Greetings Spacers Years ago I used to be exclusively a Playstation gamer, but when Morrowind was released I bought an Xbox just to play that game. The freedom Morrowind offered was irresistible to me. The first thing I did when I hopped off that ship was to find a door to lockpick. It wasnt the allure of criminal activity that drove this, but rather the freedom to go places that you wouldnt usually be able to go. So obviously when making my own game I would want to offer that kind of freedom too. This month I have been working on a few different aspects of the game, but the one that excites me the most is the ability to hack doors, giving access to any building in the game. The difficulty of the mini-game will depend on the type of door. A small common residence would be quite simple, but a military compound would be extremely difficult to complete without triggering the alarm. Later, Ill be adding a similar system to allow you to borrow other peoples speeders when on planets. [previewyoutube=WSKzChP9-lE;full][/previewyoutube] Ive also been working on the backend of a terrain system that will allow faster creation of levels, especially more confined areas such as underground mines and caves. Over the next month I will be focusing on creating more pixel art and completing the mine and large open over-world area on the starter planet and implementing the mining mechanic. The mining mechanic will allow you to collect raw resources that can be added directly to your ships cargo inventory. You could sell the commodities locally, but the chances are youd get a much better price transporting them to a world where there is a higher demand for it. Until next month, travel safely. Dave

Hi Spacers I'm really excited to finally be able to show a new trailer for Orion's End. It features some familiar and unfamiliar aspects of the game, and is a more accurate representation of where the game is currently at. For a while I struggled with some creative decisions concerning the development of Orion's End, which led to a period of non-progress, and eventually to me taking an extended break from its development. However, I have been back working on the game for some time now, and feel confident in recommencing regular updates here on Steam and social media. Today I have revealed a new trailer that shows off the current state of the game, which is sticking to the original style and concept for the most part, but has seen some changes (I think improvements) in space travel and planetary exploration. I have recently started a new job which is very draining on me mentally, so progress will be slow for a little while until I learn the ropes fully, but I shall keep plugging away on Orion's End and endeavour to post more regular updates. Happy space travels. Dave [previewyoutube=qFXatRqgB88;leftthumb][/previewyoutube]

Hi Everyone It's time that I finally face the fact that progress on Orion's End has ground to a halt - for the time being at least. I believe that I was quite naive and overly ambitious with the project considering my level of experience with a project of that size. I also found myself conflicted between what I wanted to achieve and what was practical within the time frame I was aiming for. I haven't given up all ambition with this project though, but it may be a while before I return to it. Thank you to everyone who has made positive, encouraging, or helpful comments here and on social media. I found your energy to be extremely motivating for a long while. I also offer my sincere apologies to everyone who was interested in the project. In the meantime, I am still involved in game dev. I have been working on a new project for a while now and I am happy with its progress. I will share a few images of the game here. Thanks again to everyone, and I look forward to telling you more about the new game.

Hi everyone. Its been quite a while since Ive posted anything,anywhereabout Orions 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 Orions End and discovered something horrible. The basic gameplay of the game just wasnt 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 didnt work for the game I wanted to make. It wasnt good enough. So, I decided to go silent for a little while until I had a plan of how to proceed. I didnt 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 wasnt 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 didnt have an answer, but I always felt just a few days away from having the answer, so I didnt 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 didnt have a plan to go forward. I didnt want to abandon the project, but I didnt want to keep working on it in its current direction. I thought many times about providing an update, but I really didnt 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. Ive 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 dont expect Orions 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, Im 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

November has been a very productive time for us, and we have seen some good progress in game elements that we've wanted to put into the game for a while now. As mentioned last month, two of these were character customisation and a customisable living area on the ship. Character Customisation The character customisation is not completed as yet, as it needs more variety in some of the features, such as hairstyle and accessories, but already it is offering a diverse assortment of possible characters. We have chosen to not have gender as a selectable trait and instead all features are available to every character, allowing you to create any character you like without boundaries.
There is a random creation button, and most of the following characters were created with the simple press of a button. However, characters can be created by modifying every feature individually, also. Features include face shape, skin colour, hair, eyebrow shape and colour, eye shapes and colour, nose, mouth, costume and tattoos, scars, complexion and other features.


New Ship Design The ship has been evolving slowly since the project's conception, and we admit the design was looking a little too reminiscent of another spaceship you might be familiar with. As Orion's End developed its own character, we felt it needed a more unique look to the player's ship, and the design needed to take into account the demands and dimensions of a customisable living quarters. So, the new ship design is as follows.
Living Quarters Customisation The ship has multiple decks, including the main flight deck, a cargo hold and the players living quarters. The living quarters is a holographic projection room, which can be customised as you see fit. As you explore the many systems you will collect many blueprints for artefacts and furniture design, which can be deployed to your living quarters to personalise it to your taste. The living quarters functions now as it should, however it is still early days in its development. It will require a lot more variations of decor and functionality, however we are off to a solid start.



