Sorry, I skipped the state vector for February, but only because I knew I was really close to release, and release seemed a way better time to publish. So here it finally is, the update that took way too long!

Space is hard

The good news: We have actual orbital mechanics now! With it come a multitude of side effects. Not the least of which is predictability. No longer will you have to set out from the safe but expensive confines of a station without any clue how long the trip is going to take and when you might be able to recover your dice. No, now you’ll have perfect oversight over what burn is going to need to happen when. And you’ll even be able to plan them ahead and set up future flights from locations you might not even be at right now. This brings with it a whole new depth of planning. Space is a bit harder for the player now too!

Since everything now has a position in space, there’s a whole new depth to lining up your jobs. Orbital mechanics do not only mean that things are predictable. They also mean that doing the same thing at a different time may be vastly more efficient, or might not be possible at all. In general, the job generation has been reworked to ensure that jobs can be completed in time, but the time might not always be the one you hoped for. You might be forced to decide to skip a rest and dare the vacuum, because leaving at a later time will require more delta-v. Or it might be that even though the job isn’t that urgent, you need to leave now because the next launch window is too far away to make it in time.

Here’s a little glimpse of what things look like:

That’s an eye full, and every number on this panel is functional and has meaning, though admittedly some are a lot more important than others. Oh, and there’s some convenient empty space in there that may one fine day house something like a map display, but it’s gonna be a whole while until I get around to even thinking of that seriously.

Feature creep or necessity?

I am proud of what I accomplished with this update, especially considering how challenged I tend to get with math. And the result, I have to say, works very well for the game. First of all, getting rid of the random, unpredictable flight durations was an essential feature for the game. With time now being predictable, I can finally start turning it into an actual enemy, which will be very important for the feel of the game. Giving the player control over their time management opens up future features like timers, for example for maintenance, how long you can actually stay out there, loan repayments etc. Using real orbital mechanics does not only help with immersion, it also introduces some problems and challenges for time management that are really quite unique to them.

And yet, it took a lot. Too much, the back of my mind keeps telling me, though I have not overshot my schedule that much. Contacts were worse in that regard, and most of the time I’m currently behind my personal goals are from back there. I had just hoped I could recoup a bit of that with this update, but… space was too hard, I guess. It also has to be said that the system is not currently at the level of capability I would like it to be. There’s a lot of opportunities still to be had from allowing higher-energy trajectories, or trajectories that take more than one orbit until they meet their target, or trajectories with 4 burns. That last one seems especially important for flight plans from an eccentric orbit, which is something that comes up whenever you mess up a burn and need a new flight plan on the go. There’s a problem that if your orbit is descending towards a destination, and it is located at a low altitude, there’s currently a very limited number of possible solutions on account of not allowing the orbits lowest point to hit the earth. A 4-burn solution would solve that issue by being able to play with both the highest and the lowest point in the orbit to come up with an intercept. For now, you’ll have to settle for another destination if there’s simply no possible solution for the simple algorithm within weeks. I can see a clear plan on how to get these additional capabilities, but now is not the time for that.

But while a part of my mind keeps bugging me that I should have gone with something simpler, less realistic to solve the problem of predictability - that might have been implemented in as little as a month or less - the rest of me has to admit that it could never have been any other way. This is supposed to be a hard-SF game. Its basic concept was partly born out of me playing the orbiter spaceflight simulator while rolling some dice on the side to spice things up. There are too many space games that take the easy way out and as a result end up feeling somewhat unrelated to the actual thing. The game has “Orbital” right there in its freaking name. So many reasons that would never have allowed me to go any other route than this without resenting the result. And that’s a point you never want to end up at.

Full speed ahead into the future

And in the end, I’m not really on a clock, am I? There’s no bills I need to pay with this (quite contrary to how the game plays), so what’s the rush? Weeeell, the truth is, I’m not really that good at finishing things unless I give myself some deadlines. Most people aren’t. The game wouldn’t be anywhere near the state it is in currently if I wouldn’t keep setting myself milestones and estimating what I need to reach them, and then trying to keep within those estimates. This release, incidentally, concludes the major milestone I was currently working on. A bit more than a month behind my estimation, but that’s not too bad for a years work.

Which means that today is the day that I start on a new one-year milestone, and that one has a very specific goal: Steam Next Fest February 26.

I’m afraid by now I have to accept that Itch is not a great platform to determine the economic feasibility of your game. And in the end, that’s really what the current development is all about. I want to know whether this thing might have a chance at succeeding in the market. Right now, I have exactly zero indication that this could be the case, other than still finding it fun to play myself, which I consider no small feat. They say to show stuff to people as early as possible, and I still believe that would be great if I had people to show it to. Not just a dozen, but a hundred or two or three, mind you, so I might get something akin to a representative opinion. But to get that many people to actually play your game… I guess it needs to be at least half-finished, at least in some of its aspects, and then it needs to go where the people are that might want to play it. And so, throwing it in front of a larger audience and gauging their reactions at a demo-fest seems the only logical step. And so, getting it ready for that gig is the next major priority.

In explicit, this means getting 3 things in here that I consider necessities for this goal: An actual spacecraft with defined capabilities that you can spend money on improving, some rudimentary form of character progression system, and… some rudimentary graphics. Not a lot of them, just some static background graphics for stations. Think of something simple like what’s currently serving as background for this page, which is a concept sketch I made a while ago to see if I could come up with anything halfways decent by myself. That, and reworking my entire layout system so it supports screen ratios other than 16:9.

I’ve got rough concepts for all of these three features in mind that should allow me to reach this goal within the 11 months I’ve got (though how well they’ll work remains to be seen). Then, I hope to get enough feedback from Next fest to decide where to take this further, if anywhere at all. There’s also the potential of falling back on Next fest in June 26 if things don’t go my way at all. But that’s the absolute latest I’m giving myself here.

In all of this, I hope updates will be a bit more frequent in the future. The three features I listed above can all be built piecemeal, which should allow me to release more frequently, and also better judge how far I can build those systems out within the time given.

And so, I’m off to an interesting 2025… besides of all the other… interesting… stuff currently going down in the world. I would wish you all that you may live in uninteresting times, but I guess we screwed that one up.