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A photograph of Radiant Beem, one of the enemies in indie game "Unstoppable Gorg," designed to play on sci-fi films from the 1950s. (Courtesy of Futuremark Game Studios)
Unstoppable Gorg is a highly original Tower Defense game that plays on the stereotypes of classic sci-fi films. The gameplay works with an orbital defense system. Players install turrets in the different orbits, and the turrets can be moved around on that same orbit as needed.
Jaakko Haapasalo of Futuremark Games Studio said via email he and the team have always enjoyed working with FPS and Tower Defense games, “But we always set a mission for ourselves to bring with us something unique in the approach we take, something new in the gameplay we create, that takes the genre forward, if even by a little.”
“With our first game, ‘Shattered Horizon,’ we explored space in a fairly realistic and believable sci-fi setting, and ended up combining true six-degrees-of-freedom movement and zero gravity with traditional WASD controls and time-tested skill-based gameplay,” he said. “With ‘Unstoppable Gorg,’ we wanted to explore moving towers and reconfigurable defense.”
They had clear reasons for taking this route. While Tower Defense games are great, they can be pretty similar: waves of enemies are thrown at stationary defenses that players can upgrade as they go.
“The basic setup works great, and is a big reason we love the genre: planning, optimizing, re-playing and fine-tuning your tower strategy to finally get that perfect success. Repetition is a feature!” Haapasalo said.
“But we felt there was an opportunity to improve on the passive, waiting mechanics: make the whole setup more dynamic by allowing towers to move. Not freely though: very importantly, the towers (satellites) are tied to orbits, and you always have to move an entire orbit with all its satellites,” he said.
The new mechanic challenges players to plan ahead to avoid losing different combinations of paths. It also makes players react to new situations, and forces them to change the paths left open by shifting their turrets—particularly when dealing with enemies coming from multiple directions.
Weapons will also play into this, of course. Haapasalo gave an example, noting the “power-multiplier satellites like the range-boosting Radar Station or the Shield Generator take on a whole new meaning once you are able to reconfigure your defense at will.”
Beyond the gameplay though, ‘Unstoppable Gorg’ has a unique style that gives it an air of its own. Players face off against three main enemies: the robot armies of Radiant Beem, the seductress alien Sereia, and Gorg the lizard king.
All of them are acted out with intentionally cheesy dialogue reminiscent of classic sci-fi films from the 1950s.
Haapasalo said the style came from a “ personal interest for many at the studio, and the original inspiration was, I think, one of our movie nights where a particularly esoteric line-up was being shown ”
Yet as they moved forward, they found the style had more to offer than they originally thought.
“Beyond the initial inspiration, we quickly found that the era was amazingly rich from the point of view of these fantastic alien characters, settings, and motives that could really inspire an entire original story,” he said.
They were able to create props used to create the classic sci-fi film look thanks to someone in-house who is a genius with miniature models.
“He basically took off and created this entire world of amazing aliens, spaceships, cloud cities, and swamp fortresses (most of which we then burned down with a blowtorch and filmed at super-speed). Not to mention the characters, which we had a great time playing,” Haapasalo said.