It’s no doubt been a long day for Eric "Wingman" Peterson and the other folks at Descendent Studios, but their crowdfunded reboot of the six-degrees-of-freedom shooter Descent is now over the $600,000 mark and will receive its funding, which will allow Peterson and team to buckle down and get to work on the title—once the post-Kickstarter partying is over, of course.
Though the funding campaign got off to a good start, pledges slowed over the last week of the campaign. However, backers donated more than $200,000 of the $600,000 goal in the past four days, with $70,000 of donations coming in today, on the campaign’s final day. With about two hours left on the clock, the donation mark stands at just a bit over $602,000.
Peterson and his team (which includes several former members of the Austin branch of Cloud Imperium, which is currently focusing on building Star Citizen’s persistent universe) have set their sights on resurrecting the Decent series of games, which reached the height of their popularity in the late 1990s and cast players as the pilot of a fast, maneuverable spaceship blasting killer robots in underground mines. The game’s hook was that unlike other FPS titles, Descent allowed full movement along all axes—you could move up, down, left right, forward, backward, and rotate in any direction.
Descent Underground is intended to function as a prequel to the first Descent game, retaining the core elements (first person view from a spaceship flying around in mines with six degrees of freedom) while changing some elements around. Although Descendent Studios acquired the rights to use the Descent name from Descent publisher Interplay, they don’t have complete access to all of the Descent IP; this has necessitated a few changes to how the game works—like pilots flying the ships remotely as drones, for example.
In the weeks since we first reported on the project, the team has posted a large number of developer updates and videos, taking a page from the Star Citizen infodump model. A few days ago, the team put up a video showing Oculus Rift integration (embedded near the top of this article), and based on that and the other videos that have been posted, the project looks like it’s captured that "Descent" tunnel vibe, using the Unreal Engine 4 to create moodily lit underground spaces punctuated by laser fire and explosions. According to Kickstarter FAQ page, currently the developers plan to target the game at all of the non-mobile platforms supported by Unreal Engine 4, which means Windows, OS X, and Linux (sorry, console gamers—no console versions are planned).
For disclosure, I backed Descent Underground several weeks ago after first hearing about the project, and I have high hopes that it will deliver. You can’t go back in time and recapture your teenage years again, but maybe this title will recreate some of that magic. Looking forward to seeing you all in the mines, Material Defenders.
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