After a large scale attack on humanities greatest war ships, fighter craft pilot Ryder finds himself stranded alone, without communications, on an abandoned space station from the last peace period. However, soon after the arrival he discovers that he isn’t as alone as he thought – the station is controlled and regulated by an advanced neural network AI ‘Johnny’.
Ryder finds out that Johnny was created to simulate and control the integrate climate system of the rainforest on board the space station, he also learns that Johnny has been cut off from civilization since the war started again 100 years ago. Together they try to work out ways to contact the outside galaxy. Months after Ryder’s arrival the station is found by the enemy fleet, they then have only each other to rely on in order to survive the hostile assault.
Last Jungle In Sector 17 is a new take on the traditional top-down view space shooter with added RTS elements, some of the games it relates to are SPAZ, Star Control and classic Asteroids.
It features zero gravity open space 2D environment, base building with different defense turrets and tactical structures, large scale space battles, various allied and enemy units with special abilities like teleportation, EMP wave, kamikaze…, story told trough in-game dialogue and manga/comics style story sections.
The game is played using the keyboard and the mouse. The player starts out with the hero craft which he controls throughout the game and the first goal is to learn to control that craft in zero gravity environment. To be effective in dogfights the player needs to also master the deflective shooting technique.
The primary objective of the game is to defend the home space station from hostile enemy activity. At the beginning the player must use the hero craft to do so, but as the game progresses he also gains access to defense turrets, upgrades (which won’t just make the stats better, but also deliver special abilities), tactical structures and allied crafts.
Last Jungle In Sector 17 is developed by a two man international team, Lennart Rikk from Estonia as designer and animator and Tariq Makled from US as programmer. There are some smaller games they both have worked on before, but ljis17 is their first step into the growing indie scene.
The game is using the Flash platform and currently has a free prototype demo available which can be played in the browser. The playthrough of the prototype should take about half an hour and can be played here: http://ljis17.com/prototype/
To see what kind of experience the final game is aiming to deliver check out its Kickstarter campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1396394944/last-jungle-in-sector-17/
