Content Warnings

It's a first person shooter, so there's typical gun-to-alien based violence in a non-realistic art style.
There's red blood effects and if enemies sustain enough damage they can explode into gibs.

Project Introduction

In SENTRY you must escape an Earth that is losing its final battle. You do this by plotting an escape route through a star map whilst battling pursuing aliens. When you are attacked, you are taken to a map of your spaceship where enemies will attempt to take over until they can attack the ship's core. When battle commences, you must prevent the enemy from achieving their objective through placing traps and turrets and fighting them in fast-paced FPS gameplay. As you progress you earn resources through your performance in battle which can be spent on upgrading and unlocking your equipment.

We decided to deviate from the standard action-defence gameplay you'd see in Orcs Must Die or Sanctum, where the traps were the most powerful elements with the player acting in a supporting role. This means that you can - if you've optimised your killbox sufficiently - not even get involved in the action, which isn't how we imagined a desparate defence should feel like. We therefore changed the moment-to-moment gameplay to have a focus on a fast and responsive player, which made them the driving force behind a defence, with traps and turrets in a supporting role. While you face overwhelming odds and you need your traps to help, the player is the one doing the heavy lifting.

On top of that, because of the structure of our campaign, failure is treated differently from a linear campaign where defeat is a blocker to progress. In SENTRY, you can lose lives and levels but the campaign progresses - think of it as losing the battle, but not the war. This ties into the 'backs against the wall' vibe we wanted the game to have, and means SENTRY often puts players in the position where they're snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.
(please note that you can't lose indefinitely - if all the crew on your ship are killed in battle, or the enemy destroys the ship's core then your run comes to an end)

We then tie this into the rogue elements in the game. Players unlock new equipment (our collective name for weapons, traps and abilities) and at certain stages can choose to bank this to their profile or expand the amount of equipment they can carry. If you lose a run, you lose any unbanked equipment. When you start a new run, you are given random equipment that was banked to your profile, and all pieces of equipment have their own upgrade path.

About Developer

Fireblade Software was founded by myself in early 2016, it has always been a remote-working focused micro studio, where our goal was to make games that we self-published.

In 2018 we released our first game Abandon Ship, which reached 4th in the Global Top Sellers chart on Steam the night it launched. This remained in Early Access until late 2019, and then in 2020 we commenced work on SENTRY, which released into Early Access in late March this year and is due to remain in Early Access for 12 months.

As a studio we've always aimed to both create something new and interesting as well as 'punch above our weight' - i.e. create games that surprise people when they realise how many people actually made them.