A new year, full of new promises to fill and deadlines to watch go zooming past us.
But I think the question everyone is asking is: what’s the current state of the game?
As mentioned, a huge amount of work was done across the board.
Our base races, battleships, equipment, and stations were all fully built and implemented, and systems and stations had their data filled out, encounters refined, and more.
Tons of vignettes, quests, and side-stories were filled out. Missions and trading on stations were properly implemented, as were storms, bosses, etc.
So, to summarize a huge amount of work is done and a huge amount of the game is complete, but there’s still work to be done. The biggest blocks of content in our way are quests, the campaigns, and station interiors. That sounds like a lot, but it’s even more because of all the background tech and modeling behind that. During this year, you’ll start to see updates shift more towards that kind of thing.
Our next big milestone is demo 1.8, which will bring a substantial amount of content into it, including the first two campaign missions, storms (and the mechanics for such), and party members. As well as the usual host of improvements, optimizations, fixes, etc.
This month’s overall progress wasn’t as extensive and broad as previous months mind you. Read on below and you’ll find out why.
As always, just is just a paraphrasing of the main article, which you can read here.
Campaign Missions!
Finally, after so much time promising and setting up, campaign missions are finally starting to become a thing! This last month saw us implement the first two of fifteen campaign missions, as well as the massive amount of background work needed to drive them.
Mission #1 will have the players getting jumped by pirates, witness a shipyard getting bombed, and have a jumphole collapse right on top of them. Typical first-day-on-the-job stuff, you know?
Meanwhile mission #2 is much more dialogue heavy, and starts diving into the meat and potatoes of the story as you pose as a smuggler in order to shoot down another smuggler and take his place!
As mentioned there’s a lot of background work that had to go into these, including quite a few features I think modders will enjoy taking advantage of, like tons of scripting commands, campaign failure trigger zones, etc.
Gameplay Tweaks
Working on the campaign highlighted a few issues and things I wanted changing. For starters, you can turn off the fancy UI graphics to just see the game running normally.
Docking autopilot will try and steer you through proper docking points much earlier and much better. AI following has been redone too. They’ll follow you through lanes, jumpgates, via highengines and thrust, etc.
You can also hail things that, normally, can’t be hailed! Ever want to talk to a sun and have it shill its social media at you? Now you can!
Rooms can have their lights dimmed now too. Very convenient for slideshows!
And finally, unstable jumpholes (which form in storms) have their own custom graphics now.
Asset Work
And last but not least, assets! Ever wanted nine foot tall pollution spewing… things to charge you toll road fees? Meet our last race, the Veilers! They’re quite popular.
That’s all for this month. We’ve got some exciting upcoming stuff (sadly unrelated to the campaign) next month, so check back in then!
This is looking even more beautiful with every update. Do not relent, it's fantastic thus far.