I'm running an open playtest this week, give it a try! It will be available until Friday. The playtest can be accessed from the store page, looks like this: It's a late alpha build: a bit rough and lacking features but should give a pretty good idea of how a run feels like. Please give me feedback if you give it a try! I've included a link to Google Forms from the main menu. See if you can beat…
I've been working on the late-game. I already had a nicely flowing upgrade path for the first 2/3 of the run but the last year needed more content. The main idea is that towards the end it should be possible (and worthwhile!) to do longer and longer grinding trips. The main changes were: 1) Revised the asteroid belt generation mechanic. I made it so that the asteroids fields get richer (more li…
Balancing out mid/late game gameplay elements. I needed to come up with a way to make side hustling activities less dominating. The resource trading especially was problematic, since with the prices moving around a lot it was pretty easy to make lots of credits in a short time. Without any constraints, the best strategy would be to completely skip upgrading the ship and just sit at the station…
I have recently been working mostly on music and now have first versions of some tracks done. It's not quite where I want it to be yet, but the tracks are shaping up pretty nicely, I think. I've been experimenting with loads of different music production tools in the past few weeks. My first idea was to use trackers because I thought FastTracker 2 was cool in the 90s, but they did not seem the…
Not too many visible things this week, but lots of refactoring and cleaning up code regarding, for example, the energy system and ship specs data. The biggest gameplay change was related to the player crashing the ship or running out of fuel. Previously, this resulted in loading the last save, but this kind of broke up the flow and enabled save scumming. Being that a single run goes on for a li…
This week's main work has been the auto-targeting mining laser. Upgrading this along with the magnet enables much more efficient roid grinding. I'm quite happy with how the laser effect turned out. Getting the magnet to work nicely was a piece of work due to the collectable resources easily just orbiting the ship, never getting collected. In the end I had to resort to a slight hack to solve thi…
This week, I've focused on two idle money-making mechanics. · There's the resource market simulation, which allows profiting from resource price fluctuations. · It's possible to rent out excess energy created by the ship's reactor. Activating rent contracts provides a passive income stream but drains energy, thus burdening other systems and increasing fuel consumption. The hardest (and most fun…
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