SENTRY News

Indie developers Fireblade Software have announced a new game, Sentry, for 2023 release. In Sentry you're a defender trying to save a human ship as it flees a defeated Earth pursued by alien threats. When the aliens catch up to your ship you've got to fight in a dynamic defensive campaign that sees you holding off the enemy from different ship systems. The combination of First-Person Shooter and Tower Defense might remind you of classic-to-some Sanctum...
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Tower defense games aren't my thing, but the exceptions are those that embody you in a particular character on the battlefield, Orcs Must Die-style. That's what first-person shooter Sentry does. Sentry is an "action-defense" shooter in which you're protecting a spaceship from waves of aliens, alone or in co-op, by placing traps and blasting heads. You'll find the trailer below.

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An exciting day for the SENTRY Defence Program - the Announcement Trailer is out:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
In it, we see the player spawning in a level to help defend it from an enemy attack. As the battle progresses we see how player death is handled (something we talked about here) - but death doesn't mean defeat in SENTRY as long as there are crew in stasis to revive and throw into the fight. The new SENTRY gains the upper hand in a pyrrhic victory - of course beyond the events in this trailer the fight would continue in-game when the next SENTRY arrives in their spawn pod to deal with the fallout from their predecessors actions!

You may also have noticed when you navigate to the SENTRY store page that another video plays before the trailer. This is our Announcement Teaser:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
It shows a few clips of gameplay and is a handy way of showing people what the game is like very quickly before settling into the full trailer.

We'll do a proper breakdown of the trailer in a future post that talks about some of the cool elements the team enjoyed making, as well as how difficult it was to capture - it's nearly 90 seconds to the first cut, and the vast majority of takes was me doing a perfect run... and then doing something silly in the last few seconds, invalidating the whole take...

Anyway, let us know what you think - and remember; the SENTRY Defence Program needs you, so sign-up today!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1252680/SENTRY/

Here's a new screenshot we've just added:



(You can see a larger version by navigating to the store page screenshot carousel and clicking on the image)

In this one, the player is running toward their co-op companion who is defending a power core from a wave of oncoming enemies.

The co-op player has set up a good defensive position behind a barricade with turrets providing supporting fire. Hopefully the arrival of the player will help turn the tide...

Our announcement trailer is going to be unveiled in the next 24 hours, so make sure you're reporting for duty to watch it - the SENTRY Defence Program needs you!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1252680/SENTRY/

In a recent post (which you can find here) we broke down the development of our new logo. In it we mentioned we'd also be updating the Steam capsule images too, and as you may have noticed, we have!

With this sort of thing, you need art that covers landscape and portrait versions. Here's the landscape:



...and here's the portrait:



There's a few goals we wanted to achieve with these images. We wanted people to see them and think (in no particular order):

• This game looks cool
  
• It also looks professional
  
• It must be a game where you shoot
  
• The character + gun gives the impression of it being sci-fi
  
• This stood out when I saw it on a random Steam page
  
• I want to learn more!
  

We're hopeful the above images achieve those objectives :)

In a future post we'll show some of the early concepts (there's some very cool ones that weren't quite suitable or gave the wrong thematic impression) but in the meantime, here's some images of how the above capsule art came together.

One of the early concepts that we gravitated toward was this image of a SENTRY with a battle in the foreground. Note we hadn't hit on the colour scheme yet, but the rest is pretty close:



While this worked in portrait mode, the next step was to test it in landscape:







During this process we hit upon the orange colour scheme, which we liked more than the grey we'd tried previously. It both matched the colour on the SENTRY breastplate armour and we felt made it stand out more.

While we really liked the portrait one with the orange colour scheme, the landscape versions weren't working for us, so we started to experiment with something different, a single SENTRY in an interesting pose. Here's a few examples where we were trying different poses, colour schemes and logo positions:









As you can see from the final version, we chose the shooting pose with the orange colour scheme and the horizontal black stripe to show the logo.



As I mentioned above, in the future we'll show some of the other concepts we discarded along the way, as although they ultimately weren't suitable, they're too cool to remain unseen :)

Until then, keep an eye out for our imminent Announcement Trailer - hit the Wishlist/Follow button for the news to appear in your Steam feed:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1252680/SENTRY/

Thanks,

Gary