Last week we headed off to PAX Australia and showed off our basic progress on Motherships. Things had, really, only just come together that week. So we were pretty relieved to be able to show anything off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T61hcI0cY2I
Motherships represented the culmination of three months worth of refactoring and the game is substantially better for it.
Turrets
As you move your motherships around you will need to defend it. We have our first combat turrets making an appearance in the game. These are manually moved by the players, so you need to hop in one and shoot. They are lasers, so they use quite a bit of power.
Rocket Engines
Now that we can have motherships we need reliable ways to move them around. Rocket engines come in large and small sizes, and when combusting gas they provide thrust. You mix your fuel (in the case below, different ratios of oxygen and propane) and they produce thrust. How much thrust changes based on the pressure setting of the thruster (what pressure it fills the chamber at).
Rocket Engine with clean burning fuel mix:
Rocket Engine with non-clean burning fuel mix:
Current work
Our current focus is completing a basic game loop with the mothership. This means you start the game with a prebuilt mothership, and travel around with your friends doing small away missions, gathering resources, and making your mothership better.
Progress to Release
Motherships was a major milestone. It gives us a very clear, if basic, game loop that is fun, enjoyable, and stable. This is our key focus for Early Access and allows us to then grow the game based on what makes the most sense, using community feedback.
We're now pretty confident that December 2017 is a realistic release date.