Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update. As we’ve mentioned previously our current focus is on implementing the core gameplay loop. Along with balancing the lethality and cost of weapons and ships there are some other design challenges we face due to the unique nature of our technology. Specifically, to-scale planets are quite large. So large in fact that until you’ve spent some time in our game it’s likely difficult for you to truly appreciate just how big a solar system really is. Where this presents a problem is encouraging players to congregate around certain “points of interest” within the solar system. Otherwise, with lifelike scales, you could easily spend the entire rest of your life in our game without ever meeting another player.

WIP carrier leaving a planet

One way of mitigating this issue is showing you where other players happen to be located. We already do this with our limited implementation of radar/sensors and that will only get better as development progresses. Another way is to give players objectives to guide them towards certain areas. These ideas and many others are explored a recent gameplay discussion we started on our forums.

A cruiser leaving an orbiting station

Aside from the ongoing discussion regarding gameplay we’ve also fixed a number of engineering and art bugs and made some improvements to our sound effects. With just over a month to go until our release of the Alpha we may or may not release an intermediate patch. That’s it for this week, until next time!