What will the game be like in the near future?
1) COOPERATIVE. Join battles together with your friends! Combine tactics and strategies; bring about huge firepower while your ally leads the boarding assault!
2) ROGUELIKE. Explore space together with your friends and fight battles against various types of threat. Find and extract resources, transport cargo and landing to planets for explore treasures or enemies. Utilise the map to move between a semi-randomised galaxy of sectors. Some unique planets may offer rare systems and rewards but will push your crew to the limit! Each campaign will be unique and dangerous in its own way; maybe you will try and deal with the pirate threat in ‘Orion sector; or meet unknown aliens in sector ‘Lira’. The further you progress through the sectors the more powerful the enemies will become but so will the rewards be greater!
3) OUR STATION. You will be able to own a station to dock your ships and store the modules you have bought or found in sectors. Start with a small 5 dock port and upgrade to larger stations or even an entire moon base.
It sounds great but is it possible to implement all this taking into account that I'm developing the game by myself?
Actually, the features above are rather trivial from the point of view of development. I already have all the necessary basis for a cooperative mode (in fact PvP mode is already ready). The production of a roguelike will take longer, but it's all achievable. The space base feature I plan to have included within a week. After that my plans for the near future will be this;
1) First, I will add a base cooperative mode; allowing you to play a mission together against a much larger enemy ship for example.
2) Then I will start production of the roguelike – I will add in several types of missions (military, research, freight etc) across 2-3 sectors with 10-25 systems available to explore. At the same time the co-op mode will be ready by this time and we will be able to fight alongside our friends!
3) I will then work to further refine the co-op mode; looking at systems such as allowing your ally to repair your hull or transferring crew or ammunition.
4) Once I am happy with the basic state of the co-op and campaign I will then work on more opportunities; ore mining drones, transport and exploration ships as well as new equipment and enemies.
5) I will be setting up a death system in game whereby if you lose your ship and crew you can start again at your station with a cost between 5-10% of the parts and hire a new crew.
6) Finally, in my current plans I will be setting up battles against several enemies at once in fleet engagements. When you become strong enough you will be able to upgrade to frigates, cruisers or even dreadnaughts and take the fight to sectors swarming with enemies. For a single battle you may have to battle 3, 5 or even 10 enemy ships at once which will truly test your ship and tactical ability!
This development will be an adventure but one which everyone can share!