Hey everyone! First off, we very much realize that this update is really late in coming. After releasing the update earlier in the year, the plan was for this update to essentially be the "official releasing of the game update".  Unfortunately the save / load system has continued to slow things down.  We continued to hold off on this update in hopes that things would get finished. 

A few things I want to make clear. We really appreciate all of you and your patience. We realize some of you are very upset and are chomping at the bits ready for this game to be released. We hear you and you have every right to feel the way you do. All we can say is that this game is going to come out. Not releasing this game is not an option. Please realize we are SO close to the finish line here. All of us have dedicated so much energy, blood, sweat, tears, and not to mention family time to get this game done. There have just been a lot of set backs in this project beyond anyone's control. This is not about making excuses, just stating some facts. Regardless, SpaceVenture is absolutely going to get released!

SO WHAT HAS BEEN THE FOCUS THE LAST FEW MONTHS?

The majority of our focus has been on the save/load system, which has gone through a major overhaul. To clarify on the problems with the save/load system, we had put the original system in place during the beginning of our progress on the game, and it worked okay during that time. During the first phase of SpaceVenture, we didn't have anywhere near the amount of game mechanics as we ended up with when the game got to its final stages. Throughout this process, the save/load system got back-burnered due to us trying to finish the full game. Our thoughts were that it shouldn't be too much trouble to bring the system up to date once we had all the mechanics in. Unfortunately this was very wrong. 

The approach we should have taken would have been to modify the save / load system along the way. This would have taken longer to get to the final stages of the game, but we would have not ran into the problems that we have now.

On top of the save / load system being worked on, there has been more polish put into the game as well. Our beta testers did a great job of documenting things that were wrong and team members not working on save / load components have been able to put some time on those items as well.

HOW WILL THE SAVE / LOAD SYSTEM OPERATE IN SPACEVENTURE NOW?

In a perfect world, we would love for the player to be able to just save anywhere, anytime they want and be able to restore and things go exactly back to the way they were. In a lot scenes in SpaceVenture, you will get just that.

There are going to be three things to understand about the system you will experience while playing SpaceVenture:

• Normal Saving and Loading: The game lets you save on a scene and you can just restore back to the way they were when you saved.
• In certain sequences saving will be disabled: During certain areas of the game, mostly when animation operations are occurring, there will be a red X that appears over the save icon. You will need to wait until a certain sequence finishes or complete some small task before you will be able to save. There are very few cases in the game where you will experience this.
• Saving in certain scenes will reset the scene upon reloading: On certain scenes due to the different mechanics occurring, the scene will reset upon reloading. This issue has been the biggest thing we've been trying to solve during the course of this year. Unfortunately there is just no easy answer to solving this problem for every single scene in the game. The good news is, this is just in a few areas of the game and understand that even when the scene resets upon load it will take very little time for you to complete tasks to get back to where you were before reloading. Also, you will know when this is going to occur because the game will warn you before saving.

SO WHATS HAPPENING NOW?

We are very close to having the save / load system working for the whole game but there are still some troublesome areas that we are fighting. These areas need to be 100% working with the system before we release the game.  

WHEN THE GAME IS RELEASED WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT?

The game will be released on Windows first. As you all probably remember, we are using Unity as the game engine so porting the game over to the other systems shouldn't be a big problem, but we do expect there to be some issues that need to be worked out for that to happen. We also realize that you all may report bugs and we will try to release fixes for those as well. 

After all of that, we will be working on shipping rewards. Please do not message us your updated address information for rewards. We will eventually send out a survey that will allow you to put your updated information in there for us.

So that's it folks. The next update WILL contain info about releasing the game and how it will be going out. Thank you all for your patience and hope you will find the game to be worth the wait when you get it.

If anyone is worried about the "exclusivity" of the beta to a specific set of backers, I do believe the year we have had the access is more than enough to cover it, especially considering that we haven't had an update of the beta for a long time. 

So, I don't know. Maybe it could be smart to release the build to all the backers. It could show some good faith, perhaps even alleviate the current mood at the Kickstarter forums. That place hasn't been pretty in a good while. 

Wait for it......

Regarding the rather familiar sleeping person Ace stumbles across in the Supplies room on the Deep Space Research station -- think they made it off the station in time?

This walk thru is the only version currently supported - and takes you up to the "NANO" scene. Anything you try and do within this walk thru that creates a bug, please report it.

Supported SpaceVenture Walkthrough (BETA 1.0 v2.0)

For example, I had two ship pieces and the meteor when I seemed to be stuck getting the last engine piece from the far left slot (literally moved every piece of "junk" out of there so that it was just lifting ET games; and still the magnet couldn't seem to find the engine piece no matter where I moved it) - so I tried to save from the crane - when I found the "Empty Slot" bug (reported here - https://itch.io/t/1082992/v4-attempting-to-save-a-game-from-the-crane-shows-all-...) - saved and restored (just to see what would happen restoring from the crane save slot).

Boom. Ace is at the front of the junkyard, in mule, and all progress was lost (no longer had the pole, the two ship pieces, meteor). So you need to know where to save where it's safe to know the game has all your progress saved.

This could be a major turn off to someone, whose done a bunch. Saved. Came back. And all that progress is gone.

Full size: Here.

