It's been a little bit of time without news, and I'd like to let everyone know what's being cooked up in the background.
Cities, Land and Pipelines
Using planetary-scale factories, you'll be building thousands of pets, but where will they go? Pet shops, of course! There are cities on-planet, which will be able to sell all the pets you throw at them. Have a variety available in a particular town, and you'll be able to sell them for a higher price.
You'll need all that cash, because land is expensive. Especially in the areas with new biomes, like the deep forest and overgrown mushroom lands.
Thousands and thousands of pets are hard to transport, and not all of them can be moved around by space elevator. Factories next to a city can sell directly to that city, but ones further away will need a pipeline to move those pets towards the people.
Orbital Design, New Pets and Balancing
The code for those features above is currently in-game and tested, but the balance and art does not exist yet. There are a lot more design parameters which need setting now, and it's been difficult figuring out the overall pacing. The last thing I want is to push this update and have people feel like they're just sitting and waiting for pets to be sold in order to purchase the next upgrade.
How long until the new update?
The beta should be Soon™. This is mostly a one-man studio, and design development like this can be hard to predict. The goal is to have the ugly but functional prototype of this be available on a beta branch once I have the first few hours of the new design balanced.
Are old saves going to be supported?
Things are changing enough that older saves won't be supported. I'll be creating a steam branch for people who still want to play the older version of the game. Start a game now, and practice your factory building! The core gameplay of finding pets and building pet factories isn't changing very much, so all those skills will still be useful.
What about that VR update?
Right now, the VR movement redesign is working! Per-joystick movement options, along with some other requested features. The redesign also was an opportunity to clean up some of the code, which has currently broken the non-VR game. I need to do some cleanup on that, and then I'll be shipping it out.
Today's thumbnail is an image of some typical development windows: art definitions for areas, a database entry for a new pet, a list of passing unit tests.
TL;DR Update is still coming, work is slow, feeling good about the update.