Polygon’s Tracey Lien:
[FTL creator] Davis says that in most video games, the player is always the pilot, never the commander, whereas in science fiction like Star Trek or Firefly, the fiction focuses on the commander. “It seemed strange that when people want to bring that world to life, they put you in the pilot’s shoes. We thought it would be fun to put players in the commander’s shoes for once.”
Davis and Ma wrote up a long list of one-paragraph game pitches to prototype. They would be small, manageable games that two people could complete on their own. The game they chose to go with would have to be finished within a year, because that was all they had budgeted for. Among the pitches inspired by board games, roguelikes and all the genres that excited them was a 2D, top-down management game called FTL.
A fun little indie game and a great success story.