As Next Fest is wrapping up, I've made a few more changes to the demo as a result of some more great feedback from players. If you checked out the demo earlier, there's a good chance it's significantly different from what you saw before. Take a look at the changes if you get a chance.
Time Limit / Weird VPs
The VP system was a hold over from the time trial mode, initial implementation and it never really fit with the way the game plays out. This has been removed and replaced with a "Planet / Research tracker and goal panel".
The game progress is now more directly tied to your progress through the systems of the game, unlocking features as you naturally progress. This also eliminates the goal prompts from before, makes it impossible to soft-lock if you play around the original goals, and makes the gameplay feel like a much more open sandbox (as originally intended).
Thanks everyone for the great feedback on this, I think it's really helped shaped the game in a better way.
I've also removed the time limit related elements, and instead the game just lets you know when it's in post-demo sandbox mode and you can just keep playing though the full game content isn't available, some of the evolving gameplay mechanics will be missing late in the game.
There is a sort of kill timer in the game still (though it's much higher than before, I doubt anyone will hit it). It's just there because the architectural change to completely remove game time risked the demo reliability a bit too much for a quick change. I'll be taking this out once Next Fest is completely over as I wrap up the final demo feedback and move towards the release plan.
Faction Identity
First change, the available factions in the start of the demo are now reduced from 9 to 5. This reduces some of the overwhelming feeling of selecting one at the start for new players, and allows me to focus more on clearly defining the factions in a more unique manner. (Warning: Balance is definitely altered because of the changes, and I'll be tweaking that over time as well).
Factions now have a list of advantages (often stats), disadvantages (stats and rate impacts are most common) and unique gameplay effects. For now, since exploring is the most common early game action, most of the current unique effects are based around exploration... with some new visualizations for old favorites.
Each one now plays significantly different at least in the early game, and should make the demo experiences more unique for players. The prestige system coming in the full game will increasingly diverge these faction identities, and build out some more interesting directions they can take.
The "no faction" has been changed to a real faction, with a small buff instead of a button to opt out of the modifiers. This faction might change over time, as it does feel like it might be a little too strong now in the game.
Seeing people jump in and have lots of great ideas to help make the game better has been awesome, thanks everyone so far. If you have any thoughts or feedback, feel free to throw it my way any time.