Hello dear community! We have been busy for a while, but now we are here again!
Our job it is not only the development, but also we need to perform some paper work with our company. We decided to move our company in better place, but unfortunately the lawyers which we choose for assistance, turned out incompetent, as result, the money which we payed for their services was wasted.
For now, we are don't want to reveal the statistics of selling, we plan to publish it in the future. But for now, our revenue is not too high, but it is enough for development.
Actually, until the game in pre-Alpha, we don't deserve to have huge selling. :)
So that failure with incompetent law company could be quite sad, because we didn't have enough finance for another trying. But you are, dear community, helped us in this situation! :)
We are don't know how, but in July our sales have been increased nearly 5 times! It was very unexpected and nice. This will allow us to solve the registration issues faster than we expected.
Thanks for anyone who supports us and recommends us to their friends! Such a help turned out incredible helpful for us!
Now about development
Okay, we should thank you with something else besides the words. :)
Development was not stopped. Our main goal for next update is adding a normal way to obtain a food for your crew. You are requested it quite often and we're agree with it.
Sounds simple, we just need to add a hydroponics module. Yes, it is solution, and we will definitely add it later, but for now we are decide to make it in another way.
We want to implement a trading, not only for food, but also as interesting game feature.
Trading
The idea is next. There is several NPC space stations, each station consumes some goods A and produces some goods B. You will be able to trade these goods between stations. The pricing will depends on the demands and supply of each station.
Also we want to implement the AI traders which will cruising between stations, as result, star system will be filled with a life and fully dynamic economics! Unfortunately the AI for orbital mechanics still not implemented, so the first version of trade feature will be without NPC traders.
This idea can be encountered in some others space games.
But it should be nicer with the fact, that all NPC stations and cargo ships will be constructed by using the same modules!
For example, capacity of refueling station will be realistically depends from amount of fuel tanks, and fuel production depends of amount of fuel generators. If it will be partially damaged, the production or capacity will be decreased accordingly.
Eventually we plan to make fully dynamic economics! It will takes a little additional time, but it should be very good feature!
By the way, take a note about new labels with name of the ships, it's redesigned and now it stretches horizontally accordingly to length of the name.
Docking
Another nice thing it's a docking with NPC stations. We want to make it in interesting and realistic way,
If you want to dock with the station, you need make a request for docking. The station will check relationship with you and the status of its docking ports, if docking port is free, you will receive and instruction about approach, otherwise your ship will be added in queue for docking.
On our opinion, it is cool. Interesting fact that amount of docked ships depends on amount of docking ports. Later we will add a possibility to build your own stations which will be able to trade with NPC ships.
Also we added a money for each player. What a trading without a money? Sounds simple, but it has required some changes in code of players database.
By the way, recent code improvements allows us to make pretty nice improvement with the control.
Complex hotkeys
Buttons of modules now have useful descriptions, normal names with spaces (no any SwitchManualControl) and allows to assign complex hotkeys with Ctrl, Shift, Alt modifiers!
Now this interactions method seems more comfortable and flexible. For example we added a button to engineering bay, so now you can assign any key to open a build menu.
Also some bug fixes. For example, players no longer can control the ships of other players and NPC.
We will try to bring the update to stable point and upload the update as soon as possible.
