Plasma is a spacey engineering game from former Kingdom and Poly Bridge devs
Build robo-puppies when Plasma hits early access March 30th
Everyone loves a robot companion, from Half-Life’s Dog to the plethora of Star Wars droids that are so cute they generate millions in merchandising. That’s why I’m intrigued by Plasma, a spacey physics-driven engineering game that lets players build a variety of robot friendos, useful machines, and generally wild contraptions. Plasma comes from Patrick Corrieri and Marco Bancale, who have previously worked on the Poly Bridge series and the tense Kingdom games. Their new creative engineering sim is heading into early access on March 30th, and I can’t wait to see what people make.
The trailer begins with the aforementioned robo-cuties: a little machine that waves its hand stiffly and a Bakugan-like ball that can fold its legs. Things get crazy as the video goes on, though: we see the visual programming system used to give these machines different properties, letting us customise them to our hearts' content. One scene shows an arcade cabinet; by connecting a series of nodes on the programming side it seems we could actually build a version of Pong in Plasma. Wild.
I’m always nervous when I see complicated UIs, but developer Dry Licorice say “players of all ages will be able to explore and learn the visual programming system step by step,” which is reassuring. The team continues to say that a “user-friendly tutorial system” will introduce players to the engineering basics before we go on to create the big rockets seen in the trailer.
Arguably the most exciting part of Plasma is the opportunity to share your creations with others. Plasma has a built-in sharing platform where you can download other players’ creations, modify their gizmos, and share your own. A massive, mechanised chess board and an automated mini-golf set are used as examples in the trailer, but I’m more interested in recreating the patchwork vehicles from Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. The game will also feature full Steam Workshop integration, so you never know.
Plasma will be launching onto Steam on March 30th as an early access release.