Adding More to the Worlds We've also been adding details and character to the existing worlds, giving small insights as to what stories might be going to unfold on the planets. On Baucoi, for example, there is a large mining corporation that has taken over the grassroots operations of the locals, with the expected reaction from the locals.
What's Next? The next thing we'll be working on is adding even more detail to all of the existing planets and starting the personal stories and quests for the NPCs. We'll also be starting to develop some new planets to visit. We've started sketching out some possible designs for them.
Safe travels in the spacelanes, friends, and we'll be sharing more at the end of December. The Orion's End Crew

Greetings Spacers! I'm running a little later than planned with the October Dev Log, but the good news is that it was because we were hard at work on Orion's End that I'm behind. And that means we have seen quite a bit of progress. Last Month's Promise Last month I said we'll be working on more ship and blaster upgrades. As planned, there is now a specialist NPC you visit who can upgrade the individual aspects of the hand blaster and ships weapon, shield and systems - strength, fire rate, recharge etc. The player decides what aspects of the equipment is most urgent. A slow firing but powerful weapon if you are a confident aim, or a low strength rapid fire weapon. Eventually, you could have a rapid-fire, high-power weapon, but we need to look at balancing the gameplay around that somehow. True Colours Due to an oversight on my part, the previous colour palette for Orion's End did not capture the feel that I intended. The colours were artificially enhanced by the colour profile on my main computer, making me believe the colours were more vibrant than a lot of people were seeing them. So, to correct the problem, a fair amount of time was spent finding the correct colours and then recolouring all of the existing graphics for the game. But from now on all future graphics has a colour palette that is a balance between the different colour profiles presentation, and I won't make THAT mistake again. (As a side note: The new trailer shows slightly different colours to the new ones - the trailer may appear more saturated than what we will be working with from here on) Palette Comparison
Hitting Things with Other Things We now have a melee combat system in the game. No longer are we limited to blasters for vaporising aliens. The weapon currently is a power sword, because power swords are cool. Both sword and blaster are equipped simultaneously, and it is easy to jump back and forwards between them during combat.
Damn the Torpedoes! I am periodically adding more features to spacelane travel, especially the combat. The combat had become more dynamic and fun with the addition of torpedoes from pirate vessels. This paves the way for other enemy weapons like defence drones and mines.
Dungeons Keeping The map generation for the Space Hulk dungeon has been modified to create more interesting and a little-less-cramped areas. This should make combat more fun especially now that melee is implemented, while still retaining a claustrophobic feeling at times. Also, steps are underway to make the space hulk levels a little more varied and interesting. Picture Perfect New NPC portrait sizes are being implemented to show off more of the characters appearance and personality. This goes hand in hand with the different layout for the NPC dialogue boxes. This also led us to start work on the feature I've been putting off for a while, and that is the player character customisation. Stay tuned for more on that next month.
Fill My Trailer with Pixels! We now have a new trailer, which shows off the increased resolution, some of the graphical changes and a colour palette closer to my original vision - but as I said a little more vibrant than we are currently working on - but we didn't want to delay releasing the new trailer any longer. I have been trying to release new trailers periodically, to reflect the current state of the game, and the next trailer will be showing off a greater variety of gameplay experience, so I look forward to being able to do that. Now the Bad News I have had to change the estimated release date on the Steam page to reflect when I realistically believe the game will be ready to play. And that date, unfortunately is ... "I don't know". I have a development schedule on a whiteboard in my workspace, and I've watched as we have slipped further and further out of sync with my schedule. As I want the game to be the best it can be, and as this is my first commercial game, and my first game of anywhere near this scale, I need to be careful with what I promise. Also, Steam is now changing their policy about how a release date is shown when you don't have a solid release date, and the most accurate option is "To Be Announced". I will provide in these Dev Logs any news when I have it. My deepest apologies, and I hope you will remain a fellow passenger on this journey into the far reaches. In the coming month we'll be working on player character customisation, the living quarters deck on the ship and more. Safe travels in the spacelanes, friends, and we'll be sharing more soon. The Orion's End Crew

Greetings Spacers! We've been hard at work on Orion's End over the last month, however, there hasn't been anything visually impressive to show off. Hence, why I've been so quiet on Twitter lately. (Twitter is usually where you will find frequent updates on what we've been doing lately.) A New Dimension A major change to the game has been the screen resolution, which has been increased from an already impressive 256 x 144 pixels, to a massive 320 x 180 pixels. It mightn't sound like much, but it has created a lot of freedom around menu screens and more importantly the internal space of the player ship. I originally loved the pokey little ship, but with plans to have a customisable living space on a lower deck, the additional room will be greatly appreciated when that is implemented. Unfortunately, this has meant that there was quite a bit of time modifying code and graphics to suit the new dimensions. This is almost completed now. You can see the change to the ship design below. (It still requires more consoles and extra engines. They will come soon.)

Bugs, Bugs and More Bugs! We've also been squashing some annoying bugs, optimising code and then squashing more bugs from the new code. :( But it has been time well spent, and the game is feeling a little smoother thanks to the lack of invertebrates. Speaking of bugs, the randomly generated spacehulk levels are absolutely full of bugs and they are really fun to blast away at. The plan is to have 100 levels of increasingly difficult levels to grind through if you feel so inclined and gather all kind of rewards for the effort - monetary, loot and in-game badges.
Dodgy Space Travel Space combat has been pretty fun, but we felt it needed to be a bit more fun. So, we have started to implement more weapon and ship upgrades. The first two involve some pretty cool ship manoeuvres, allowing the player to dodge and weave through other ships and asteroids like a true roguish space captain.
Next, we will be working on hand blaster upgrades and more ship upgrades. Safe travels in the spacelanes, friends, and we'll be sharing more soon. The Orion's End Crew