An innovative survival horror sandbox set in a solar system far from home - far from safety. Can you survive?
Read More
318
backers
£6,422
pledged of £50,000 goal
Replay with sound
An innovative survival horror sandbox set in a solar system far from home - far from safety. Can you survive?
About this project
The Pitch
"Centration is the tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others."
Centration is a multiplayer round-based online survival sandbox horror game set in a solar system far from our own. You're a crew-member on board a state-of-the-art futuristic space station that's been established in orbit of a potentially habitable planet.
Your goal is to survive. How you do this is your own choice, but generally speaking you'll be keeping the station operational, working together as a team, and sprinting through sections of the station attempting to escape [masked killers/fire/meteoroids/a very angry monkey].
True horror doesn't come from monsters, creatures or darkness. The true horror of Centration is the fear of humanity, and of our capacity to forget all others in our fight for survival.
We're a small group of avid, creative, and dedicated developers with one heart and one mind in making this project a reality. Our team is a mix of industry-experienced, field-experienced, and entry-level developers who all deserve to be a part of the creation of this game. We believe that our team has what it takes to make this project a truly unique success. Real innovation doesn't come from industry-proven companies and teams - it comes from the indie developers; and every once in a while, a project like this comes along and promises to truly innovate the scene.
We're redefining what survival means.
What is Centration?
Centration is set in 2152, where after centuries of development and growth, corporate entities have essentially taken control of humanity. They patrol the skies and the streets... and they control who lives or dies. UniTech, the biggest of the corporations, owns or directly controls more than 60% of the world's economy. They have established a government-like entity with a military and fleet of combat-ready spacecraft in order to police the band of squabbling corporations.
Humanity is desperate to escape and UniTech is going to provide that escape. The Centration expedition is a corporate-funded endeavour to colonise the moon of a gas giant in the Keplar-16 solar system. It is proven by probes to be capable of sustaining human life, and will provide a perfect starting point for a human colony in a new solar system.
The launch of the expedition goes well, they arrive and set up space stations and habitation modules in orbit while UniTech investigate the surface properly.
Deep space... it does things to the mind.
How would a typical game of Centration play?
You start a game of Centration when everything is swell and dandy, nothing in the world could go wrong on such a beautiful day in outer-space, right?
Wrong. You're a crew member on board one of the state-of-the-art space stations in the Keplar-16 solar system, on a mission of vital importance to UniTech. You have duties to carry out, whether you're and engineer or a medical technician, you'll go about doing what you need to do to make sure the space station stays in working order. We call this the maintenance period. It's also nicknamed the calm before the storm.
Sooner or later, someone inevitably breaks something. Someone might have a mission to kill you, or one of your crew. They might be tasked with sabotaging the station, stealing some chemical or data, or they might just be doing it because they want to.
The station's security will naturally try to keep order, protect the crew, while the engineers will keep the station functioning mechanically. The medics will heal and the officers will lead. We call this the active period; nicknamed the storm.
Centration is played your way, and what happens during a round will differ massively from one to the next. A quiet shift where you don't even realise something's gone wrong until it's all done and over with. A crazy shift culminating in the death of the entire crew. A really long shift where everything goes wrong, and you and your crew try your hardest to keep on top of everything and it just seems never ending... then comes the conclusion period. The end of your little story. Have you survived this long? Will you survive to the end? There's a shuttle on its way to rescue you. There are escape pods, space suits, and there's also death.
The round or 'shift' ends when everyone is dead, the shift ends (time-limit), everyone has left the station permanently (shuttle or escape pods), or the antagonist has successfully fulfilled all of his/her duties.
A first-person survival horror sandbox, Centration delivers some of the most dynamic features you've ever seen in a computer game.
- Airflow that flows around the station, providing you with that vital air... or maybe poison?
- Electric Systems that power every bit of machinery you operate
- Scripting that controls the machinery
- Realistic Physics (Yes, that includes explosive decompressions.)
- Combat - Brutal, visceral, and most of all... dangerous. Centration isn't about face-paced, in-your-face combat. There's no running and gunning. It's not an FPS. It's a battle for survival. Your weapon? Everything is a weapon, with limitless potential for creativity.
- Health - You can bleed, suffocate, burn, poison, and break.
- Computing - Keep an eye on vital statistics and information, send interdepartmental messages, or just browse Facebook.
- Multiplayer Round-Based - You play online with dozens of others, in rounds that could last from 5 minutes to 5 hours.
- Fully interactive environment - If you can see it, you can interact with it. Don't like that table? Move it. Don't like that console? Re-install it. Don't like that crew-member? Eject it. Don't like that window? Break it. You get the picture.
- Persistent character statistics - grow your character over time, increase your competency, earn credits, evolve.
- Picture-in-Picture
- Science! Perform amazing scientific experiments with the help of your friends, mix chemicals together and discover the potentially explosive results or see what happens when you feed antimatter to a monkey. (Hint: It doesn't go well for the monkey.)
