This is Muhammad seen from a great distance:

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Played some more, still loving it.

Hope things are going OK and not too stressful. Good luck! Looking forward to it

Yeah it works fine here too, XP SP3, Firefox 3.6.3, 2.4 GHz single core

This is Mohammed holding the still-warm heart of an Infidel.

All he's saying is start with the most important features first, which is like writing a game prototype instead of starting with the introduction screen. I'd wager most game programmers start like this. Hands up if you started your last game project by programming the title screen?


Didn't think so.

Cool, well, looking forward to more  

I think you need to make a distinction between lanes that don't lead to a civilised world and lanes which can't be travelled due to insufficient navigational ability - I thought for ages the red lanes couldn't be flown, until I actually tried it. Basically what I am saying is that I look at the lanes to tell me whether I can travel, not the destinations.

Also there is a lane off to the right that is so long I cannot select the destination.

I bought two Anti-armour IV lasers and equipped them in my laser bay; only one appeared on my ship even though both appeared as equipped. I could sell one, so I did - when I looked back at the equip screen the second laser had indeed gone. I bought and equipped an auto-laser II which DID appear on the ship graphic. I didn't notice it automatically firing, however!

Battles in general seem far too easy. I haven't had to flee once yet.

Would be good to see more varieties of ship for purchase (I haven't really read any of your notes yet so I don't know what's planned / in progress). They seem mostly middling (i.e. balanced between offense/trade), and I didn't notice an increase in available weapon slots or whatever, just hull integrity and capacity...

Even though it is lovely and evocative and immersive, it's quite annoying to have to click on the small buttons to access the planet menu, could it also be laid out in shortcut at the top left as it is once you open it?

I like the levels system, but sometimes it feels like I'm piling points into something with no purpose... like, I don't have any need to put anything into "piloting" until I want to buy a new ship, but by the time I realise that I might be quite high level and it'll take me ages to put enough points into that skill, as levels are very far apart. I think I need more incentive to allocate my points intelligently instead of just picking crazy random stuff. Like, I know I have Navigation goals as there are places to go where I need e.g. 50 points to go there, but I've only seen 15 points for trading arms, and some amount of points for a new ship (didn't check too closely), and haven't seen anything at all for arms.

Was thinking piloting could feed back into the battle system for dodging missiles etc...? Just a thought anyway.

Hmm fuel is annoying so I understand why you got rid of it, but it drops the incentive to sell off cargo at a loss - I might as well keep hold of it until I find a sweet deal, seeing as it's not costing me anything to haul it around the galaxy; in fact I'm keeping in profit due to the battles being easy. How about turning some of the dropped cargo bits in battle into actual cargo so that I have to offload that shit before I head out pirate-hunting?

Anyway FUCKING sweet game, the graphics are really sweet and good sound and movement, interface etc is nice. Looking forward to more.

Love it already.

Couple of minor things:
- I could get a pop-up for a planet while hovering over a menu item
- "prepare to be fired apon" - should be "upon"

Woho, gonna give this a go later.

So I combined the ideas of what I was thinking and what alex suggested and made a quick edit.

I only did one ball because I didn't have too much time, but as you can see, it can look pretty dang awesome fully textured.

The problem with fully textured elements is when the thing is moving - as they go 'north' of other elements they will pop behind them and that'll be more visible the more busy the texture is. With the flat shaded bits, the outline idea deals with the popping as you don't see the edge of the element going behind the elements around it.

She was fine once you softened her up a bit. I'd be grumpy too if I were on the night desk of a hostel on my own

I found the guys at the hostel were really good with booking alteration - so book it now for the current guest list and then you can phone them up and amend it later.

Love the art! I am not thrilled by the idea of the mechanic but that is just my taste. Good luck!

Absolutely, and the small team size really is the key.

small fan base:
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php

I'm certainly not angry though. 

Well I am. 

This argument cannot end. How much I am (or anyone is) willing to pay for a game is totally subjective and arbitrary.

Right, and I have a value attached to my product. So I want to accommodate those who are only willing to pay a fraction of what I want to charge for the game, but not give the people who are willing to pay that much or more nothing extra for their effort. So either I have some kind of punishment for paying less than my asking price, or I ask for much less and give much more to people who pay more.

The former (punitive) is easier of course, if a little negative - the way I would do it would be to let people choose how much they want to pay for the product and reduce the price over time, emailing those who had selected lower price tags when the price dropped to that level.

The latter (reward) is much harder as you have to have extra content ready for release when you launch, and your tiered product bundles all sorted out, it is also less of a continuum (can't have 100 different bundles for every $value up to $100 for instance) and if you want to accommodate the real fucking cheapskates you have to sell your base game for $1.

Oh I thought the minimum was a dollar. Well, I wonder how much of the money they totalled up was swallowed by paypal.

haha reading those articles remind me of how i thought the first part of Spore was the best, since everything you did (except eyes oh look eyes it doesn't really matter i guess) affected your microbe, the rest was a bit like dress-up

it still lacked about 25 parts though, i think that says a lot about the gameplay diversity i expected from the real creature phase haha but wasn't that what we all expected

as of now E.V.O. is a better "creature phase" and that's a fucking SNES game

man there is nothing incredible about that "procedural" animation thing i mean sure it's good and okay but you know there's a PS2 game where you can just draw anything and say "this part is a leg" and it works, sure it maybe has slightly less animations total but at least you can draw whatever, you're not limited to twelve bones, twelves mouths etc

also how you draw things affect how you play out already a bit more

anyways if you're not man enough to take one for the team its ok chris... its ok... its all your teams' fault that the game didn't meet anyone's expectations...

I'd just like to underline how unpleasant this post is. Not cool.

Wow, not bad! Ok, you proofed me wrong, the spheres can be improved. 

But it seems even harder to me to create head and wings that can compete with that style. (at least without 3D software) Initially, I wanted to avoid that.

Yeah, it might prove difficult, and also end up not matching with the rest of your art, etc. I say it looks fine as it is