gGuardian

The interstellar transit routes are a dangerous place. Forget the environmental hazards of hard vacuum and skin-crisping radiation, there are nastier things out there. Along with the fact that people need to spend the entire trip in cryosleep, space travel is a lot less safe than most folks would prefer.

The Guardian droids give peace of mind. Heavily armed, intelligent and resourceful, they are a crowning glory of AI design. They keep their passengers safe from the unknown. They make space travel safe again.

You are a gGuardian. As one of the g series, you are the most advanced model yet produced. During an otherwise uneventful trip, your emergency routines awake you just as you've jacked into the power grid to recharge. Your power feed suddenly goes dead, an energy surge lightly scrambling your RAM. Alarms shriek. There is a hostile force on board, and they're making a beeline for the cryopods. Fortunately, the immediate area containing the pods and the armoury has been sealed off, but it's just a matter of time before the invaders break in. Unfortunately, your internal map of the ship is corrupt. Your weapons have been scattered. And you only have ten minutes' worth of energy left...

gGuardian was built in February 2008 for Game.Dev Competition 17, where the object was to create a game where each complete session lasts for 10 minutes. No persistence, no metagame, just a 10-minute block of gameplay that delivers a complete experience. gGuardian was an attempt to take elements of survival games, top-down shooters, and tower defense and meld them together. Players have five minutes to scout an unexplored procedurally-generated maze and collect weaponry scattered about, all the while also identifying spawn points of enemy mobs and setting up defenses to prevent those enemies from reaching the cryobay at the center of the level. After five minutes, the alien hordes spawn, and the real fun begins...