Creating a computer game is expensive. We're confident that our £50k budget is enough to cover the cost of developing Centration. We've already invested a significant amount of time, money, and effort into Centration but we still need your help. From the total, we have to pay Kickstarter and payment fees as well as putting aside the overheads for your rewards.
After that, we're aiming to release by Christmas 2014, and there's a lot of work to do by then: designing maps, creating assets, animating, creating content and the core features for the game, recording the music, the sound effects, and then there's testing, bug fixing, and more testing. The team isn't being paid, so the budget goes directly into game production.
Unity Pro
We're using the Unity 4 engine for Centration; and we want to deliver an amazing game - so we're going to need Unity Pro licences - they're not cheap either at £1k a pop.
Equipment
Our team needs to have the right equipment to test on; We refuse to deliver you a product that hasn't been tested and fixed over multiple iterations.
Motion-Capture
Unity 4 utilizes the Mecanim motion-capture system, and we fully intend on taking advantage of that. That means we're going to be spending a lot of time recording Mocap data. While that's fun for the team, it's also expensive.
Asset-Creation
Unfortunately in today's world you can't get anything for free. Our team can only create so much themselves before the bills start racking up. It takes a lot of effort and time to create game-ready assets.
Additional Licences
We might need to use additional middle-ware and third party packages. These more often than not involve licence costs.
Coffee & Bacon
Gotta have coffee. And bacon, at the request of our enduring fans.
It would be nice to exceed our budget, and while it's not necessarily important that we do - if it happens, we've got some plans on what we can do with the extra.
The list of possibilities is fairly high, we have a pool of ideas that we'd like to add to the game with extra money. Here's a list of what you could see if we reach above and beyond our goal:
- More Science! More realistic scientific experiments
- AI-Controlled Characters to populate your stations and keep things running for you
- Some single-player scenarios and challenges
- Oculus Rift platform release
- More items and objects in the game
Cutting out the Middleman
The main purpose of using Kickstarter is cutting out the middleman. Producers tend to ruin things; for both the developers and the gamers. With a successful kickstarter, our team is free to follow the original design and plan for Centration, and you, the gamers, get the original vision of the game.
Direct to Players
The game is delivered directly from the developers to you, the players. If something needs to get fixed, it's fixed. A really cool suggestion? Let's do it. There's no approval process to go through, there's no internal politics and most importantly, we can communicate directly with you guys in order to deliver the best experience.
We're also on Steam Greenlight! We're currently ranked #10 (at the time of writing) in all of the games on Greenlight and we're confident we will shortly be greenlit and have the awesome features of Steam available to us! If you'd like to visit our greenlight page and vote for us, please click here!
Independence
We're a small indie team, built up of a mix of industry-experienced professionals, professionals looking to get into the gaming industry, and other talented individuals looking for a leg-up into the industry. This game has spent a long time in design, and all of our team are truly passionate about making it a success.
We all know each other above and outside the project now. Even though we may live and work apart, we work well together.
Mature & Experience
The majority of our members are mature professionals, coming from different backgrounds both within and outside the gaming industry. Their heads are where they need to be. Even though they are of professional calibre, they have already agreed to volunteer to create Centration without any assurance of financial compensation. To us, that is the kind of commitment you guys deserve to see.
Fresh & Creative
On the other hand, there are members of our team who do not have professional experience or qualifications, but are in fact extremely talented individuals looking for a leg-up into the gaming industry.
It's extremely difficult for those with no professional experience to break into the industry, and even harder for them to stay. Our team is as much about giving those people the chance to shine as it is about delivering an amazing gaming experience.
Meet some of the team
Aaron is 25 years old and lives in Swindon, United Kingdom. He has had a passion for games ever since he was old enough to use a computer, with particular interest in survival and action games. His experience stems from working on Space Station 13 - a semi popular tile-based survival game of which serves as a primary inspiration for Centration.
Michael is 19 and comes from Milton Keynes, United Kingdom. He is a passionate gamer and has a unique way of viewing the world. Michael met Aaron online, and have been friends for years before they came together to make Centration a reality. Michael currently attends university and has a high working technical knowledge of games and their creation.
Ian is the lead-developer for Centration, focusing mainly on man-handling all of those code-monkeys, ensuring they're well fed and keep working diligently. He has a high professional experience in leading a team of programmers and this experience is translating very well on this project.
Duncan is a programmer who came to us from the old SS13 scene, from Oregon. Having taken part in and won various local and national programming competitions he's an amazing and integral part of our team.
We found Nelson at a game-artists expo in the USA, showing off some of his space-ships. We knew there and then we wanted him on the team and so pitched the idea to him. He was thrilled by the idea and even brought his brother on board too. Nelson has a high working knowledge of 3D modelling and this experience is vital to leading our team of artists.
Katy is a legend. The concept art you see here, the concept art we have on our site, it's mostly her work. She has been instrumental in helping our vision come to life before our eyes with her amazing artwork. She's a gamer with extraordinary talent, and we're damned lucky to have her on board.
His past experience in composing for indie games notwithstanding, Cory is by far one of the most amazing composers we could have imagined. We wouldn't swap him for Hans Zimmer, and that's saying something. Katy helped us see our vision first. Cory helped us hear it first. We almost cried with joy.
