Revolutionising the farming genre with mechs: "Big robots don't have to fight Godzilla to be cool"

gamesindustry.biz:

Christopher Dring

Head of Games B2B

Monday 25th July 2022

Amplifier

A spaceship crashes on a brightly coloured alien world. A mech robot ejects and lands on the surface with a bang. It emerges from a crater with two huge weapons for arms. So far, so very video games.

And then it starts farming.

"We want to push against this constant violence, so Lightyear Frontier is everything except violence and brutality," begins Denis Ferrier, head of publishing at Amplifier Game Invest.

"You play in a first-person or third-person view, but it is always to create, never to kill. There is no death or threat. We believe we will do something never done before. You see this big tractor mech as a main character... and you don't expect something peaceful and a tribute to nature. You expect something that is 'Love, Death and Robots', but it's not like that."

"We want to push against this constant violence"

Denis Ferrier, Amplifier

Joakim Hedström, CEO of developer Frame Break adds: "Mechs are kind of underutilised as a machine of labour. Big robots don't have to fight Godzilla to be cool.

"We did explore combat early on. We had the idea of the mechs protecting the farm from these invading aliens. We tried that in prototyping, but realised this isn't fun... it's just a combat game with a super complex economy system. The player only thinks about the next combat and what they need for that. They don't think about the joy of farming, of taking their time, of decorating their farm and exploring. Everything's just stressful because you need to be strong for the next combat. We thought, this isn't a good game, it's two bad games. Which one should we make? Should we make a mech combat game? We're pretty sure those have been done before. Shall we make a