Hey all time for another weekly update. When I announced last weekend that we were hoping to release the next patch this week I didn’t realize that Flavien’s new computer was arriving soon and it took him a couple of days to reinstall everything and transfer all of his data. Needless to say that meant we weren’t able to finish everything for the patch but it’s nearly ready. Alongside that our pledge upgrade system is coming along nicely. Accepting payments via credit card and/or Bitcoin is completed and all that remains is integrating PayPal. This also lays the foundation for being able to accept new pledges for the game directly from our website later on.

Initial material pass on the NPC hauler

On the art side the big news is the release of new screen shots showing the initial material pass on the NPC hauler. There’s still quite a bit of polish left to do but so far we’re pretty pleased with the results. This is the first ship we’re getting production ready so it’s taken a bit longer as we’ve experimented with some new techniques and built up a library of reusable textures. Aside from that the finishing touches are getting put on the bomber cockpit and we’ll be moving onto the corvette cockpit within a few days.

Another screen shot of the initial material pass on the NPC hauler

After the new pledging system is complete I’ll be getting back to finishing up some outstanding issues with the launcher and new installer as well as adding support for incremental patching. Once the next patch is out Flavien will finish up his networking improvements and, as we’ve mentioned before, sometime next month the both of us should be hopping back onto iterating on core gameplay. That’s all for this week!