I’ve just recently realized that I have not posted here about the huge changes I’ve decided to introduce to the game. And by huge I mean HUGE. Like, humongous. Well, better late than never.

So last October I’ve released the open alpha version of the game. After I had evaluated the results, it became quite clear that something ought to be changed. First, I’ve roughly estimated the amount of time it would take to produce remaining content, and it became clear that finishing the game would take a looong time. More importantly, even though general feedback was positive, it turned out that the game in its current form was somewhat boring and, let’s say, not very catchy, so finishing the game the way it was would be… um… an unwise time investment. It’s not like I have not made knowingly unwise time investments before, but this time I’ve decided that I have made enough mistakes to finally exercise some wisdom.
I have to admit, after that I was kinda demotivated, and haven’t been working on a project for several months. But recently I got inspired again and decided to rework the game. I’ve came up with some changes to hopefully fix the gameplay, and make it so I could finish the game in a finite amount of time. Some things will stay the same, other things will be heavily altered, other stuff will be completely cut from the game.

So here are some basic gameplay changes I’ve introduced to the game:

Combat:

• The combat is turn-based again, as it was in the very first version of the game. Real-time combat with active pause turned out to be not as good after all. Watching for gun cooldowns is not very convenient and, well, not very fun. And many people who played the game couldn’t even figure out how exactly it works.

• The player now controls multiple ships.

• Ships are now able to move around the battlefield.
  As a result, the combat is more tactical, but without being overly complicated. If I were to draw a comparison, I’d say that now the combat is somewhat reminiscent of Fire Emblem series.

Metagame:

• The main change is that the exploration mode, as it previously was in the game (flying around the world and stuff), is completely removed. Yeeeah, I can hear your booing :( It was an extremely hard decision to make, especially considering huge amount of work already put into it. But it turned out that producing levels was incredibly labour intensive. I had to admit that making a game of decent quality and sufficient length this way is just not possible for me. Instead, now there is a global map with various locations, that are unlocked during playthrough.

• Player’s characters now control entire ships instead of manning guns. So basically each character is a pilot of their ship now.

“But Igor,” you say, “if you tell us finishing the game that was already this far into production was impossible, how on earth can remaking it be faster?” And that is a reasonable question. But no worries, if anyone has concerns about that, I have good news: I’ve already implemented everything I’ve mentioned and most technical tasks are already done, so I’m currently in the state of mostly just content production. I won’t show any images yet, since the visual side of the game is still kinda rough, but that will be fixed prety soon.

So stay tuned and don’t lose hope in the game (please, I’ll finish it, I promise ಥ_ಥ )!