Crashlands announced

Greetings, indie RPG fans! I’m a bit behind, but slowly clawing my way through the eternal backlog. Today’s post comes courtesy of Sam Coster from Butterscotch Shenanigans (creators of Quadropus Rampage, previously covered here), who has written in to announce Crashlands, an action RPG with crafting, base-building, creature-taming, and big procedurally generated biomes to explore.

The narrative premise is pretty silly:

Play as Flux Dabes, a galactic delivery truck driver whose latest shipment gets interrupted by a megalomaniacal alien named “Q” who tears her ship to pieces looking for useful tech. Crashlanded on Woanope, you must fight, tame, craft, quest, bossfight, and adventure your way to domination of all the things so that you and JuiceBox, your trusty sidekick/supervisor/robotic cargo palette, can send a message to the Bureau of Shipping and get those damn packages delivered!

The trailer should give you the idea of what you’re in for:

It bears mentioning that there’s a human interest angle to this game–Butterscotch Shenanigans evidently dumped whatever it was they were working on in October 2013 when Sam Coster was diagnosed with cancer. The team began working on Crashlands instead, because–in Coster’s words–he was “[i]n need of something more meaningful to work on through all the chemo and tests.” If nothing else, it’s served to help him keep going through some serious adversity, though one must hope that the game will prove excellent in its own right as well.

Crashlands’s planned feature list reads as follows:

1. Infinite, self-managing inventory

2. Pleasurable base-building that feels like painting

3. A huge, absurd narrative that gives purpose and direction to crafting

4. Diverse combat with tameable creatures

5. Platform-agnosticism: The game plays just as well on mobile and desktop (Steam, Android, iOS), will launch at the same time on all of them, and has cross-platform save syncing

Crashlands is planned for release in the fall; Windows and Mac ($15), iOS and Android ($5).