The Next Fest Build Is Live — Abilities, a Living Galaxy, and a Mountain of Polish
Steam Next Fest kicks off June 15, and Infinite Empire's demo is in it. This update is the biggest the demo has ever gotten, with three and a half weeks of work, and most of the game's systems got touched. Here's what's new since the last update.
⚡ Abilities are online
Thirteen combat abilities just came online: Warp Jump, Void Bomb, Nova Cannon, summoned drone and bomber wings, curses, marks, and emergency buffs. They unlock through your empire's progression tree, and new runs start with a starter set already known. Equipping them is real now too: the Builder has a proper ability loadout panel so you can click a slot, pick from everything you've unlocked, read the tooltip, done. In combat, abilities use aim-then-fire targeting: press the hotkey to prime, get a reticle and range ring with pulsing highlights on whatever you're about to hit, then click to fire. Right-click or Esc cancels free and cooldowns only spend when you commit.
👑 A galaxy that fights for keeps
Every faction now has its own personality, doctrine, and long-term goals. Some hunger for territory, some chase vengeance, artifacts, or trade routes. They mobilize for sustained offensives, commit to multi-stage sieges, and genuinely kill each other's captains.
Captains hold grudges. Kill someone's comrade and they will remember — and hunt you. Killers build named kill-streak reputations in the galaxy news. Wandering Prophets rise in contested space. A broken empire's survivors can rally into a brand-new hostile faction.
The campaign escalates through eras — expansion, consolidation, twilight — with fresh offensives whenever the late game threatens to stall into a stalemate.
Your own captains can no longer die permanently. A defeated captain is knocked out, retreats to refit, and comes back with their name, levels, and story intact. The news announces both the fall and the return.
Galaxy news is sorted by significance now. Defining Moments pinned in gold, Notable Events below, routine siege chatter at the bottom. The big story beats never get buried.
💥 Combat got a face-lift
Living nebula skies! Every battle plays out under a procedural nebula unique to its sector, tinted by the local biome, drifting in parallax behind the stars.
Explosions ripple space itself. Core deaths fire a screen-distorting shockwave tinted by the dying faction's colors.
Battle damage has real depth now: armor chars and thins, torn holes open into interior rooms, and catastrophic hits blast clean through to open space.
The galaxy map got a visual overhaul too, with glowing system orbs, textured territory, glowing travel lanes, and your map token is now an actual snapshot of your ship, battle damage and all.
🛠️ Builder, rebuilt
The tool panel is a clean accordion now with Hull Appearance, Shapes, Struts, Texture Paint, Depth Shape (which now has a proper theme dropdown and a new three-click Curve mode for smooth hull paneling). You can name your ship. Hovering a module shows its loot rarity, condition, and stat modifiers at a glance. Repairs are instant, undo behaves, struts draw the moment you place them, and the Builder politely refuses to launch a ship that can't actually fly.
💾 Saves, fixed for real
Three manual slots plus three rotating autosaves. A manual save is a frozen snapshot an autosave can never overwrite. The save-game freeze is gone for good (saving runs silently in the background now), the Load window is faster and groups saves by empire with your ship's snapshot on each one, and the Steam Cloud "over quota" errors are dead.
🎮 Steam Deck + 41 achievements
The demo is playable on Steam Deck out of the box now — point with the trackpad, press A, and it just works. Menus, Builder, settings panels: all reworked to fit the screen, with the UI scaled up for legibility. And there are 41 Steam achievements to chase across combat, building, and conquest.
…plus the kitchen sink
Off-screen contact pips for enemies, allies, and torpedoes beyond the screen edge. A combat camera that starts centered on YOUR ship, with an optional rotation-lock mode. Point-defense is a real sixth weapon group with an Auto/Manual toggle. Bind two keys to every action. A heads-up for returning players: spacebar pauses combat now instead of firing — left-click and controller trigger still shoot. Plus a DX12 launch fix, a game-wide texture filtering pass so nothing shimmers when you zoom out, and a few hundred fixes beyond that. The full list lives in the in-game News panel.
Before the 15th
One more pass is in flight: performance tuning for large late-game battles. It'll be in the build that greets Next Fest.
Play it
The demo on this page is the Next Fest build. If you play it and something delights you — or breaks — the discussion board is right there, and I read everything. If you want to see where this goes, a wishlist genuinely helps more than anything else you can do. See you at the fest. 🚀