Eridani Survivors

Eridani Survivors is a 2D survivors-like, in space. 

Darius and Lana Rodriguez (brother and sister), Abeni Ojiofor, Pablo Hernandez, and (in the release version), Pablo's commandos and soldiers, are giving it everything they have because they are willing to sacrifice their lives in the pursuit of justice. In an area when most are spineless and unwilling to stand up against the genocidal empire, they are doing everything they can to prevent the extermination of the peaceful Rhani.

The pilots are characters from my short visual novel Across Kiloparsecs. The plan was to build a strategy combat game inspired by Ogre Battle using those characters, but I'm not ready yet skills-wise to do that, so Eridani Survivors is an intermediate step. Think of this as the characters escaping and surviving long enough to begin challenging the empire in the later game.

I haven't built an arcade-style or action game before, and I took on this project to learn Unreal Engine. Why a 2D game, and why a survivorslike? Vampire Survivors and other survivorslikes were what I had been playing in my wind-down-at-night time when I started the project. I figured if I was already playing that kind of game anyway, I could use the time to playtest and improve my own game instead.

This is an alpha/demo build and I'm looking for feedback -- is this fun for you? Why or why not? What would make it more enjoyable, engaging, or interesting? I'm sure there are bugs or glitches or annoyances to be found.

The main goal before release is to add more skills/abilities/weapons/passives to create more combos and synergies and create a much larger variety of enemy ships. But first I have to get the core mechanics right -- starting move speed? Firing rate? Number of enemies? Progression? Please, share your thoughts.

Since this is my first game written with Unreal Engine, I might have missed something with the build. For Windows, you may need to install the Visual C++ distributable if you've never installed that (I REALLY don't understand why Windows just doesn't auto-install that on all machines). I've included that in the zip file as VC_redist.x64.exe just in case you need to run it. The Linux version has only been tested on my Ubuntu machine. Let me know if anything else needed to launch the game is missing.

I plan to translate this into a bunch of languages for release (see the Steam page for full list), but right now it's just partially translated into Spanish.

This game is available to wishlist on Steam with a planned launch date in August 2025. I'll be putting a demo up on steam probably in early May.

Whether you end up playing or not, thank you for your time. You could have been doing literally anything else, and yet you're here, on this page.