Production on STASIS, Rick Future springs into sci-fi action

Written by Jack Allin — September 28, 2012 at 00:01

Hot on the comet trail of ASA and Lifeless Planet, there are two more sci-fi adventures approaching the horizon in the form of STASIS and Rick Future.

Stasis

Chris Bischoff's STASIS stars John Maracheck, captain of a small spacecraft called The Hawking, who thinks he's hit the salvage motherlode when he discovers a giant, heavily damaged ship drifting seemingly dead in space. But soon Maracheck finds himself opening his eyes, "disoriented, drowsy and in pain.... (with) "nothing to greet him but the static of a nearby monitor and a cold steel floor. Thick, green liquid covers the floor and then his body, leading a trail to a nearby, steaming stasis-pod. He slowly gets to his feet, trying to take in his surroundings. Where is his wife? His daughter? What the hell is going on...?"

An impressive-looking one-man creation, as seen in the game's introductory trailers, STASIS features high resolution graphics with an unusual (for adventure games) isometric, third-person perspective.  Though looking more like an RPG on the surface, and with "danger lurking in every shadow", Bischoff claims that STASIS is based on classic adventure mechanics.  Players must "solve puzzles and use objects... to progress and to find Maracheck’s family."  Helping in this matter is the Emergency Medical Kit, which lets you break items down into their base elements to store for later use.

Bischoff has been working hard on STASIS for quite a while now, and he estimates the fully self-financed game is now 70% complete. He's targeting a completion date late this year, but with full voiceover recordings also planned, the indie developer expects that the first quarter of 2013 is a more realistic target.  The game will be self-published, as well as distributed through participating portals such as GOG.com.

For more details about STASIS, check out the official website.

Rick Future - The Adventure Game

Rick Future is the star of a free German audio play series, and will soon be branching out into his own self-titled adventure game. He'll get a rude introduction to the new medium, however, as a group of pirates attack Rick's ship when he and his crew attempt to deliver a seemingly harmless cargo of freight containers in the outer territories. Rick is forced to hide his craft in a nearby nebula, where it "collides with an old alien emergency probe which holds an ancient distress call from a long forgotten alien ship." What follows is "a new adventure which leads them through the dangerous Gon’Dual sector, where they do not know who is friend or foe..."

An adventure game powered by Crytek's CryENGINE 3 (words very rarely uttered in the same sentence), Rick Future is a 3D point-and-click adventure with three playable roles.  Along with Rick, players will control his crewmates Hubert and Evi, each of which has individual skills necessary to overcome obstacles ranging from navigating space to cracking computer codes to hotwiring robots.

This game has also been in development for some time, though it's much farther off than Stasis.  Two-man indie developers MetalPop Games are currently hoping to have the game finished by the end of 2013. If you'd like to see the game released on Steam upon completion, you can vote for Rick Future through Valve's Greenlight program.

For more details about Rick Future - The Adventure Game, check out the official website.