This month I’ve mostly been working on the game’s random events, as well as playtesting and making other minor changes and bugfixes as I push the game towards its finished state.
Choices
I’ve gone through all the existing events and added new options to make sure that wherever possible you always have two choices, even if you don’t have any crew members with relevant skills. Usually there will be one with a low success chance and one with a higher success chance but smaller rewards for success and/or greater consequences for failure.
New Events
I’ve also added new events to fill in categories where I was getting the same event too many times. In particular, I’ve added several new events for when you’re in orbit of a planet rather than on its surface.
Generally, although not universally, orbit events risk damaging your ship whereas surface events risk injuring your crew.
Other Changes
I’ve also made some other changes, including:
- There’s no longer a random chance of failure when trying to make contact with an alien civilisation. It made sense, but it wasn’t fun.
- There are a few more of the interstellar civilisation “personality” traits that determine what kinds of marks they leave on other worlds. Every time you find evidence of an interstellar civ you should also learn something about them.
- Intelligent beings can now have the body shape “amorphous”, representing both blob people and cloud-like beings living in gas giants.
- Entering the wormhole back to base is now done via an inline link with a cute little wormhole icon.
- Many bug fixes.
Plan for the Final Stage
My aim now is to have the game content complete by the end of February. If I can do that, I can spend all of March balancing and bug-fixing, and possibly launch as early as April. I’m not making any promises, but for the sake of giving myself a date to aim for, I’m going to aim to launch on 12 April, to coincide with the International Day of Human Space Flight (aka Yuri’s Night).
Thank you again for sticking with me through this long process, and I’ll see you next month.