Station - Away Actions

When you're not near your station you can still do most of the actions - managing ships, calling them in for backup, starting research missions or exploration missions, sending crew home or just emergency warping your fleet home. The interface is all there and the features are almost all complete.

Station Management while away from home

Starting a research project

Managing missions and ships

Research projects simply take one ship and use it to research modules and upgrades. Larger ships speed up research since you can place more crew towards the project. So far the rewards are random, but you are guaranteed an item you haven't unlocked yet.

Exploration missions are a different beast, you essentially send a fleet to do what the player does. They might come back with additional crew, might lose or gain some ships, discover new technology, etc... It's essentially like simulating a second coop player. The risk is real but the rewards are much higher than the relatively safe research projects.

Calling in backup

Backup arrives

At some point you'll find your current fleet just isn't up to par, maybe you underestimated the enemy fleet - and you'll have to call backup. If your station has the crew to man the ship, it'll be sent on it's way and warp to your location ASAP.

Just a little update - there's a lot of UI building for missions and station management in the works - not quite ready to show it yet!

Giving the player a home - Mother Base

General Update

I've got a big semester and it's not going to get any easier, that said I still try to do the most I can on this project (which is why I haven't bothered making any kickstarter or Early Access campaigns). That said, there are other delays that I have to pass through that make the release of this game difficult.

I've made some art style changes that I'm as of yet unsure of - namely much more bloom and flares using HDR cameras. This unfortunately disables the near perfect antialiasing of forward rendering and the default Ambient Occlusion of Unity. Long story short - I'll need to buy a more advanced AA solution and a much better AO solution as the default one is downright awful.

The Main Title screen will randomly choose a background. It's nice to be welcomed by a different spacescape.

Mother Base

There's nothing quite as boring as mining in space sims. So why have the player do it in a game where you capture ships and add them to your fleet? What if you capture a ship but have no place in your fleet? What happens when you rescue willing crewmen but your ship is full? The answer is the player needs somewhere to call home, some place to store resources and allow him to manage a larger fleet.

Stations are already very easy to create - just pop open the station menu, spend some credits and there it is - the default station. They're already easy to edit - since you just use the normal ship editor anyway. The infrastructure to store ships is already in place, including their configuration (mining, combat or cargo). From there you'll be able to send ships on different missions - when you discover a profitable asteroid field or a planet with valuable resources, you can start a mining mission from the menu and if you have enough ships and crew to man them, they will be sent to that destination. Or you can start a research project that requires crew to dedicate themselves to it and will unlock an item. All of these are slowly completed over the course of sector jumps (just warping to another sector moves the missions along) and have various rewards.

It's already easy to edit the stations

I'm also planning emergency station services - calling in ships to bolster your fleet in your time of need, firing a superweapon from light years away, etc... there's a lot of possibilities here and it gives the player a nice money sink. It's also pretty easy to expand the system to do a lot of things or more complicated economics. You need more crew and ships to start missions, you need a bigger station to store more ships and crew, and you need credits to make a bigger station.

After these features, it'll be time for the final stretch - the game could use some balancing and testing.