Following an exciting launch on Steam, I've been eager to roll out updates quickly for my players and armed myself with a glorious Road-map to lead the way. Sadly, the sat-nav took me a different route and into a pond...

Or rather, a lot of Real Life has gotten in the way and slowed progress. Also, a notable detour has been taken from the roadmap where I wasn't happy with the core game-play. A primary inspiration for ionAXXIA was the campaign mode in the original Star Control. I felt my current objective-based levels and repairing of ships produced a very different feeling game, where the currency aspect didn't make much sense and the ship values were pointless as the biggest, most expensive ship would always be the best. So, even though procedural level creation didn't take too long to get running, I decided against refining the procedural objectives for that as they'd need to be replaced for a completely different balance in the new structure.

So the past 6 weeks when I've had time, I've beavered away at a different star map system and had to make some notable changes under the hood. The focus of the next patch will be more 1-on-1 combat and fighting on a budget.

You'll have a limited budget to clear all the stars. Healing will be rare, so you'll want to balance your 'garage' (selection of ships taken in to each star system) with different levels of affordability. Stars you can clear with a budget spaceship will free up more cash for using tougher ships in tougher battles, as it were.

There'll also be no in-level designer, which was only present as an introduction. It now resides in a separate phase where you'll design your ships, and then select from your designs for each star system.

The basics of this are all in, leaving just a lot of polish and some more content to go before I release the first update. I hope this can be managed by the end of the month. Feedback on balance will be very important! Looking forwards to what people think.

David