On a terrace outside the Hilton hotel in Brighton, I'm sitting with the man who co-wrote Elite, one of the greatest space games of all time. "It's hot, I'm going to change tops," he declares. And surrounded by delegates attending the packed Develop 2013 conference, he does just that. I glance down at my notes and think about how surreal it always is to meet David Braben, having spent months of my early gaming life zooming through the universe he co-created, trading narcotics and luxury goods on far-off space stations. Now we are about to talk about Elite's long-awaited new instalment. As soon as he's got his top back on.

It's been an interesting month for Frontier Developments, the studio set up by Braben in 1994. It has just been admitted to AIM, the London-based stock exchange for smaller companies, with a market capitalisation of £39.4m. Shares will begin trading on 15 July. This follows a round of investor funding in June that raised another £2.8m. At a time in which UK developers are struggling to find a place in the global games business, this is ambitious stuff.

So why an IPO now? "The time was right," says Braben simply. "Essentially, we have an additional £10m of cash now; we already had a fair amount in the business, but it allows us to move to the next stage. The industry is changing so rapidly –look at the rise of digital sales across all platforms. It presents amazing opportunities to do really exciting things."

One of those things is, of course, Elite: Dangerous, a fourth title in the legendary series of space combat and trading simulations. But Braben is facing controversy here: last year, the title was crowdfunded via Kickstarter, raising over £1.5m from more than 25,000 backers. Now, many of those supporters are flooding the Elite project page with angry questions – if there were plans to raise cash through an IPO, and if there was already money in the company coffers, why did Frontier turn to Kickstarter? This comes after all the anger focused at Double Fine last week; Tim Schafer's studio will have to release its latest title, Broken Age, in two segments, the former helping to fund the latter, even after raising $3.3m for the game – again on Kickstarter. There have always been questions about more established studios using crowdfunding sites – another ambiguous case study won't help.

Elite: Dangerous: raised more than £1.5m from Kickstarter

Braben though is unrepentant. "The Elite Kickstarter was very important for three reasons," he explains. "To prove that there really were people seriously interested in the game; to provide a great sounding board to validate ideas and plans for the game we were making; and to provide funds to reduce the risks of development. Though it wasn't the whole fund for development, it makes a big difference."

So Kickstarter was only ever part of process for bringing the game into development? Braben says not. "Kickstarter was solely responsible for getting the game off the ground. We were already doing 'skunkworks' development on it, but the successful Kickstarter was needed to give us the confidence to commit a big portion of our available resources – people and money – to the game." As for concerns over whether shareholders will now threaten the creative autonomy of the studio, he's similarly adamant. "We're doing it to get greater control. Look at what we're doing with Elite; we have the flexibility to make the games we really want to make, to keep moving things forward."

It's tricky, because there is still clearly a disparity between the way some gamers view Kickstarter and the way some developers use it. It's a mistake to see the site as an ethos – it's a funding platform for businesses; funders need to understand that. But studios must also be ready to answer questions and face flak from people who put money into projects they care about. The executive producer of Elite, Michael Brookes, has been on the Kickstarter forum, assuring backers about the process; explaining that the IPO is about the security of the whole company. Elite is safe, he says, and your money made it happen. But he's not dealing with shareholders, he's dealing with the emotional investments of fans. It's an ambiguous relationship. And at the centre of it, is this very exciting, much-anticipated game.

Due out on PC and Mac in March 2014, Elite: Dangerous is certainly a leap forward. As in the 1984 original, players will begin with a small spaceship and 100 credits, and the aim is to make money by trading between planets, improving your craft, indulging in aerial combat, and gradually ranking up. This all takes place in a procedurally generated universe, densely packed with stars and space stations; players will be able to explore the galaxies offline, but there is also a massively multiplayer component, complete with a dynamic economy and political system. Prices will fall and rise in different systems depending on the trading conditions; and NPC police craft will patrol deep space, hunting down pilots who blast innocent passers-by into star dust.

Elite: Dangerous: a leap forward

Beyond this, there will be dozens of ships to buy and upgrade, all with fully 3D cockpits (and later, players may even be able to move around inside the craft). You'll be able to slipstream other players through hyperspace, share navi-com data with friends on team quests and become involved in a wider narrative of galactic war. There are hints in Braben's Kickstarter developer diaries that other platforms may eventually be added to the roll-out.

It is a huge expansion of the Elite premise, and Frontier is keeping funders up to date with video diaries and polls on key design decisions. Is there pressure in having to appease hardcore fans while still appealing to newcomers? "What we're trying to do is make the game as well as we possibly can," he says. "I've said from the beginning that we're not going to get hung up on this focus group approach; we will build the best game that we want to play… I probably sit somewhere between the camps. I love the nostalgia of the old game, but I also see what we can improve."

