The core mechanic of Seedship is the game presenting the player with a randomly generated planet, and the player choosing whether to colonise it or move on to the next one–a sort of Tinder of space colonisation. Perhaps the most important part of the game, therefore, is how it represents planets.
Each planet is represented by five attributes: atmosphere, temperature, gravity, water, and resources. Each one has a range of possible values, e.g. the atmosphere can be breathable, toxic, or various other values, and temperature can range from very cold to very hot. When they’re displayed to the player, they’re colour-coded. Red means uninhabitable; yellow is marginally habitable; and green is ideal. (The exception is resources, where the colour refers to the difficulty of setting up a high-tech civilisation there, rather than habitability; you might be able to live on a planet without resources, but you’ll likely end up back in the stone age.) Each attribute corresponds to one of the Seedship’s scanners, so if e.g. the atmosphere scanner is damaged, you might not be able to tell what this planet’s atmosphere is. The basic mechanic of the game is that you’re looking for planets with green attributes, or failing that yellow ones, and avoiding red ones.
Complicating matters (and this is where things get more fun) is the system of Features–things like native life forms, unusual cave systems, and mysterious alien ruins. From orbit, you can only see hints about what features a planet has, in the form of anomalies. To find out what the features are you have to use a surface probe, of which the Seedship has only a limited number. Features can be good or bad, and a good features can sometimes make up for a bad attribute.
The preview version of the game I posted the other day had the full range of planet attributes but only a small number of features. What I’m working on at the moment is adding a lot more surface features, each of which will have an effect on the colony as it develops.
Once I’ve added a good range of planet features, I’m going to move on to adding more content to the other part of the game: interstellar travel.
Seedship’s development is progressing smoothly, although a March release date is now looking more likely than a February one.