Space Scavenger is a neat DIY Spaceship builder with a free alpha
Captain Forever-lite
"Ooh, that looks a bit like Captain Forever", I thought, when I spotted the Space Scavenger alpha this morning. It's a streamlined take on Forever's DIY spaceship building, where you pile on parts during distinct levels rather than roaming endless void. It's more structured, more relaxing, and fundamentally more limited. It's got good whumphing noises though, and I quite like it.
You'll need to join the game's Discord channel to grab the download link. There was a big update last week, which you can read about here.
You start off as a single block with a laser, but your arsenal quickly expands towards shotguns, hammers and flamethrowers. I particularly recommend the hammer, which is the main source of those aforementioned whumphs. You find new parts rather than chopping them off rival spaceships, which does mean it lacks one of the best dynamics from Forever - weighing up whether to avoid destroying a component precisely because it's so powerful.
Still, it's a serene counterpoint to the encroaching panic I get with Captain Forever. Time pauses whenever you want to fiddle with your ship, and the enemies - while probably no less deadly overall - tend to pile on damage over time rather than suddenly eradicating me in one fell laser swoop. I also like the little ritual where you spin around a planet to harvest its O2, which is your goal on every level. Is that, like, killing everything? I don't want to think about it.
G'wan, here's a short vid from developers Red Cabin Games that gives an overview of it all. There are also some nice views from a cabin in northern Sweden.
One of the devs told me they're "aiming to enter early access during June 2019", thus perpetuating humanity's failure to agree on what "early access" means. They're looking at September-November for the full release, "depending on the response from the early access".