Maybe I am easily amused. But this took me back to my old 286/386 machines. :D

Everyone considered him the janitor of the galaxy
He'd cleaned every toilet from here to there
His father said there's something better, but Ace never cared
Something always told Ace, that he'd prove his father wrong

He was only ten years old when he got his first contract
I remember how when he stood proudly, looking at me
I still recall the excitement in Ace's eyes 
When he turned to me
And he said, "The only thing that sucks is going to be this plunger."

There's someone for everyone and Ace's love was Rooter
Faithful as ever, made by Scraps, from scraps
Rooter can hold his tools, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.

And flooded the toilets and the elevator
The turdomorph seemed to laugh as it was in the pipes
But when Ace got'em in the blender
He said, "This one's for Rooter."
And pressed the button.

I wonder if the Guys would get away with something like this in SV?

Even if it was just seeing him from behind... Would be pretty funny.

Honestly. Thank you.

Especially since they did a documentary about it and dug it up at a trash site... the E.T. Atari 2600 cartridge. I've added a few here. :D

Eager? Me?

Perish the thought.... :D

I don't even know if I've seen a full episode of 1960s Lost in Space but I still recognize Jonathan Harris's Dr. Zachary Smith.

Only fix seems to be to ALT-F4 and start again

Anyone else having this issue?

A few thoughts: 

• The first click tries to interact with something and that is expected.  The second click should should dismiss the dialog, not try to do the interaction again.  
• Interacting with things seems difficult.  I spent 20 minutes on the first screen having no idea what to do other than knocking out the windows with the wrench.  I could not figure out how to interact with the door--then all of a sudden the screen changed to a close up of the door.  No idea what Ace finally approached the door nor why he didn't do so earlier.  
• A few times I was able to see a close up of the vent, showing the type of bolt I need to match with the socket.  But most of the time I just get a dialog about the weird bolts.  I've clicked everywhere on it and am confused as to how I got it to open before, and why I can't now.
• Hot spots are not always there and I'm not sure why.  Perhaps it has something to do with different cursor types..  As one example, once I got the dog on the other side of the crates, I could not get him to interact with the crate movey thing. No hotspot there.  Eventually it just worked.  As another example, there is no indication that things can be moved on the desk.

Even following some of the walk-through hints on this forum, I'm having extreme difficulty progressing.  The game should not be difficult while following a walkthrough.  

And by far my favorite...

However, the first puzzle in the game is wrong, handle 2 rotates the wrong way according to the diagram, and there are a dozen missing or place holder action cues in the first three screens. I started documenting this, but this is alpha and pre-alpha stuff. The lack of feedback when an action I'm attempting isn't possible versus I failed to click in the right spot versus I failed to intuit what the UI thought I wanted to do renders the game quite frustrating to play. I feel that any feedback I could give on the puzzles would be meaningless as so far many feel unfinished and if I comment that putting the hint that you need to use Rooter's head for the bit as the second look action on the Zapon drill seems obtuse, given that most objects don't have additional descriptions, that's pointless if the game is just missing a line for when you try to put a bit in the pipe wrench (my initial thought) that points to Rooter.

I'm also a Linux user playing on Wine, so that might be to blame for some of my UI issues, but based on other feedback I'm seeing I suspect that isn't the primary cause.

But I LOVE, love the art in Scraps' garage and the density of details and sci-fi references.  With of course, the best being the "Home" scene, the junk/TV room upstairs from the garage.  And I thought it'd be fun to see how many references we can identify.

Edit: Probably helps to zoom since it's pretty small picture here in the forum thread.  In Chrome, right click and "Open in new tab", in Firefox, "View Image".  Then can zoom more as needed)

I'll start with the ones I think I've found (which I don't think are even half of what's here):

From left to right, top half:
- Pong machine (apparently Clucky Chicken went with a retro cab design)  Edit:  was wrong, this is Computer Space, see below 
- Commodore 64, second model
- "The Robot" (Lost in Space)
- Weighted Companion Cube (Portal)
- I dunno, an old Goldstar black-and-white TV?
- BB-8
- Klaatu?
- Not sure what or even if the planetarium or swordfish ("bladefish") are references to.  I thought the planetarium thing might be from Dark Crystal, but no.
- Master Chief (Halo)
- Voyager Gold Record
- I think the "holochess" table rom Star Wars
- A Dalek carcass with an R2 unit's head welded on, which works better than you'd think

Left to right, bottom half:

- That orange thing must be  reference to something, but I can't place it.
- Tom Servo (MST3k)
- I think the projector is supposed to be made out of one of the martians from War of the Worlds - V.I.N.CENT (The Black Hole)
- Crow T. Robot (MST3K)
- The little training "remote" droid from Star Wars
- The hand of the Iron Giant
- Not sure what that last silhouette is - it kinda looks like Discovery One from 2001, but the body's wrong.  I was thinking maybe Cambot from MST3k or maybe some Klingon ship from Star Trek, but don't think those are it either.  Maybe it's just junk?

Anyway, there's  BUNCH more to find, curious what else people see =)

Edit:  Fixed some formatting munging

I can't wait for build 3, hopefully I'll be able to get past the rooter repair part then and continue to explore! <3

I find most puzzles boring to be honest, choosing the proper socket for example, is not challenging at all!