Slow Progress

I'm all over the place on development work right now. There's so much to do that I often just log into the game and start working on whatever I come across first. I am working off a short "to do" list, and my next goal is to get to the point where I can let a few people create new accounts and start doing some very early testing in the game. I don't want to work in a complete vacuum so getting feedback from some others would be helpful at this point.

I'm almost finished with the basic new player setup. At this point you'll just choose a name and gender of your captain, and name your ship. Everyone will start at the same colony in the same star system for now. The captain will have the basic skills needed to run the small ship by himself unless the player chooses to hire another crew member with the few credits they'll have leftover.

Eventually I want to make the new player setup a bit more complicated, where you'll choose a career path for your captain which will determine his starting skill set and where he and your new ship appear in the game. This will let you specialize your starting ship to be a miner, trader, military, etc.

Update

I'm easing back into development mode right now after spending most of the summer preoccupied with my real job and other activities.

I did receive the final planetary artwork set, and those are going to look really great. My focus at the moment is to finish the cargo movement code and then add a few ship abilities that make use of that, such as Comet Harvesting. Then I'll probably move on to new player setup and fleshing out the Colony screen.

I have made a first pass on paper for the combat system. I've decided to keep in basically one-dimensional to keep things simple. Ships will exist in "range bands" and will thus close, hold, or withdraw as movement actions. The combat structure is still in major flux, however, so look for things to change by the time I start coding it up.