I'm back, and I bring some good news: 

After the last release, I decided to go for a larger content update in one go, focused around space travel and ship repairs. The update is well under way, and will be ready by April this year! I am also excited to be able to put more hours into this project during this time, which is always great.

Quick note: I would love to have some people playtest my releases, which does wonders for general stability when developing something like this. If you would like to 1) Play Sphere a little earlier than everyone else and 2) get featured on a credits page in the main menu, contact me here on itch.io!

Now for this post, I will share some upcoming features with you. For the summary, check out the updated roadmap on the game page.

Space

For sphere to be a proper space game, it is currently missing one central feature: Space exploration. The update will amend this, and add a new view for ship navigation and scanning. Shipwrecks are arranged into clusters, and we will need thrusters to move around in local space.

After repairing the jump drive, and getting a required item, we will be able to jump between clusters on the world map, reaching different, and potentially more dangerous environments.

Visuals are WIP and may change a little. The background is done via diamond-square noise - one for cloud brightness, one for color.

Mouse controls

I recently learned that computers often come with a kind of clicky-pointy device which apparently looks like this:

Jokes aside, I am putting some time into implementing full mouse controls for Sphere, mostly because the new menus work much nicer with it, and it is more comfortable for most folks. I still aim to keep the game playable with the keyboard, though. The main reason this has not been done yet is because, as some of you may know, I foolishly decided to do my own GUI framework when I started this project.

Nicer ship content

Ships will be given more variability on shape, size and interiors. The goal here is mostly to provide variety, and to allow players to choose their preferred scope and difficulty when doing loot runs. Different kinds of wreck will have different rewards, heavily destroyed ships are a low-risk source of basic materials, for instance, while intact and inhabited cargo or vault ships pose a greater combat challenge for more or advanced loot.

As always, thank you for playing reading, and see you soon!