Awooga! FTL Boarded Garry's Mod
If gathering friends to play Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator is a bit cumbersome, and if you find FTL a bit lonely, then I've found the perfect game for you. Final Frontier is the result of a nasty transporter accident between the pair, where the Heisenberg compensators decoupled and they arrived on the SS GMOD screaming and inside out. The sick bay did its best, but all it could do is stabilise the life signs. To be honest, the gristly lump that was spat out looks pretty amazing.
There's a Facepunch forum thread, but you might not be able to see that if you're not a member, so here's what it says:
Final Frontier is our attempt to make a unique and novel Garry's Mod gamemode centred around the teamwork involved in controlling and maintaining a starship doing space things. Each individual on a ship should be allocated to one or more of the tasks required to keep the ship running, and in times of battle to assist the war effort as best they can. There is no strict job / roll system in the game, players should decide where they would be of most use. The players are also not divided into discrete teams, in fact anyone may defect to another ship or mutiny at any time, so crews should be wary of moral and look out for traitorous crewmen.
You'll be manually performing tasks at the ship's stations. That means someone will be manning the transporter, picking out ships in the nearby area to board and selecting the rooms for players to zap over to. All areas of the ship will have to be under someone's purview. This looks seriously great.
There's a full introduction to the game here, with a bunch of systems shown off.
And just to prove that the UI actually does something, have a look at the transporter room run through.
No word on a release, yet. And the developers admit they're only using Gmod for prototyping, so it could end-up standalone. My body is ready for either.