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Space Engineers

An image of the space engineers logo with the sillouette of an astronaut waving, floats above a spaceship in planetary descent

Space Engineers, is what is known as a "Sandbox" game. Though as-of-yet unreleased, Space Engineers has existed in a playable (alpha) state for over 2 years. In December of 2016, the game moved to a bug-testing and polishing state (beta).

Sandbox games are named for the limitless opportunities that they offer in gameplay. Rather than a traditional game, which provides some sort of quest, or struggle, Sandboxes leave the adventure up to the player to decide, by focusing development on procedural or randomly generated levels/worlds, and usually provides the player a means to build or express creativity.

In Space Engineers, the player starts in a mostly destroyed ship, and is asked to mine for raw elements ranging from carbon to plutonium, in hopes to craft a better means for survival in the harsh environment of space. Also, to live up to the fullest extent of the sandbox genre, the player can choose "creative" mode, and craft with limitless materials, invulnerable to damage, in order to focus on the core beauty of the game -- engineering.

Depicted below, is a picture of the player overlooking an earth like base. The red lines, depict the viewport of the game in a standard widescreen configuration, while the yellow lines depict that of an ultra-wide monitor. The image in its entirerity, is of a triple widescreen aspect ratio.

An image of in-game footage depicts a first person view from the player, overlooking a base, on an earth-like planet

See they tiny screens on the ship below? If, they are hard to see, click on the picture to zoom in, it links to the original image (as with all the gameplay examples).

If you're wondering where "Engineer" part of the title comes in, this is a great example. The words aren't a static image. The player has to program them. I know what you're thinking, not "program", like write a .txt document, that would be useless, and only for looks. No, in this game, we play like engineers. In order to display those pieces of information, you have to call methods from the ships' grid, in order to solve for display outputs. Some things are relatively simple, like programming the displays to output time, or readout the cargo of your ship, while others, like the "stop distance" requires intense mathematics, where one must solve for the inertia of the ship, by calculating its speed and mass, and factoring them against given gravitational fields and thrust readings coming from the ship.

(I say "must", but again, this is a sandbox, so no one told me I had to make my ship display a solution for the amount of time and distances before my ship could come to a complete stop, I just figured it could come in handy.) (It has.)

An image of in-game footage depicts a first person view from the player's cockpit, of a blue and purple nebulous space.