the death star is a similar "feature." This twist allows the game to require innovation in building in every level, instead of occasional building when new parts become available.