Hey guys, it's been a long time. Lots of life changes... significant family medical emergency in my family a while back, one in the artist's family more recently. Honestly, just the typical risks in any indie game development where progress is contingent upon the availability of very few people.
However, the tallest pole in the tent has always been the artwork and I have continued to fund that part of the project to keep the project moving along. Because of the time involved in doing the last two races (Humans and Klackons) and the 240 ship animations for all 10 races, I made the decision to go radio silent on the project rather than create some sort of drip drip tease about the game when I knew the next alpha would take a long time to get here.
But it's a good time now to let everyone know that the next alpha, Alpha 5, should almost certainly be ready by the end of the year.
Here's my handy-dandy cut and paste of what's added for this alpha and what remains to be done for the final release:
Added in Alpha 5:
-- Human and Klackon races added (all 10 races now in game)
-- Player-controlled tactical ship combat now added
-- Modernized ship artwork for all 10 races
-- Modernized Ship Design UI
-- 14 of 16 original random events added
What's remaining for the beta and 1.0 release:
-- Orion homeworld & guardian ship (artwork completed)
-- 3 diplomatic options
-- 2 random events for Space Amoeba and Crystalline Entity (artwork completed)
-- Game Over animations
-- language translations (post-beta)
-- updated artwork for sabotage missions and technology discoveries (several months of work)
-- modernized UIs for map UI, races UI, sabotage UI and galactic council UI
As you can see, the game is literally 99% functionally done at this point. All that's left is a handful of minor features and then cosmetic stuff like artwork and revamping the last few UIs.
Once all of the artwork is done and there is no placeholder artwork in the game, I'll start an official beta and open-source the code for anyone who wants to see what a crappy games programmer I am. It's also the point where I will hopefully be able to crowdsource AI improvements.
Please note: don't get perturbed if you see this exact post pasted on another game forum. I just don't want to type all of this out again! Obviously I will personally respond to any questions and comments here.
Example intro screen for the Klackons: