Nice stuff here, think you did a good job on that skybox. One thought is that on zooming in you show a nebula/cloud effect. Would be nice to see that effect benefit or hinder a player, so if you zoom right in to the players controlled ship and you see that your almost blinded by a nebula. Think that would add another level of immersion into the game and make the environment part of your strategy as well and it will make those visuals really a part of the game. That's my .02

Cheers, yeah it is something we are considering very carefully. For all of the stats, configurable options and 3D nature of combat in this game - the fact the space has no terrain is probably the biggest obstacle now. Homeworld works around this by distracting the player with countless configurable options and sheer scale but is there a better way to do this?

Truth be told, can we afford to be that adventurous with our first game? Fortune favours the bold granted but we intend to deviate from the tested path in other areas and the dire truth of human fickleness is in the lie that we want something different, but when that something different arrives we slate it for being so. 

A true dichotomy but we shall prevail.

I totally understand about not taking many risks at this stage because adding what may seem like a small immersion feature to the game could involve a huge amount of testing and tweaking to the game. Could the ships themselves provide the tactics? Meaning ships get destroyed and they explode, do you clean up the wreckage as the game progresses or do you leave these on the map to provide maybe a form of absorption from enemy fire. And the same wreckage could prove to be a hindrance if AI or player can flank and make getting away tougher. So wreckage could provide some immersion as well, maybe some smaller fighters take damage because of collisions and the same with larger ships. Just a thought.

In the videos that I have seen looks like shallow space is far along and the polish is being applied and don't remember a tentative release date but the little things count the most sometimes to make your game stand out above the rest.

Oh totally skipped over the fact you now have the producer from N:TJI on your team. Very nice. I enjoyed this game and maybe he can bring in lots of insight to the features that players like most about Nexus and see what can be included in Shallow Space without too much increased dev time. 

A number of people have bought up the floating wrecks thing, it's a good idea actually and we'll probably go down that path. We not using high poly models so we can spare that performance hit I feel now.

The game does look far along and everything is working as it should, the trouble is to attract people to the project we've had to apply some of that polish early (well from day one actually) but there are entire mechanics as yet uncoded and unexplored, also once all this Kickstarter stuff is out the way I really need to tear the whole thing down and spend a couple of weeks documenting and refactoring.

The idea of the project is that we won't just fart out the token game and move on, the idea is to continually develop the engine into 'the' 3D RTS engine. So we have a story arc planned that spans three games, each pushing the boundary out a little more until we eventually hit 4X territory. Of course in the first game the scope is kept narrow so the funds that come in can reward the team and be reinvested in part two but it'll still be packed with content.

Yes, Vincent Van Diemen joining us is amazing news he has sooooo many contacts in the industry (already arranging meetings) and he has done this before so my walls will be adorned with charts aplenty soon enough. Have some really exciting interviews planned with him and I even ask the question about a Nexus 2 😉