A new weekly update to go along with our release of a new update for the game (Developer Access backers only)! We were unable to release our v0.1.3.0 patch yesterday due to a partial outage at our data center however everything was all sorted out today and we released the patch without any problems. The major new feature for v0.1.3.0 is the addition of a playable mockup of the corvette. It’s big, less maneuverable, and has a very different flight model than the bomber which has already resulted in a number of pilots slamming into planets at fatal speeds. Of course this is only the initial implementation so we’ll be iterating on it quite a bit over the coming months. You can read more information about what’s changed in the v0.1.3.0 patch notes here. Below is a short video of some of our Developer Access backers playing around with the new corvette in all of its gray, untextured glory:

https://vimeo.com/162269298

Now that the corvette has been integrated the next ship to get mocked up is the interceptor, which we expect to go pretty quickly. Following that will be additional weapon systems. Currently the only weapon available is a generic forward facing blaster which gets old pretty quick and is nowhere near being representative of the gameplay we’re going after. We want to get some additional weapon types mocked up before we begin integrating capital ships so that we can start testing real gameplay - which should also make our videos much more interesting to watch.

As I’ve mentioned before our goal is to have all of the major gameplay components mocked up in some form within ~2 months. That’ll give us approximately 5 months to get core gameplay reasonably well polished before the game becomes available to our Alpha backers. We also want to have the final art for the smaller ships (interceptor, bomber, and corvette) pretty well nailed down by the time we ship the Alpha. This will give our art team a good chunk of time to focus on the capital ships, stations, land bases, particle effects, and general polish as we push toward Beta and then gold release during 2017.