Tellingly, Braben talks a lot about the connected era of game design; of improved broadband access and digital distribution making it easier for developers to add content post-release. It's likely Elite will take the whole "game-as-platform" approach, with regular updates and additions added after initial release. "All the things I've always wanted to do with the game we have the opportunity to do," he says. "We won't necessarily do them all for day one – we can say, this feature will derail the launch massively, let's bring it out slightly later. There's been a lot of talk about landing on planets, a lot of partisan discussion. It will be phenomenal and I want to do it, but I want to get it just right and I don't want it to delay things."

Elsewhere, the company is planning to license elements of its proprietary Cobra engine to other developers, and it has several unannounced projects in production. Considering the studio's work on important Kinect titles like Kinectimals and Disneyland Adventures, surely there must be Xbox One projects on its itinerary. Microsoft certainly needs advocates for its ever-present motion tracking gadget and Braben sees the omnipresence of Kinect in a positive light. "The beauty of the technology just being there is that developers can use it as much or as little as they like," he says. "I think one of the uses of the original Kinect was in Skyrim – just being able to shout at the screen while still frantically button mashing was fantastic. And with first-person shooters, the ability to tilt your head to look round corners is wonderful as well. It's that sort of thing, subtle implementations, rather than pure motion-controlled experiences. We'll see things change, we'll see genres mutate and merge."

There is also Raspberry Pi, the mini-PC designed by Eben Upton and several colleagues from the University of Cambridge, and built with Braben's assistance. The hope was to create a computer cheap enough to introduce as many children as possible to programming. The size of a large matchbox, it features an ARM processor and HD video capabilities, and will run a variety of software applications, including coding languages. Since its launch, the device has been adopted in schools as well as by researchers and has a thriving developer community.

"There's been so much support for the whole concept," says Braben. "There were 10 years in which we had no teaching of coding in schools; terms like nerd and geek made it embarrassing for kids to admit their interest – that was a tragedy. Hopefully, we've turned that a little bit with Raspberry Pi. When we made the first 10,000 units, we thought that was all the developer units we'd be able to sell – but we sold out in seconds. We're now selling that many every day. We're coming up to the point at which the Raspberry Pi will have sold as many as the BBC Micro – that's a significant number."

So what have been some of his favourite uses? "I love some of the robotics implementations, and there have been some high profile uses in space flights, but for me what's more important is that so many people are using it individually and in schools. Just seeing teachers backing this … we're giving them ammo to teach subjects they care about. It matters that those people have engaged so positively. In the same way that I got started through computers like the Acorn Atom, I hope that in 10 or 20 years' time there will be developers giving interviews saying 'I got where I am today because of Raspberry Pi.'"

Braben is always interesting to interview – he exudes the typical enthusiasm of the original bedroom coders; the ones who basically had to fight 8bit technology to get it to play games. But he's also a businessman, and some of that comes through while we're chatting about the IPO. At one point I suggest that becoming a public company has not always benefited UK developers. I mention Argonaut, a key British studio of the eighties and nineties that floated in 1999, only to go bust five years later. There's a gasp of shock and incredulity from Braben and Frontier's COO David Walsh, who's also at the table. It's followed swiftly by laughter. "Oh don't give me that," protests Braben. "That was a long time ago and I so strongly disagreed with what happened there."

Later, feeling suitably chastened, I speak to Nick Gibson, an industry veteran and analyst at Games Investor Consulting. He reels off a list of developers that crashed after high profile public floatations: Gremlin, Rage, Kuju, Warthog… "It would be contentious to suggest that these companies went under because they floated," he says. "Some were fundamentally unsustainable businesses that would have disappeared whether listed or private. What this list demonstrates is that the UK has had a very poor history of games company listings."

But things were different then: several studios were undone by the dotcom collapse of 2000, others by an overreliance on capricious publishers in an era when self-publishing via digital distribution was impossible. The industry has evolved considerably in the past five years and Frontier can benefit from the opportunities offered by digital distribution and a range of new platforms. "The key will be to under-promise and over-deliver," says Gibson. "In other words, to manage investor expectations and then to achieve consistent earnings and sales growth over many years."

Right now, Braben can't say a lot about the company's future plans, only that there will be announcements in the next few month. He's still wading through the AIM paperwork and there are apparently rules on what newly floated companies can reveal about coming projects. Chatting to him in the Brighton sunshine, he has the confidence of someone who has been in this industry for 30 years, who has ridden with its peaks and troughs. "We've always had a very broad portfolio, we do all different kinds of games, which keeps us fresh," he says. "It's important that we perform, it's important that we do exciting things."