Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update! With a little less than a month and a half left to go until we release the Alpha it’s been another busy week. Most notably we released a new patch including our new spectator mode, kill cams, improved HUD icons, and laid some groundwork for our menu system. There’s also lots of tweaks and bug fixes which you can read about in the patch notes. Next up, as we’ve mentioned before, is core gameplay.

The new WIP carrier in high orbit

The remaining big-ticket items for the Alpha, and there are still a few, are radar, the resource system, capital ship weapons, countermeasures, win/loss conditions, carrier spawning, and getting our first battlescape up and running. Most of these are fairly self-explanatory except this idea of a “battlescape”. Originally, we were hoping to have a continuous battle take place across the entire solar system which would involve some amount of base building on the part of players. That game would have been a sort of semi-persistent mini-MMO. Unfortunately, this was a lofty stretch goal and we came nowhere near raising enough money to achieve it. Instead, bases will be pseudo randomly generated from a predetermined set of possible locations centered around a single planet and nearby moons. When a battlescape has been conquered the war will move on to another battlescape on some other planet. To win the war, thereby causing the server to reset, one of the 3 teams will have to conquer all of the battlescapes.

Under the watchful gaze of a gas giant

At least this is an outline of the current plan. It’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that we will make significant changes to that as we go along but insofar as the Alpha is concerned we want to get a single battlescape up and running. This will involve a balanced set of factories, small space stations, large space stations (for capital ships), and land bases strategically placed around a planet and its nearby moons. The core gameplay loop starts with each team spawning at their pre-designated collection of bases. Due to being initially resource constrained the beginning of the game will involve scouting and light skirmishes as each team saves up resources to purchase more powerful ships and weapons. As the resource system kicks into high gear each team will be able to progressively acquire greater firepower until one team finally emerges victorious. The rate at which this occurs will be tweakable from one server to the next as it will have a significant impact on the length of a match.

Flying in the upper atmosphere over a large mountain range

This is just a rough, high level overview. We’ll be having a lot of core gameplay discussion over the coming weeks and as this stuff starts to get implemented for the Alpha we’ll be discussing it in greater detail. That’s all for this week, until next time!