With this month’s release, I reached the first milestone for the game after the initial prototype, and I managed to do it in the time I’ve set out. Not only that, I even managed to get in some extra things. Besides the all-new UI there’s also new locations and more diversification of available options between locations, making some better suited for some things and some better for other things, and some come with problems that others don’t.

And then, there’s music! This one came as a bit of a surprise for me to be honest, but at some point it just hit me and I put some in there. Not my music obviously, there wouldn’t have been nearly enough time for that! But more on that particular topic further down. For now, I’m happy (and a little bit proud) to present you with a radically overhauled experience. I have to admit that the new additions add a lot more to the game than I expected them to (considering they don’t add that much in terms of mechanics). It… feels almost like a game now, no longer just a clobbered together proof of concept of game mechanics, even though that’s really what it still is.

Have fun and let me know what you think!

Music was my first love…

But it wasn’t meant to last. Fun fact, once upon a time that seems like a completely different life now, I wanted to become a musician. Not in the sense that I wanted to learn to play an instrument, I played several of them already (though only the drums well enough to really call it playing). No, I wanted to study music at the Jazz academy. Not to go too much into details, it obviously turned out somewhat differently, what with me working in software nowadays.

It turns out that the leap from being a good hobbyist to being a graduated professional is… gigantic (I did a similar move later in software, and honestly, it was nowhere near this steep). I didn’t have the grit to see it through. But music has always been something that speaks to me much more than other forms of art, and continues to do so. It should therefore not be surprising that the music in my game is very important to me.

That’s why I was very reluctant at first to put any in. I want music that is specific to the game, and evocative of its atmosphere. The current music is provided by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio, the hero nobody deserves, but every creator needs! The guy is so prolific he could keep a radio station going on just his own works, and the music would still be more varied than in most radio stations I have listened to during my life. And practically all of it is royalty free, and it’s really good stuff if you need anything synth-y. I’ve listened to his music so much during work that my Boss probably ought to pay him money for how much he’s boosted my productivity.

Sometimes the shoe doesn’t quite fit…

Though it is really good stuff, it’s not quite what I want in the end. I have a vision that every (unique) location in the game comes with its own ambient track, broken up by a recognisable, unique motive. That’s kind of more important to me than every location having distinct visuals, honestly (which right now obviously they don’t… they don’t have any visuals at all yet).

The idea is inspired by older games like Star Control 2, where every race had its own theme, or Wing Commander Privateer, where the music was such a powerful tool to support the atmosphere of the location you were at. This game will have a lot more distinctive locations than good old privateer with its… errr… 5 or so station types and possibly as many unique locations? It’s been a while… So whether I can ever justify the budget for something like that is another question entirely.

But it’s what I would want, and White Bat’s diverse music enabled me to put a bit of that in there. Every location currently has its own track, tediously hand-picked during hours upon hours of listening. It was difficult to choose, because none of them quite fit. Not Karl’s fault, obviously, he wrote them with entirely different things in mind. But being forced to make this compromise is what made me reluctant to putting in music at this point. It’s just… not quite right, doesn’t quite express the things I want it to express, but I finally decided it was better than silence. It’s possibly going to be jarring for some people if I ever get the opportunity to replace that music, because obviously their perception of the locations will be colored by the music that’s in right now, seeing as they don’t have much else to go on. I’m sorry for that in advance, but if I will ever be able to put any money into the game, this is probably going to be one of the first investments. We are still a loooong way away from that, though.

…Except when it does

Locations are not the only thing that got atmospheric support by Karl’s music, though. There’s also some tracks during spaceflight, including the currently chosen title theme aptly named “floating”, and then there’s also some tracks that play during EVAs. The space tracks are pretty good. I’d like to have something more somber with stronger themes, but it was a lot easier to choose three tracks to play during spaceflight than it was to choose the tracks for the locations. And then there’s the three EVA tracks. And for those, quite frankly, I can’t really imagine anything more fitting. Karl’s library of 80ies inspired scifi thriller and horror tunes delivered pretty much everything I could ask for for these scenes. There would have been a lot more here that I could easily have included, but let’s keep the file size reasonable. And also, it would feel even more like ripping off Karl Casey than it already feels like. I’ve sent a little money his way, but there can be no argument that his contribution to my project right now is immeasurably larger than mine to his. Thanks Karl!

The things to come

So… My first major milestone is reached, I’m on schedule, and I like the results so far. As in, I really like them. Even I start finding the game fun, something that no longer just has to ask “pretty please, would you consider playing me” and instead can promise something in return. What’s next then?

In all honesty, my goals for the next milestone aren’t entirely clear to me yet. Some are, but some are not. What is clear is that I want to put together a plan of where I want to be in january, and that I hope to get the game as much further in these six months as I brought it in the past six, but some of it will depend on feedback I’ll (hopefully) be getting on this release. One thing is obvious, the game currently lacks goals and progress. The problem is, it lacks a lot of other things, and some of those will make implementing some of those goals easier and more cohesive, so my priorities right now look a bit more like a snowglobe than a stack: Shake it once, and everything looks a bit different, but everything still seems to make sense.

I am sure about the thing I am going to focus on in the near term, though: Contacts and job acquisition. The current job hunting challenge is really just a placeholder to have something in there. But eventually, acquiring jobs should mostly depend on maintaining a network of contacts and good business relations, not so much directly on player skill. Instead, building the contact network is what the players skill should be applied to. So that’s a form of progress, a goal that the player needs to work on in the early game if they want to survive. At the same time, contacts should be able to give the game a bit of additional depth. But there’s also the issue that acquiring contacts as envisioned will require some stuff for which it is too early (for example much more interactive locations), so there’s probably going to be another bit of placeholder mechanics for that for the time being.

Another thing I’m thinking about is better navigation. Not detailed trajectory fiddling like KSP or Orbiter, I think something like that would be entirely misplaced in a dice roller. But eventually the player should have some control over how they want to do things. Spend more DV to get to a destination faster, rely on their skill and do an off-plane transfer, or do their plane change at a higher point in orbit to save DV… as mentioned, all heavily abstracted, but none the less believable and functional. The problem with this is that it isn’t a goal the player can work towards, so should be lower priority. But effective, predictable time management would open up a world of possibilities that is kind of important for many goals, like ship upgrading (it’s not nice to limit the endurance of the players ship if they can’t control how long their journey is going to take, and so many upgrades would relate to that), loans (qualifying for loans to invest as well as paying them off), stuff like that.

And then of course there’s character progression, i.e. an actual skill or feat or perk system or whatever exactly I’ll end up using. But so much of that will need higher level missions and challenges to actually make it worthwhile, and doing that in addition seems like too big a chunk together with the contacts. So yeah. Not quite sure where this’ll be going yet. I’m looking forward to your feedback, hoping that will help me making a decision.

As it stands, I’m not entirely sure when the next update is going to be. I’m pretty sure I can’t make the contacts work in just a month, not with all the new systems I need to build to make them happen. There’s a couple of other, minor things lying around that I might bunch up to have something to release, but I’m not sure yet if that’ll be worth it. The only thing I can promise right now is that I will keep you posted as usual.