Ryan Stevens had a vision for a mobile-game that some might call mad: an open-world FPS-RPG (along the lines of Fallout 3 and Borderlands), coupled with a 24-hour day/night cycle (a la Animal Crossing). Entitled Rock Rock Rocket, players would take control of a researcher/astronaut whom — after the onset of a sudden tragedy — must survive alone upon a massive and fully-explorable alien world. In order to ensure that Rock Rock Rocket keeps chugging along at sixty frames per second, the entire 3D game world is — in a move similar to Doom and Wolfenstein 3D — presented via 2D-sprites.
The time of day will — similar to Animal Crossing — be perfectly mirrored in game, with certain quests and alien creatures only being accessible based upon whether or not the sun is currently shining. Other ways in which this time system can manifest itself includes your researcher depositing an alien egg he found in the back of his spaceship, and then discovering — two real world days later — that the egg has begun hatching. Although individual quests are expected to be finishable within roughly ten minutes, the entire campaign — in part due to the app’s real time nature — is expected to last nearly a month.
However — after showing off all the work finished on his impressive game engine — Ryan Stevens told Kickstarter’s community that he needed $6,000 (AUD) in development funds, with the app promised to release later this September if successfully funded. Although Ryan’s game might seem massively ambitious for a mobile platform, it looks as though we’ll soon be discovering if he truly has the skills to flawlessly pull this massive vision together. Although not a single one of his stretch goals were ever achieved, Rock Rock Rocket — spurred on by thirty nine very generous backers — still managed to secure its funding goal at the eleventh hour.
We here are at iFanzine are quite intrigued by Ryan Stevens’ ambitious project, and fully plan to cover Rock Rock Rocket later this year when the mobile open-world FPS-RPG finally launches.