During the demo, some people were rightfully curious about the progression of Desk Space. There’s no secret that all of these games have some sort of prestige mechanic, and so does Desk Space.
I didn’t want to show too much since I want it to be a nice surprise for the players, not that it's a revolutionary mechanic, but I personally think anything that can be left to be discovered is a good thing.
My game design style is to try for gameplay variation with mechanics that exist in the game, making it a relatively meaningful change instead of doing smaller changes just to bloat content.
The overall goal for each loop is to trigger a singularity, which triggers a universe reset… and gives you a permanent upgrade that can help or speed up the loop in certain ways.
As you trigger a singularity, the universe [REDACTED] and introduces more friction until you can trigger it again. There are a couple of ways you can [REDACTED] the [REDACTED], ranging from passive ways to more active choices that require resources of different kinds.
Desk Space is still made to run relatively passively (if you want), but the game also introduces extra gameplay choices to give variation, such as running refineries for metal, playing the stock market or sending crews on time-based expeditions. All this, and you can still watch your ships zoom around with their flight paths. I’m glad so many players found the joy and calmness in that, just as I did when I was prototyping. Someone called it a "space aquarium" and I loved that comparison lol.
Here's a sneakpeak at refineries (which you can manually place out, pretty cool!)
I’m working hard on putting all the nuts and bolts together for release on the 30th. The Next Fest support really blew me away, so I’m crunching to put in content and variation. I hope you will enjoy it, some will probably be disappointed, but hopefully most will find the fun in it!
More info soon!