Indiegogo campaign completed, 3rd adventure comic revealed

Our Indiegogo campaign did pretty well! About 223 roguelikers contributed to our noble cause, and we were also approached by several cool publishers.
Before the campaign started, we agreed that development of the game itself shouldn't suffer because of it. The campaign probably earned a bit less because of that, but not delaying development is almost priceless for us :)
All Indiegogo contributors have our eternal gratitude and will receive a new playable within this year (seriously, thank you for helping us - we didn't lose our hope for humanity because of you!). We are currently working on a major combat system update. The new features havent been fully implemented yet but testing them feels already very satisfying. 

February update, good vibes

Mothership Energy Management System 

Hello again, bold uknown heroes who venture into the rising territories of Estonian independent game development! Above you can see the internal layer of the player ship and it's energy system. If we can, we'd like to add a few other internal systems to this layer. 

For example, the command bridge could be linked with the warpdrive, sensors and jammers. If the bridge ends up getting hit, the linked subsystems would get disabled until the bridge is repaired 
The additional subsystems can be done only if we can spare enought devtime. 
However, in the best case, the internal systems would be something that your ship pet cat (yes, various pets are a planned feature in addition to ship crew and internal drones) could get stuck in, so you'd have to send down search parties. And sometimes, you could find fleshy eggs there, left behind by certain xenomorphous aliens :)

In other news, general development & negotiations with various potential partners are running along nicely. It's better to do great things together rather than alone, right? :) There's a good work flow going on and we build something which can be seen and/or played around with almost every week, which is highly motivating. 

September update, good news

We've had a bit of radio silence here because so much has been going on. We worked most of the summer to prepare Interactive Fate for investments (the legalities involved were a challenge, but we solved everything) and turn the late alpha version of Rogue Ambassador into a very early beta.

This means we have all the major features of the game engine ready and we can soon dedicate ourselves fully to creating content: more space ships, exotic planets, quests, alien species, artifacts, and all the other cool stuff in the game. We are actively communicating with our potential publishers again and all signs so far are very positive =)

Another big news is the battle mode. After careful game designing and planning, we decided to make the RTS-style combat (as in Starcraft or Warcraft) more similar to FTL-style combat, which can be played both in real time or by turns.

The Mothership versus hostile pirate fleets

Click on image to see the full-sized picture

To attack, the player selects individual weapons directly from ship (or from the list of modules) and targets them at individual hostile ships seen on the right.
Combat sensors, jammers, nukes and tactical fighter ships are used the same way.

Internal combat versus boarding teams (or alien parasites)

Click on image to see the full-sized picture

The common aim of space pirates is not to destroy the Mothership, but destroy all its weapons and capture the ship and its cargo. Pirate assault  pods will be launched at the mothership, full of armed aliens ready to breach the hull and kill or enslave everybody inside. If any weapons are still intact or can be repaired quickly enough, some of the assaulters can be shot to pieces before reaching the ship.

The boarding usually starts only when enemies have also disabled your emergency escape warpdrive. If you are able to repair the warpdrive beforore it or the ship command bridge is captured, you can warp to safe distance from the combat. Any enemies inside Mothership at the time of escape will remain there and will have to be neutralized.

As mentioned in the previous post, much more nastier creatures can creep into the Mothership as well. Certain space organisms have the cozy habit of secretly infesting your ship with their eggs, cocoons, or larvae.

Needless to say, when the little guys hatch, they will start eating your crew and laying more eggs. The space parasites will be hard to discover if the player does not realize that crewmembers are regularly going missing or that the engine malfunctions are the result of aliens getting stuck in there. I'm sure Ellen Ripley would approve this design choice :)

I aim to continue blog updates more regularly now (twice a month, perhaps). Your feedback and comments are what motivates me the most, so please keep them coming! :)