In Descender you must guide your escape pod through tricky and treacherous terrain to survive.
Fight for survival against gravity, treacherous rocky caves, as well as alien fauna and flora using your limited thruster power to guide your pod down safely in this lunar lander style arcade game.
Initially I wrote the basic thruster mechanic for a lunar lander style game idea that I wanted to utilise for a Unity tutorial written over at raywenderlich.com.
After writing the tutorial, I really wanted to make a game that used the thruster / lunar lander style mechanic, and so I spent a bit of time creating a game where you descend down a cave system using limited thruster power.
The idea is that your thruster power only starts regenerating slowly after you back off using them. It forces you to be careful with how much you use them, and when you use them. To make things even more difficult, slight impacts to the edges of rocks will harm you, and there are hazard like rock falls, cave fires, gravity reverse/increase waves, and alien life to hamper your descent.
The goal is to get as far down into the randomly generated cave system as you can, in the quickest possible time.
Cave segments are randomly generated from a large list of different segment types after the first, static segment. Alien life and pick up spawns are randomly placed inside these segments based on some placement criteria like locating flat or open surfaces combined with chance mechanics.
Currently Descender is out for Android via the Google Play Store. It features Google Play Achievements to go after, as well as a descent distance and timing leaderboards to see how far you can go without being destroyed, as well as how quickly and efficiently you can do your runs.