A little over 4 months left and I have taken stock of where I'm at and what needs to be finished. I believe my commitment to Steam Next Fest is actually well timed for getting me to be realistic on where I can go from here while sticking to my planned release date.

Currently the focus is general polish across everything, UI, menu options, and balance. I'm trying to knock out as much of this as possible before forking the project over to the demo (luckily this will be easy, I can disable content on the backend with a few edits, and players should have (within reason) a portion of the game to play around freely.

On a potentially disappointing note, I'm scaling back how much lore will make it into the initial game. A logbook type page will remain a "stretch goal" assuming people are playing/enjoying the game enough for a possible post launch update. The benefit is that it's allowing me to clean up the menus a bit, and its a ton of work I can put towards meatening up the content and polishing the rest. I've tried to make the art and ship designs evocative enough to imply there's a lived in world, so I hope that its enough for people to be intrigued to know more.

On a more positive note, the combination of me accidentally making an HD game (making the average ship sprite 128x128 isn't as pixely as I thought it'd be) and Gamemakers built in scaling options, video settings is proving to be a lot easier than I feared, so I will sleep a lot better. Today I added in Steam Deck camera settings so players on 16:10 aspect ratio can play the game without black bars or stretching. I've also enabled free resize while in windowed mode and the graphics seem to hold up well at whatever weird size I stretch the window to (though you will get bars if it isn't 16:9 or 16:10).