Space Station Mayhem

About the game

Space Station Mayhem is a first-person zero-gravity comedy about holding down a job in orbit. You are a contractor for the Orbital Facilities Dept., posted to a small station where everything floats, everything is physical, and one loose wrench can vent the room. Do what is on the work order, meet the quota, and be in the shuttle when it leaves. Play alone, or with a crew on your local network.

• 5shifts in a work week
• 15kinds of incident
• 4crew, at most

A shift, start to finish#

Every shift opens at the bulletin board in the hub: today's jobs, today's quota, a memo from management.

1. Briefing. Read the board, spend your wages at the Company Store, clock in.
2. The jobs. One or two contracts, each a list of paid tasks: lunch for three, a toilet service, a dead fuse.
3. Incidents. A breaker trips, a filter clogs, a battery overheats. Handling them can earn hazard pay.
4. The shuttle. At T-2:00, or once the tasks are done, the staff shuttle parks off the outer hatch. Helmet on, cycle the airlock, cross the gap, sit down.
5. The payslip. Every task, bonus and deduction, with a retrieval fee for anyone left behind.

All staff are reminded that the big red button is not a shelf. Do not press it, lean on it, or let a wrench drift into it.

Moving and handling#

There is no floor. You thrust in six directions, brake to a stop, and hold a handrail when the room starts moving without you.

Grab what floats past, carry it, throw it: heavy things lag behind you, and every throw pushes you the other way. Kick a colleague. Clip a tether to an orange rail before you open anything that leads outside.

The station, room by room#

The hub is where shifts start: the bulletin board, the airlock door, the Company Store, and the EMERGENCY PURGE button, which is large, red and where a drifting object would find it.

The galley runs Lunch Rush. Dock a rations pouch on the rehydrator and stop the fill in the green, heat it in the meal warmer, clip it to a tray with a side and a drink, and serve three crew places. Overfill a pouch and it bursts. The paste goes where the air goes, and the clogged filter is then serviced bolt by bolt.

Hygiene holds the head, due for its service: fan to standby, canister emptied, hose reseated, fresh filter, fan on, one test flush. Flush with the canister out, move the hose under pressure or let the fan start backwards, and the result leaves through the ventilation and arrives in the galley.

Engineering is diagnosis. Read the lamps on the fuse board, find the dead circuit with the probe, switch it off, and seat a fuse of the rating on the plate. Swap the CO2 scrubber cartridge in the right latch order. Bleed the coolant loop without redecorating. The battery bank lives here too, and occasionally catches fire.

The airlock is two rooms. The suit room keeps the helmets and the tethers. The crew lock runs a staged cycle: pump down, hold, a three-second leak check, then vacuum, with a gauge and five stage lamps. A propped hatch or an unseated seal fails the check. The purge button skips the procedure and takes the hub's air with it.

Docking and the shuttle. The cargo pod comes in by hand at the docking console: brake it, line it up, touch the ring at under half a metre per second. The staff shuttle has a cabin for four and a DEPART lever. You board it by being inside it.

The work week#

Shifts add up to a week, Monday to Friday, with a quota that rises every day. Each week is built from a seed, so the jobs, memos, incidents and the store's shelf change, and the Daily Week gives everyone the same five days.

Memos bend the rules for a day: Low Power Monday, Audit Day, Filter Shortage. Wages go into a week balance, and the Company Store sells a spare filter, a fuse, a tether extension, breakage insurance.

Miss a quota and you receive a written warning and steeper quotas. Miss two and a performance review is scheduled. No shift ends early: Friday's payslip is followed by the verdict card, somewhere between Employee of the Week and Reassigned to Lunar Waste.

Overtime is unpaid. Being left behind is billed.

Incidents and chain reactions#

Fifteen kinds of incident are on the roster, from a power flicker to a pass of orbital junk and one visitor nobody can explain. Rooms share power and air, so trouble travels: paste from the galley lights a fan alarm in engineering, and a breaker reset in the wrong order reverses the fan in the head.

Co-op#

The station is built for a crew of up to four. A crew plays over a local network with one player hosting, and shares one contract, one shuttle clock and one payslip. The host decides how hard colleagues may shove each other. Online co-op through Steam is in development. Solo, the quota and the incidents scale down to a crew of one.

Tablet, HUD and controls#

The screen stays quiet: one objective line with the shuttle clock, a suit ring, one prompt. The rest is on the field tablet: tasks with their pay, a map, the crew, the incident log, the week.

Play with keyboard and mouse or a gamepad. Prompts show the glyphs of the device you touched last, and every action can be rebound.

Comfort and accessibility#

• Comfort, Standard and Chaos presets for camera shake, lean and flight assist
• Field of view, reduced motion, and hold or press-once for timed actions
• Subtitles, a text scale and a colour-blind mode that adds shapes and words to colour
• Three quality levels, five volume sliders

Sound#

Each room has its ambience, the music moves between calm, tension and the payslip, and a PA voice comments on your work in the tone of a form letter. The music and sound effects are original; the PA voice is synthetic.

Tone and content#

This is cartoon slapstick. Injury effects are cosmetic and off by default. Gross-out effects are off by default too: the toilet produces blue foam.

Availability#

Space Station Mayhem is coming to Steam for Windows. The release date and the price are to be announced, and there is no public build to download yet. Follow the game by email on this page to hear when the store page opens and when it ships.