Hi everyone. It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything, anywhere about Orion’s End and I think I owe you an explanation. At the beginning of the year, I was sick for a while and had a short break from programming. When I was feeling better, I returned to Orion’s End and discovered something horrible. The basic gameplay of the game just wasn’t fun. Space travel was tedious after doing it a few times and ground combat was too imprecise. My initial idea was to base the gameplay elements on classic games from the 80s, and I think I was heading in the right direction, but I found that having a “vibe” of the 80s was great, but having the same level of controls and mechanics just didn’t work for the game I wanted to make. It wasn’t good enough. So, I decided to go silent for a little while until I had a plan of how to proceed. I didn’t expect this to be longer than a week or two. I looked at different changes I could make to the basic game: on land and in space. A experimented with side on 2d platforming rather than top down, old school Asteroids style space flight instead of the Spy Hunter inspired spaceflight I currently had. That wasn’t right though. I loved the top down perspective and the Asteroid style space flight had been done in lots of games already – and was being done a lot better than what I was going to do. Time dragged on and I didn’t have an answer, but I always felt just a few days away from having the answer, so I didn’t want to say anything about the changes until I knew what those changes were going to be. And it was only a couple of more days, right? Wrong! Months later and I still didn’t have a plan to go forward. I didn’t want to abandon the project, but I didn’t want to keep working on it in it’s current direction. I thought many times about providing an update, but I really didn’t have anything insightful to say. I realise this was a bad decision, and I should have said something … anything. So my apologies for remaining silent for so long. What was going to be just a week or two, turned into six months. Future Direction I think I may have a direction to proceed with now, though. I have been experimenting with a completely revamped space travel that I am quite happy with so far. I’ve spent the past two weeks solidly working on it, and now I have the bare skeleton to build upon. I will be sharing some screen capture of this in the near future. I have also been thinking about what I wanted from the game. Realistically, I don’t expect Orion’s End to be a best seller. I think the person who will play the game the most will probably be me, so I have asked myself what it is that I want from the game that I am planning on spending hundreds of hours playing (and many more programming), and that would mean changing the game quite a bit. Or more precisely, adding a lot more to it. The game I wanted would need to allow me to explore extensively and be surprised by what I found. So that meant I needed to use procedural generation to create a lot more planets to explore. But I also wanted to make friends with NPCs in the game and have a home base that I could always return to revisit my friends. So, that meant my original idea of having the hand crafted settlements and stations could remain. I wanted to have satisfying combat both in space and on land, so I needed to totally revamp those systems. I also wanted to discover unexpected missions and stories, so procedural generation would need to be used in the mission system also. But procedural missions could never replace a well crafted story, so that would need to be there too. So that means introducing a few very substantial elements, and the completion date would have to be extended by quite a bit too. (I was very unrealistic with my expectations concerning a release date anyway). And, I’m okay with that. If I am going to spend so long making a game, I want the game to be a game that I'll be happy to show others and happy to play myself. So, thanks for your patience and once again I am so sorry for being so silent for so long. I hope to have more to tell you and more to show in the near future. Dave