Hello Pilots & Commanders,
We are very excited to announce that Space Reign is now Officially out of Early Access!
Let's take a look at what's new, what's changed, and what the future holds for us. 🚀
Roadmap Recap
With all major milestones reached, the EA Roadmap is now complete. ✅
1.0 Features and Changes
Cruisers
Strongest ships with focus on S3 Hardpoints now ready to be researched, purchased and deployed!
Spearhad Light Cruiser - Tyrcorp
Glaive Medium Cruiser - Tyrcorp
Ballista Heavy Cruiser - Tyrcorp
Valkyrie Light Cruiser - Novatech
Arcturus Medium Cruiser - Novatech
Nautilus Heavy Cruiser - Novatech
Support Ships
Koi-class Support Corvette
A fast and cost-effective solution for in-sector fleet resupply, the Koi is the smallest combat resupply ship available. Its light frame demands careful positioning away from enemy heavy weapons fire.
Hestia-class Support Frigate
The Hestia strikes a solid balance between fleet resupply, agility, and defensive capability, making it a reliable support vessel for Novatech fleets.
Kirin-class Support Barge
The largest support ship available, capable of resupplying a significant portion of the fleet during prolonged engagements. Its solid armor and five weapon hardpoints—including one S2—allow it to contribute defensively while performing its logistics role.
New S3 Weapons
Autocannon
Following the approach from S1 and S2, we’re introducing the standard autocannon in the S3 category as well — giving players a reliable mid- to close-range option with solid damage output.
Artillery Cannon
This is the longest-range weapon in the projectile lineup, ideal for providing fire support and picking off enemy modules from a safe distance.
Beam Laser
An experimental weapon designed for pinpoint accuracy and reliable sustained DPS — trading away explosive burst damage for consistency.
Ship Upgrades
Inspired by the Endless Mode, you will now be able to upgrade every ship in your fleet directly through the Fleet Roster window using credits. These upgrades provide an additional way to fine-tune ship performance and maximize their combat efficiency.
Chapter III Quadrant & Sectors
Chapter III introduces a brand-new Quadrant, along with new sectors where you’ll deploy your fleet and engage in combat. These locations feature new backgrounds and include the core of Tyrcorp’s operations, which you’ll be tasked with destroying.
Sector Map Update
Sector map just got a fresh 3D look!
Steam Achievements
Ready for some "clever" puns? We are excited to introduce a set of 34 Steam Achievements for you to complete and get that 100% completion rate on yet another Steam game!
QOL, Fixes and Changes (the bigger ones)
Custom Corporation Name
Unit Box Selection
AI Fighter Module Targeting
Fast Travel Speed Increase
Sector map camera updated with smoother controls
Increased experience gains to reduce Corporation rank grind
Improved Collision Avoidance for all Ships
Better Overall Performance through VFX and Weapon System rework
Player settings should now save properly
Borderless fullscreen, Fullscreen and Windowed options fixed
Station Defense enemies now jump in, minimizing the waiting time between individual waves
Endless Mode enemies should not get stuck anymore
Our Development Journey
As indie devs often do, we started working on Space Reign after quitting our in-between jobs because we wanted to go full time. With no previous game development or software development experience and no outside funding besides our savings, the logical step would have been to start with a small project and slowly grow in scope as our first games released and (hopefully) earned something, right?
Well… that didn’t happen.
Our primary focus when first prototyping the game was simply to make something we ourselves would love to play. In our case, that turned out to be a Space Sim/RTS hybrid inspired by Homeworld, Battlestar Galactica, and The Expanse — not something I’d advise doing when you’re just starting out. Especially with only one programmer who had just started coding! (Thanks Adam.)
Funnily enough, what we wanted to make wasn’t decided overnight. During the first pre-Early Access years, we switched between several sci-fi settings and genres. There were times when Space Reign was supposed to be a space sim and survival game, combining fighter controls with a first-person character controller. Hard to imagine now, right?
Or just a fighter-based space sim inspired by Freespace.
Or… a station-building and defense game.
As we experimented with different ideas, we agreed on one thing in particular: being able to control any unit in your fleet and give orders to the rest is really cool.
That’s when we decided to design the whole game around this feature while trying to minimize complexity in other areas. It sounded like a good idea on paper — but perhaps not so much when dealing with complex, physics-based ships moving in three dimensions and two different player perspectives. Eh.
Over time we slowly put the fundamental mechanics together, implemented basic ship AI, and focused more and more on combat and fleet battles — the part we were the most passionate about.
Realizing that ship combat involving two different perspectives and control schemes was quite difficult to execute properly, we decided to focus on just one at first, saving larger ships and the third-person perspective for later during Early Access.
This turned out to be one of the better decisions during development, because even with just one perspective and control scheme, many things still went wrong with the initial Early Access launch. There were issues with controls, player onboarding, several major and game-breaking bugs, and plenty of other problems.
Looking back, Adam and I both agree that most of these issues came from our lack of experience with actually launching a game.
But there was something that made us feel good and kept us motivated: many players actually liked the feel and look of the ship combat itself.
That meant a lot to us — especially since fleet combat is the main focus of Space Reign.
After gathering a crazy amount of feedback and bug reports during the first weeks of Early Access, we tried to keep the content updates coming. However, our technical inexperience eventually caught up with us. Many systems had to be redesigned or reworked entirely in order to make the rest of the roadmap milestones possible.
This caused updates to be slower and more irregular than we would have liked — which isn’t ideal in today’s world of Early Access games. For that, we once again sincerely apologize and thank you for your patience. ❤️
After surviving the reworks and implementing new features (thanks again, Adam), we were eventually able to hit all the roadmap goals — which has led us to this moment.
Is the game still rough around the edges? Yes.
Could there be more of… well, everything? Also yes.
But do we believe Space Reign is worth playing and experiencing?
Absolutely.
Especially if you enjoy what we enjoy: juicy space fleet combat that’s easy to get into without the complexity and hassle of many other games in this genre.
What's Next for Space Reign
With the Early Access roadmap now completed, we will shift our focus to fixing bugs, resolving issues, and doing a bit of balancing here and there.
As always, please keep the feedback and bug reports coming on the Steam Community Hub and our Discord!
Future of Propulsive Games
One thing we confirmed while working on Space Reign is that making a game we ourselves would love to play is exactly what we want to continue doing — while reducing the overall scope and complexity and focusing more on the overall quality of the content. Well, at least now while there's still just the two of us.
We are currently exploring many ideas on paper, so there is nothing concrete to share just yet. But we would love to take you on another journey — this time hopefully with fewer bumps along the way.
Stay tuned, and in the meantime feel free to come chat with us on our Discord!
Thanks again for your continued support — none of this would have been possible without you, the players.
Good hunting, Commanders! 🫡
Adam & Daniel
