Since I'm pretty happy with this project, I will move it from prototype development to Alpha soon. But I have to meet a few key features and mechanics before then. ATM we have Asteroids that break up and drop two types of goodies. A creature that emerges from asteroids and chases you and feeds on energy called a joule bug, basic utilization of the goodies for ship energy fill and repairs, in the playable demo. I am working on making the station I put in a purpose. ATM you can land on it but it doesn't do anything yet. At this time I am working on NPCs using polygon2D shapes that Godot has, for the armature (bone) based animations and the basics of conversation with NPCs. This has to be in place before I can make the intro story. This method is a bit time-consuming so far but as soon as I get the Blender plugin working in some form it'll go a lot faster for me. I'm trying to not have to make my tools right now so I can focus on getting the prototype finished as a demonstration of the smallest playable portion of this game.

So far the only characters besides the unseen player I have planned are the Mechanic, Bort, and your ship's droid. But this will complete the needs for the tutorial system and once I have that it'll be halfway to alpha. I simply want to have at least one other form of space fauna, two forms of enemy ships to fight with, and at least one more NPC space station to give you access to sector travel. Sectors are the individual play areas or chunks where the basic gameplay level takes place. They are about a billion square meters or so but I still have to write that system that allows you to fast travel to another sector shortly after the tutorial, and probably a boss fight.

The boss fight will be what I work on first when I move to alpha development. Then I will work on a bit of the sector-to-sector play, where you start to get a sense of the size of the No No Zone and meet the inhabitants and factions that make up the more AI parts of the world. The faction system, economy, and basic buildings and machines will probably come after making more ships and mission types. Oh, and the mission system should probably come after the first boss is done. I will have a better road map once I get the elements I'm working on now in place. The last thing I'll probably work on in Alpha will be the story and at least one multiplayer vs. system that will help with having a co-op system for the main story and arcade/free modes. I consider the mode I'm working with right now semi-sandbox as I'll be moving it to the story and arcade modes as I get things finished. Pretty soon you'll see more options on the title screen and a little bit more on development.

After that, when I go to Beta, It'll probably be mostly under polish and fixing status, but if the project gets enough funding there will be many content updates for new and interesting plans. If it works out I'll put up an Early Access Steam version and come up with a price point so that I can push the full version into a commercial product. That is future talk though. We shall see if it gains traction.