I’ve been working on Beyond the Chiron Gate steadily this year, and right now I’ve got an initial playable version with a lot of the game’s core systems in place.
Here’s the intro text. All the text in the game is first-draft:
Before you embark on the mission, you select your crew. This is currently the most complicated screen in the game and I’m going to think about ways to simplify it. Crew members are rated 0-100 in five stats: Piloting, Engineering, Planetary Science, Biology, and Linguistics. I’m probably going to add a Medicine stat when I add a more complicated injury system, and I’m thinking about renaming Linguistics to something more general like Xeno-anthropology (Xenology?). I’ll also add some kind of bios so they’re more than just bunches of numbers.
Star system view. Now we’re through the intro, all the sidebar icons have appeared. From the top, they are: main view, crew stats, ship stats, data you’ve gathered, and settings. Right now the crew view shows basically the same thing as the crew select screen, and the others show only very basic info, so I won’t bother screenshotting them.
Planet view. You interact with planets by exploring anomalies, which appear as blue links in the planet description. This planet only has one. As you can see, I’ve decided to use a log entry format to show how time is passing as you play the game.
Exploring an anomaly will often lead to bad stuff happening, which you can try to deal with using various approaches. An icon means the chance of success is based on a crew member’s level in that stat. If you didn’t have anyone with that stat, the option would be greyed out.
When you finish exploring an anomaly you’ll gain data in various categories: Planetary Science, Biology, Xenotechnology, and one for each alien civilisation you encounter. Right now data is just a way of keeping score, but eventually you’ll be able to spend it to upgrade your ship between missions.
If you encounter a hazard while exploring and fail to remedy it, a crew member might be injured. Injured crew members are just out of commission for a set number of days and then rejoin the crew. It’s currently not possible for crew members to die, but eventually it will be.
When you run out of supplies you’re forced to return to base. In the final game you’ll then be able to upgrade the ship, level up or swap out crew members, and pick a new system to explore. For the moment returning to base ends the game.
The biggest feature I still have to add is random generation of star systems. At the moment there’s only one system to explore and it’s hand-coded. A mistake I made with my prototypes last year was trying to make a random planet generator first without knowing exactly how I’d make a game out of it, so I decided to make a game with test data first and deal with random planet generation later. Along with random planet generation, I’ll also add a lot more possible anomalies and hazards to appear on the planets.
Other features I’m planning to add include ship upgrades, crew leveling up, crew bios and traits (e.g. “heals from injuries faster”), possibly a crew morale system (depressed crew members are less effective), damage to the ship including individual systems being damaged, hazards and events that can occur when travelling between planets (right now they only occur when you’re exploring anomalies), and an overarching goal of making contact with the mysterious aliens who built the Gate.
This is still a large project and I’m still in the early stages of it, so I’m not making any commitments regarding when it will finally be released. Thank you for your patience as I continue to work on this!