SPL: Skilled Pilots Live

Hi, Paweł here - Me Vs. Game - the one man studio!

SPL: "Skilled Pilots Live" can be described best as spacedoomsouls. Sounds interesting ?

The game is my dream to connect with the players in Early Access and create something great together.
Join us on Discord! https://discord.gg/7Wb5XPS

SPL is in active development and frequently updated, at least few times a month. It's constantly changing, but gives you - the player certain promises of what it is and what it's going to become.

You can read more about the promises below.
Your feedback tells me how well I'm doing on delivering on them.

SPL has been years in development and went a long, long way, from being an interesting experiment to what it is now, a game.
I'm very excited to see how far we can take it together.

Join us on Discord if you want to know a bit more about the game before purchase, gossip, report bugs, suggest ideas.

SPL promises

• Unique experience but fun and accessible.
  
• Difficulty is in the eye of the beholder. You can choose between easier or tougher fights or playstyles.
  
• Highly re-playable.
  
• Respects your time. Each playthrough is short enough for one evening and long enough to be satisfying.
  
• Perma-death comes late in the game. Never if played well.
  
• Action packed, but has non-combat content to chill between fights.
  
• Tough but fair. You can feel the impact of your mistakes, but the game gives you means to recover.
  
• Let's you choose and optimize builds.
  
• The updates are frequent, the game keeps growing and improving.

Short, intensive, replayable game loop

• Respawn is instant - learn from your failures and quickly get back into the fight.
  
• Time is your main resource. You start with 30 minutes. If you run out - perma-death turns on.
  
• No combat RNG, apart from weapon spread.
  
• You have plenty of ways to earn more time.
  
• Three chapters - each ending with a challenging boss fight, each takes approximately 30 minutes.
  
• You can quicken the arrival of the boss by picking tougher fights.
  
• If you play well, you will achieve more with given time, and finish the run with high fame (score).
  
• Your ship is fast, agile, can dash, use warp drive in combat to jump or perform glory-kills.
  
• Your weapons are super deadly and so the are enemies.

Staying Alive

Death in SPL is quick and easy, but there are plenty of ways to stay alive, many of them very souls-like:

• Ships have a passive, indestructible front shield lowered when a ship takes action.
  
• If the shield deflects, the reactor heat goes up, what, in longer perspective, can lead to the overheat and a few seconds of shutdown.
  
• Bullets can be dodged, by dashing and barrel rolling in any direction.
  
• Any incoming projectiles can be countered (parried) by a shield overload. Be careful — inaccurate counter timing can lead to the overheat!
  
• Ships can hunker down — rise the full, 360 degree shield — making them impervious to all damage, but slowly heating up the reactor.
  
• Get back your lost health (structure) by blasting your way through the enemy defenses and wrecking their ship hulls.
  
• You can raise the full shield and become imprevious to all damage and releases a kinetic blast that knocks back enemies.

Winning a Fight

So you can defend well, how about winning a fight ?

• Ship main guns never run out of ammo. Instead, the reactor heat goes up bringing you closer to the overheat shutdown.
  
• Shooting is about positioning and good timing, not placing the reticle at the perfect spot. You have the same aim assist system as the AI enemies. However, there is still plenty of space for agency and human error.
  
• The AI also knows how to defend, but can be beaten in a dogfight, by flanking, right timing, or sometimes with a good, old bullet storm.
  
• Very high DPS means a lot of healing, even over your limit. All ships yours including have very effective life stealing abilities.
  
• Defeated enemies get staggered and be glory killed for more over-healing and more momentum.

Story

The Mind Eater draws all the sentient life towards itself. It devoured the ancient Natives, and now it knows of us, too. Your resistance to Its call, however brief, is our glimmer of hope.

• SPL introduces you to the world, your mission ahead, and opens a promise of future story updates.

Tutorials

• A well tested, polished set of four tutorial missions that will introduce you to the details of the game unique mechanics.

Fame and Leaderboards

• Winning each fight earns you fame.
  
• SPL tells you how well you performed and what actions have been scored.
  
• You will lose all the fame if you die after the start of permadeath — when your time runs out.
  
• Obviously if the times runs out, you can always leave the game and take your fame with you!
  
• Steam leaderboard displays the Top Three Pilots and also other pilots around your score.

Three ship status bars are displayed:

• Heat – most of the actions generate heat. If you overheat the ship, it will take a few seconds to reboot the reactor!
  
• Armour — regenerates if you reactor is cool (at 0% heat).
  
• Structure — living metal that runs inside your ship, as well as inside the hulls of enemies. If you hit enemy directly, the liquid structure ejects from their ship and can be collected to repair your vessel. Enemies can heal in the same way!

Ship upgrades

• Four progression branches will be available — Ship, Terran Tech, Native Tech, Starborne Tech.
  
• By defeating enemies of the three species, you can progress in the respective technology and also in the Ship branch.
  
• Three weapon archetypes — Bolter, Plasmagun, Hailgun — are the respective original designs of the encountered species.
  
• Any two weapon types can be merged together using Conduit, giving additional 6 weapon types: Mauler, Starlance, Stormgun, Deathray, Melter, Phasebolt.
  
• These archetypes can be fitted with seven unique weapon variants — Auto, Trident, Scatter, Sentinel, Raptor, Assault, Destroyer — giving, altogether, 63 weapon combinations, such as Assault Bolter, Destroyer Starlance, or Raptor Deathray.
  
• 15 weapon modifiers which can be added to a composed weapon, without quantity limit, creating synergies and antisynergies.
  One of such modifiers is Flak — your bullets explode within the limited range.
  
• End result like in looter shooter, but here you get to choose, which keywords to compose your weapons from.
  
• Resilience, Heat, and Power are the three ship tech attributes that can be improved during playthrough.
  
• Some weapon combinations with modifiers, if used wisely, can be truly powerful — try to find them.
  
• Design and equip up to four weapons to have an answer to any combat situation. If needed, deconstruct and shuffle weapon types, variants, and modifiers at any time.

Flight

• Remember, there is no speed limit in the space — after the acceleration you will maintain your current speed until deceleration or hitting an object.
  
• Ships warp reactor allows you to accelerate freely in six directions, without changing the ship orientation, and with full freedom of motion. Feel free to strafe sideways or fly backwards, regardless of your camera orientation.
  
• The jump drive provide a quick acceleration to thousands of kilometers per second with the freedom of flight path within the space. The ship will automatically abort the jump after you reach an obstacle. You can also use jump drive to outrun your own bullets!
  
• Enjoy the open space and fly anywhere you want — the game will always come with surprises and give you challenges on the way.
  
• And last small tip – when the situation gets though, don’t feel dishonored by escaping any encounter or combat. Just jump away, heal up and get back into the fight!