This month I’ve added what I think should be the last major new mechanic for the game. From now on it should be minor revisions and adding more stuff…lots more stuff.
Ship upgrades
I’ve added more ship upgrades to the game, but most of them are no longer visible from the start. At first you’ll only have the different types of scanner to choose from.
Other upgrades have to be unlocked through random events. Most of these trigger when you’re exploring a particular planet trait and have a crew member of a particular class. That crew member will think of a way that the discovery could be used to enhance the ship, if they succeed on a risky skill check.
Once you’ve unlocked a ship upgrade like this, you still have to go back to Chiron Base and spend data to install it.
There are four ship upgrades that each add an extra crew member slot, for a total of eight crew members if you get them all. Other upgrades include several different ones that enhance your spacesuits in different ways, making it safe to explore planets with extreme environments (e.g. powered exoskeletons let you move comfortably on high-gravity planets). Of course, the events that unlock these upgrades often require you to explore those kinds of planets before you have the enhanced suits…
Another way to unlock ship upgrades is to make contact with aliens, who might let you look at their spaceship’s design and unlock a random ship upgrade. (Since humans have only just achieved interstellar flight in the game, all the spacefaring aliens you encounter will be more advanced than you.)
The idea of these unlockable ship upgrades is to reproduce the feeling of finding new equipment in a dungeon, in the kind of game where you might find new equipment in a dungeon. In my playtesting I’m finding that they make the game a lot more fun. Even though the game is about exploration for its own sake, finding new things that give me new abilities is a stronger motivation than just finding new things.
More planet traits
Apart from the unlockable ship upgrades, I’ve spent my time this month adding new planet traits to discover.
Planets covered in diamond dust!
Oceans that are the remains of comet impacts!
Asteroid belts that are former planets (which you can then investigate further to discover why they broke up)!
And so forth. I’ve been reading a bit on real exoplanets and adding some of the more exotic things into the game (not pictured: planets where it rains gemstones or molten glass). My task for next month is to do more reading and add more weird space things.
Release plans
There’s a lot more stuff to add and a lot of balancing and fixing to do, but I’m still feeling positive about releasing the game this year, hopefully in the summer. Patrons will get it for the price of their backing, but otherwise I’m thinking I’ll sell it for $10 on itch.io. I’m still undecided about a phone app version.
Thank you all for your continued support, and I should have some more to show you next month.