This year, while full of excitement and progress, has, also, been particularly painful, both on a personal as well as a professional level. As a team, we went through personal losses, separations, a huge health scare for our dear one, and money issues. A lot of money issues…

One would say that we experienced life in full force during 2019.

However, these storms did not take away the dream. They did not take away the commitment. If anything, they strengthened our resolve! Our passion in bringing to life this thing that we have grown to love more each and every day.

Together we will bring Tau Station to life.

Together we are moving forward, sometimes not as fast as one could wish for, but still making very important progress.

Therefore, together let’s look at what’s coming next first semester of 2020.

Combat

Let’s be honest, combat has been a sour point since the day we implemented it. A little lackluster and not as well-balanced as we would like.

We were aware of this, but we wanted to give you something, even imperfect, while we laid down the foundations of Tau Station.

Now, however, it’s time to move on and provide something fun.

We have already spent the last 4 months working hard on the combat system. Now, everything can be balanced through configuration changes. Armor and weapons now have a real impact and the code has been refactored to allow introducing more stats to combat.

More importantly, however, this allows combat to become way more interactive.

Starting early 2020, when attacked, you will have two choices, flee or enter the combat space.

If you succeed in fleeing, good for you! If you fail, it will be time to fight back.

Narrative

As you have seen Tau Stations already has hundreds of missions. But all these missions were about the universe. They are the background missions. The missions that brings flavor and context to the main story and help you see the galaxy from the eyes of its survivors.

The narrative team has been hard at work writing the core stories. These missions will take you through our universe to understand the origin of the Catastrophe and beyond. They will make you part of what happened next and allow you to experience the main, underlying narrative of Tau Station.

Steadily we are adding one core mission per station. Steadily we are preparing to unravel the story of Tau Station.

And because unrevealing the core story is not enough for me, we are working on presenting the main information that you will discover through the missions inside a journal of sorts within the CORETECHS. This will allow you to revisit your findings and not forget any important information when it is time to make vital choices…

We are also working on a new UI design for the missions, introducing some animations and more.

UI

I strongly believe that we are at a point where we understand Tau Station gameplay enough that we can start implementing a beautiful and functional Tau Station UI.

At this point you might ask me, “after more than 4 years of development?”

And the answer is Yes!

Firstly, Tau Station, as we envision it, is so huge, that making everything coherent is not as simple as we first might have envisioned.

Secondly, we are co-developing with you, therefore we needed to be able to deliver new features for you to provide feedback on. In a way, we needed to accept being naked in front of you, in order to best understand what works or does not.

Third, and this is probably the main reason, we are developing Tau Station as we would develop any client’s project.

We build the foundation, we learn through your play testing, and now that we are happy with what we have and the direction that we want to take, we make it (even more) pleasant to play.

It’s a philosophy choice here 🙂

Below are some examples of what we are working on visually. Tell us if you like our direction, but keep in mind that it’s a work in progress, plenty of little things are still missing and need to be arranged, but please feel free to tell us what you think.

These three points are my priorities for the first semester of 2020. Plenty more things are in the pipeline, but it will also depend on funding.

Yes, money is core and plays a factor in how fast we can implement our vision.

I also wanted to use this blog post to thank each one of you. First my team or my work family as I call them, of course, without whom nothing would be possible, but also you.

Without your support, without your feedback, nothing would be possible.

Therefore to everyone, thank you for making this adventure the thrilling, amazing, frustrating, possibility that it is! Thank you for co-developing Tau Station with us.

See you all in 2020 and let’s make Tau Station happen !

Leila