It's a roguelike with one "simple" mission; find a new home for mankind's DNA, which really involves finding a planet suitable for the crew you've cloned on your ship. Depending on your cloning choices, the ideal planet's requirements change, so that's something to keep in mind as you go.
As for the gameplay loop itself, you've basically got it down. To be able to "finish" a playthrough (which can be done when you meet the various requirements to "initiate a Genesis" on a planet) you'll have to get your crew to a suitable size. To be able to do that you gather resources through various means, expand the ship (build and customise it any way you want), create the required atmosphere for your crew and generally make sure the ship supports them - and is able to keep you alive in the randomly generated galaxy. There's a lot more to it, but essentially you get as far as you can, unlock alien DNA, cloning abilities, new weapons and technology, ship modules, and information about new corporations that you can play as (which comes with various perks and visual differences), and carry that over to subsequent playthroughs and see how you do. Whether you finish or fail a playthrough, you'll carry over select things, and nothing you do will ever be wasted.
Sort of. You are fighting a ton of aliens, but you are able to use various defense tools to assist you, like automatic turrets, energy shields and certain ship modules, which I suppose could be compared a bit to a tower defense shooter. Killing the aliens is part of the loop though, in that you need DNA and biomass dropped by downed aliens to create more clones, which in turn act as your lives. If you die, you will respawn as one of those clones, and keep playing until you run out of clones.
Yeah, we've streamed the game at events a few times.
Here's a video someone grabbed from one of our streams last year. Please bear in mind that the game has had a visual overhaul since then, and most things look different (and way cooler!) now. You can see a lot of that on
Twitter for instance. For a more up-to-date look at the game, we've got some deeper dives coming up very soon, that I'll be sure to share with everyone in here :)
I'd have to investigate when the team started working on it, as Team17 wasn't always involved - but it's been years. As for content goals, we really want to base future updates on player feedback. We're continuously monitoring player requests and feedback, and will explore our options post-launch :)
