Hello!
Yeah, you haven't heard from us for a long time and we are very ashamed of this. Basically, we found ourselves in a kind of moral trap. The update, or even a blog post was so inexcusable long time ago that it seemed that just posting a post would not be enough to justify the delay, and the longer there was no post, the more it seemed so.

Because of that, our plan was to not post anything about this update, and just release a good and high-quality update before the New Year. Probably it was a mistake and we are going to solve it.

But anyway, the problem is, that we can’t manage to complete it before the New Year, and it will be delayed again.

The reason for this is the war in Ukraine, namely, problems with the availability of electricity for Artaani who lives in Ukraine. Approximately half of the time electricity is not available in his house and since Artaani is responsible for many core systems of the game, availability of electricity in his house affects development speed directly. Not to mention how difficult it is to maintain normal morale in a country waging a defensive war. Romenics and Riya also has a lot of additional issues because they were forced to leave their home in Russia.

But anyway, we are currently in relatively secure places and despite such extreme conditions we will try to continue the development.

Currently, the main danger is mostly the threat of lack of money for basic needs. Therefore, we are glad that the game still has some sales, maybe small, but still, and we are very grateful to everyone who supports us on Patreon, despite the lack of updates and information from us.

We decided that from now on, we will try to publish info about development much more often.

Drones, capital ships and beginning of the game

Initially when we started developing of capital ships, we planned to spawn some “basic” capital ship and small ship right at the beginning of the game, because turned out that construction of your base from scratch is too complex and confusing task.

So, when you press “Start” button, you will see this

And this have a couple of problems:

1. It creates a lot of questions, everything is extremely confusing, a lot of individual modules, which for what? What is decoration and what is functional? All of these contraptions are way too complex for a new player who just launched the game. Also, it eliminates “feel of progression” because it seems like you already have everything on the start.
2. The game genre starts to feel more like RTS game when you have some “main building” and a worker which should gather resources, but that is not our goal. We want to keep game more like craft survival game when you start with bare minimum and gradually develop into something big.

So instead of giving capital ship right from the start, we focused on the task to make beginning of the game and construction of own capital ship more user friendly.

In result, all that you will have after start of the game is this

Yeah, that’s all. Storage, engines, and most importantly, engineering drones!

Of course, engineering robotic arms looks cool and we probably will use it somehow in the mid game, but its low range makes any kind of construction is extremely uncomfortable and tedious.

Drones, that is another matter, they can easily salvage debris from large radius around the ship and build anything in range, either own small ship or new capital ship.

Construction done, now back to salvaging

Landing pad

Yes, in earlier versions of the game, we already had similar drones, but now they are better than before. Earlier they were physically bound to the ship and was more like an animation effect, but now they acts like individual objects which may fly long away from its carrier ship, or could be destroyed, which is a good foundation for future combat drones.

Also, considering new 3D construction features, you can do something like this

Overall, we are happy with combinations of these 3D feature and drones on small starting ships, now it is easy and fun to extend starting ships into some interesting design just in a few clicks

New power generator, by the way

What about capital ship, earlier we had some problems with design some kind modules specially for large ships, with increased details and special visual design, but came out to the conclusion, that actually, it is not necessary, just a set of scaled up basic modules could work very well, and result could looks cool, especially considering 3D possibilities.

Possibility to place modules on different altitude or unusual rotation can be great tool to achieve interesting design, but player is not forced to do that, and even modules placed only on zero plane should looks well because such method of construction is very comfortable, especially for a new player.

Here is a preparation of all modules for capital size ships. Implementation of Tier 4 size still have some questions considering number of mounting points and game performance, but we will resolve it somehow.

Game design

Also, we are working on a lot of other aspects of the game, mostly it is countless usability improvements, but another main task it is overall game design, answer on questions “what to do in the game?” which is always was a problem but should be solved to make it a proper game, not just construction sandbox.

Tutorial

We also completely redesigned tutorial, now it is not a separated buttons in the main menu, but a quest-based system which starts at the beginning and guide you through the start of the game.

Such type of tutorials is the best tutorials, because they don’t force you to learn everything, quit, start the new game, and implement what you managed to remember. Instead, you can just start a normal game, slowly learn the game step by step and continue when tutorial will be completed.

Also during implementation of tutorial, we, as developers more clearly see where the game has usability and game design issues which should be solved with high priority.

We will try to post info about development more often and keep your informed.
Thanks.