Posted April 04, 2023 by Neutronio Games
#release
Hello and welcome to AstraX 0.2!
Quite happy and excited to announce the Exploration Update is finally live! Here is an overview of the amazing features I prepared for you.
The term "Satellite" is an umbrella term for any artificial structures, they can be man-made or alien-made. Examples range from satellite probes to space stations and wrecks. Star systems do generate both planets and these satellites now.
You can dock to certain space stations! Once you target a satellite, the HUD will tell you whether you can dock to it. Docking has a function, namely to replenish oxygen and fuel. More game mechanics regarding Space Stations are to come, e.g. ship construction, trading or building a colony.
Currently you can collect copper and iron ores from two different asteroid traits. It currently happens on the click of a button without restriction. HUD tells you when you collected a resource. With resource collection also comes the implementation of an inventory, which already has a nifty sorting mechanism.
I initially intended to only redesign the HUD, but I ended up reskinning the whole UI instead (Oops). The result is promising: the game has a distinct style now which I really like. I'm also making sure it's high contrast and color-blind-friendly. The HUD comes with gauge indicators for radiation, oxygen and fuel. For the latter two the gauge pointer will start blinking once the value reaches below a certain point. There are also better ways to navigate, such as the planet icons that point towards the direction of the closest targets.
There is a game over state now. It is triggered when either fuel, oxygen or hitpoints reach zero, so make sure you occasionally dock to a station to avoid certain death!
There are a few minor imperfections I would love to have fixed, but given this version is already a couple of days late, I didn't want to delay it further. The game is running stable and mostly bug-less apart from these.
Thanks for reading! Let me know how you liked this version of AstraX in the comments!