Development Update - September 2025

Another month, another exciting amount of progress! This month we focused on fleshing out ground exploration and space combat, and added a few final touches to ground combat based on our play testing.

Space Combat

Having not been touched since Vince’s original prototype build, Issac devoted several development cycles this month to polishing and rewriting the existing space combat scripts to ensure space combat feels satisfying and fun. Ships accelerate in more predictable patterns and feel more powerful. Ramming no longer results in unexpected behavior and applies damage to both ships correctly depending on relative speed, mass, and angle of impact.

We’ve also added a crew system. Damage to the ship (especially from ramming) now has a chance to injure and incapacitate the ship’s crew depending on where it hits and how much armor is remaining. If a ship does not have enough crew to man all necessary stations, its performance in combat begins to degrade. Cannons take longer to reload, the engines take longer to spool to the desired output, and the ship becomes more susceptible to boarding attacks.

Spaceship Art

Mark completed work on the next ship design, the Clipper. Originally designed to explore newly discovered systems and support initial colonization efforts, the Clipper was built to operate independently for extended periods of time, and ferry large quantities of goods quickly between Earth and the Colonies. As a result, it is a fast, rugged, well rounded ship that excels in numerous roles.

New Levels and Lighting Pass

The bridge of a starship is its central nervous system, and as such, is heavily protected somewhere deep in the center of the ship. Before you can reach it and take control, you will have to fight your way through several other areas of the ship to get there. This month, we’ve added a cargo hold for players to fight through. Battle your way through a maze of shipping containers, storage rooms, cranes, and even a transport monorail as you advance towards your prize.

The Crew advances through the cargo hold

Dom takes cover behind a cargo container to watch the approach

Stephen and Nicolas are ambushed by the medical bay

The team clears each room before moving on

Having secured the cargo hold, the crew fight their way to the bridge

We’ve also performed a lighting pass to ensure ship interiors convey the right mood and aesthetic

Character Art

Our partners at MLC continue to work through the modeling and texturing for the various outfits in the game. The Jumpsuit has received its texturing pass and modeling has finished for the first military uniform

As always, thank you again for your continued support in making this project a reality. We have a lot of exciting features planned for October that I can't wait to share with you.

Best Regards,

Vincent De Tommaso

Game Director

Full Changelog

Ground Combat Gameplay

• Injury List - Created a list of possible injuries the game pulls from when assigning injuries to units

• Weapon Swap Animation - Characters physically grab their weapons now rather than summoning their desired weapon into their hands from the astral plane

• Sentry Aim Pose - units in sentry mode now ready their weapon

• Weapon Placement - cleaned up the placement of weapons in the hands of units to look more natural

• Implement Ranged Weapon Traits - different ranged weapons now grant special abilities based on their type:

  • Pistols & Shotguns can target units in melee range and receive an accuracy bonus at close range

  • Machine guns can fire twice in one turn if the wielder remains stationary

  • Sniper Rifles cannot move and shoot and receive an accuracy penalty at close range, but receive a large accuracy bonus for long-range shots

• Vaulting/Climbing Animations - added vaulting and climbing animations for when units scale obstacles and terrain

• Ladder Animations - characters no longer use the Force to levitate up ladders and instead must climb them properly like the rest of us

• Speed up ladder animations - having grown accustomed to levitating, the characters were climbing the ladders too slowly, and were assigned remedial training to speed it up

• Can target units in full cover corners - Units peeking around full-cover are now treated as visible to units they can see

Ground Exploration Gameplay

• Transition between ground scenes - Added transition points the player party can use to travel between levels

• Ground Navigation Initial Implementation - When out of combat, the player can select a position on the ground and his selected party members will move to it in real time

• Transition In/Out of Combat - the game is able to transition between combat and non-combat navigation modes, such as from defeating all enemies

User Interface / User Experience

• Character UI Improvements - added character names, current hp,  and max hp numbers to the character UI

• Health Bar Number Cleanup - Improved the readability of numbers on health bars

• Hide Combat Actions when Navigating - The combat action UI is disabled when not in combat

• Injury UI - the character UI now displays a symbol if a unit is suffering from an injury. Mousing over the symbol displays a tooltip describing the injury effects

• Camera capture enemy actions - the camera focuses on enemies who are performing actions during the enemy turn

• Fix Movement Path when dropping down - movement path line no longer clips through terrain when dropping down from higher elevation

• Show Both Loadouts on UI - the UI now shows both weapon sets a unit is equipped with so the player no longer has to rely on memory or swap weapons to see what equipment a character is packing

• Highlight Objects of Interest Mode - added a UI mode that highlights objects that can be interacted with (doors, buttons, containers, corpses, etc.) and displays their name above the object

• Restrict Camera Range of Movement - having violated curfew, camera movement is now restricted to the confines of the level until it learns to behave

• Crew HP UI - added a health bar displaying the amount of living crew on board a ship during space combat

Space Combat Gameplay

• Refactor Ship Combat Damage Registration - the original prototype relied on separate physics colliders to determine where a ship received impacts. This has been greatly simplified to a single collider with the point of impact determined by algorithm

• Cannon Volleys - The synchronicity of cannon volleys is now dependent on the skill of the crew manning the guns. At maximum skill, volleys will be in perfect synchronicity.

• Refactor Ship Movement & Acceleration - greatly improved the acceleration/deceleration curves of ships to correct weird behavior when changing speed rapidly and to help ships feel more pondering and powerful

• Ship Crew HP System - Implemented crew system. Above 80% crew, a ship will function normally. Below that, performance will start degrading. Cannon will take longer to reload, the ship will take longer to accelerate/decelerate, orders will take longer to execute, etc.

• Limit when boarding is allowed - successful boarding now requires both ships be relatively parallel and matching speed. Higher boarding skill allows a great acceptable difference in speed and angle of attack

• Ramming - Implemented a robust damage model for ramming that takes into account relative speed, mass, and angle of impacting ships.

• Crew Damage Model - whenever a ship takes damage, there is now a chance the crew will suffer casualties based on a number of factors, such as remaining armor in the impacted location and crew damage control skill

General

• Standalone PC Build - created a standalone PC build for testing 

• Update Unity Version - updated Unity version to latest LTS build

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where mouse clicks were not registering on elevated ground planes

• Fixed a bug where the game could get stuck when a unit was killed by sentry action

• Fixed a bug where terrain cover markers would persist when issuing a compound command

• Removed an exploit that allowed a unit to reveal an enemy and take a sentry shot at them in the same turn by issuing a compound command

• Units can now heal themselves when using healing action as a compound command

• Enemies can no longer take a sentry shot and move in the same turn

• Dead characters with melee weapons no longer attempt to take opportunity attacks against opponents walking too close to their corpse