I will have to check this out later Mark. What happens to your player when you logoff? Can they still be attacked or can you give instructions on what to do while your not logged in? Is there a offline PvP system as well as online?

For internal user tracking, after ten minutes your account expires on the server and you are automatically logged off. Up until that point another player COULD challenge you to combat (I stress the 'Challenge' part of this statement) but without you there to complete the challenge arrangement, nothing would happen.

(A quick note about PVP: To keep this from becoming an issue challenges are issued by the 'attacking' player. The defending player has no chance to ignore the challenge, they are warned about the encounter and then sent to the combat screen to fight it out. But if they are not at their computer, or have logged off, the challenge 'expires' after 60 seconds and the attacking player is kicked back to the game screen to prevent him from sitting there waiting forever for a player who might not respond. Since the Defending player never sees the challenge, they just get the "Ship Detected!" warning and sent to the combat screen, they have no chance to avoid the combat screen by simply not responding to the challenge. Which is how PVP in a real MMO normally works.)

So you can see, without actively being at your computer to participate in the game there is no way to die. We have a standard PVP flag that allows you to mark yourself as 'off' to the PVP side of the game, since we built this game around PVE style play. PVP won't be fully operational until we finish developing our second game in a few months.

You can't be attacked (see above) and there isn't really room for offline game play. We really wanted something that you play in 'live time' (hence the AJAX scripts!).

It plays out much more like a non-browser MMO then a traditional browser based game, which was our intention.

There is CURRENTLY no offline play, but we're working on a java based demo of the game that will dump you into a combat engagement and cut out 'the fluff' which is things like upgrading your ship with equipment, docking and interacting with stations and/or planets, and interacting with other players.

will it be free? how about some screen shots??!

I'm back! Almost a year later, with more news. We've migrated to a dedicated server to support our emphasis on live-time play without the need of a download or plugin. With that, we've lost several things (like the developers blog, which we're in the process of restoring) but we also (finally!) hired a full time artist, which was something that was serious lacking in our game.

This is something we have struggled greatly with, and after several vigirous months of debate I can tell you that it will not unfortunately be free. And will it NOT be supported by:

1) A Micro-Transaction System (where you pay small amounts of money for small amounts of equipment)

2) A 'product trial' barter system (where you will fill out trial offers for products to earn in-game 'credit' for things)

3) Obnoxious 'punch the monkey' banner ads.

We're not interested in any of those things, my development team is not interested in any of those things, and frankly, we don't play games that have those kinds of things in them.

The off side of this is that, to make money, we will be charging a small (4.95) subscription fee on the site for updated content every month. We're planning a major expansion to the game (a new region of space and new storyline oriented mission, as well as new ships and new challenges to the gameplay by way of the environment and miltia encounters) every month after we launch.

We believe that there is no reason NOT to do this - frankly it's easy to add new content to the game with the tools we've developed, and if we're going to ask you to pay to play our game, we're of the opinion that you should get something for you money every month that you DO pay. Essentially we're talking about mini-expansions every month to our game! And for a fraction of the cost you'd pay anywhere else.

OKAY!!!!!!!!!

(Disclaimer: These screenshots are a few weeks old and we've been constantly updating the artwork in the game, so this may not reflect the final vision, but it'll be PRETTY CLOSE!!!)

Station Purchasing Interface:

Outfitting Screen for your Ship:

System Maneuvering Screen:

One more for good measure, the Combat Screen!

One last thing: you can read some more about our game here! And if you sign up through that page your 'free trial offer' which is normally ten days, is doubled to twenty. I tried to convince the accountants the free trial should be longer for a browser based game but they kept disagreeing with me!

Yes, the browser games should have a little longer trial period. This would help the gamer to have a better involvement with the game and would help him decide to have a go at the game. i had tried this game at my friends place and I must say that my short interaction with the game was some a tactical moments.

Yeap, that's pretty much the summary of our game - it's all tactical. For the moment, there is very little to the strategy side of things. But we're working on updating that with our first month of updates (we should have some details on what that will entail by Monday).

In the meantime what our game lacks for in strategy it makes up for in tactics. Our battles tend to be much more thought provoking then other games, with less button mashing and more consideration given to even the tiniest actions.