All of our rewards are designed to give you amazing goodies for your pledge. From the classic hoodies and t-shirts, to really unique bits such as 3D printed models and hugs from the dev team.
We've compiled our list of backer-rewards with two important factors in mind: Getting you great value for money, and quality. We hope you'll agree when you get the rewards and can enjoy them yourselves!
The £500 GBP tier will now include a collector's edition metal box-set and a neat little Angry Engineers Entertainment supporter statuette. This has been updated on the reward itself.
As we are unable to edit the rewards already claimed, the other tiers changes are as follows:
£100 GBP
- Previous tier PLUS
- Centration Hoodie
- Centration Lanyard
- Previous tier PLUS
- Laser-Engraved metal 16GB USB stick with Centration launcher on it
- The USB stick will come in a collector's edition box with
- A "UniTech Recruitment" Poster
Previous tier PLUS
-
Digital Deluxe version of Centration, including: - Premium Membership
- Centration Digital Soundtrack by Cory Mahler
- Alpha and Beta testing access
- Access to our modding tools before we release them publicly
- Exclusive in-game cosmetic gear for kickstarter backers only - A certificate of awesome, showing you supported us.
Add-Ons
You can now also choose to have add-ons to your rewards. For example, if you'd like to get extra Premium game keys with your reward, simply add an extra £10 GBP to your pledge and make sure to choose the right options in our survey sent out after funding.
- Additional Premium Game Key: £10 GBP
- T-Shirt: £30 GBP
- Hoodie: £40 GBP
- Poster: £15 GBP
- Centration Mug: £10 GBP
- Lanyard: £10 GBP
- Keyfob: £10 GBP
Physical items must be included in a tier that already has a physical item so as to include additional shipping, otherwise please include extra for shipping:
- £10 for Europe
- £25 for outside of Europe
No, really. We can't stress this enough. Thank you all for your amazing support for our project. When we started work on this a few years ago we weren't sure whether the market existed. You have all time and time again shown us that not only is there a market for this type of game, but it's positively craved by the gaming community.
We will continue to strive and put 110% into this project until we deliver an amazing game.
Risks and challenges
Every project comes with its risks and challenges, especially independent ones like ours. Everything has to come together - code, art, design, audio. We have an amazing team that are dedicated to creating the best gaming experience possible. We don't have a proven track record - but every team has to start somewhere.
Centration is an innovative game. It's introducing gameplay mechanics and new types of features that haven't come together in a game before. Obviously, that comes with inherent risks that they might not turn out as planned. Needless to say our team is dedicated to fixing any issues we might encounter.
We're committed to sharing everything that goes on with Centration with you guys, from all the little problems that we have to overcome to all of the major successes.
Would you believe we've iterated about 14 different models of our airflow system before deciding on our current one? Dedication, right there.
Learn about accountability on KickstarterFAQ
-
A Premium membership is essentially a special way of owning the game. You put a little bit extra towards pre-purchasing the game and in return we've given you early access to new info, access to the beta and alpha tests, and access to restricted areas of the site. Its our own little cool people club.
-
The Digital Deluxe is an updated version of the Premium version of the game. It's another tier up the ladder for those who wish to pay a little bit more and get a little bit more from the game. At the moment the digital deluxe includes extras like pre-release access to our modding tools, exclusive in-game personal items and gear, and other cool little exclusive goodies in-game.
-
The goal in Centration is simple - it's to survive. How you do that is entirely your own choice, and where the sandbox aspect comes into play. Survival means you get paid at the end of our shift, and when you get paid you can put your pay towards improving your character. I suppose you could say the goal is to make an awesome character, but 'improving' your character doesn't mean super-strength beast, it just makes you better at certain aspects of play.
-
Yes! We accept PayPal currently on our own website's store, and Google is in the process of being implemented. However we will note that any pre-purchases through our website will not count towards our goal.
-
The In-Game personal gear is essentially a backer-exclusive set of items that you will be able to wear and use in-game to show-off that you were a backer of Centration.
-
We chose to keep the rewards fairly similar so as to not be unfair on the IndieGoGo backers - that said, we have made a few changes, a Hoodie instead of a T-Shirt, some extra in-game digital content, and a few different high-end options. While we appreciate every pledge, we don't expect our IndieGoGo backers to re-pledge to our Kickstarter! You guys have done your part! <3
-
Your physical rewards will be shipped and delivered to you by the delivery date stated unless otherwise explicitly stated barring any unforeseen circumstances. They'll be delivered via Royal Mail (and eventually your local parcel postal service) unless you chose the highest backer tier, in which case our lead designer Aaron will personally deliver you the rewards and offer you a hug. You choose to opt out of this if the thought of this scares you.
-
You are more than welcome to delve deeper into the inner workings of the game by visiting our website at http://www.centration.co/ and looking around. We're always adding new content and updates, so be sure to check back regularly!
-
We will be releasing Centration on Windows PC, Mac, and Linux.
Support this project
Funding period
- (32 days)