Hi Bugbyte,

I recently fell on your website and I'm very enthusiasm about your game. it looks amazing and I can't wait to try it!

I was thinking about some gameplay ideas. I’m just dropping them here and hope that some of them can be helpful for you.



Events / Games Mechanics:

• First of all, what’s the idea about the environment/universe? How do we evolve across Space Haven universe? Is the ship traveling system to system or are events coming to us? Is the possibility to land on planets considered? (different biomes, water, gas, earth-like, volcanic, forest…).
  

• Presence of stations (Markets to sell/buy supplies, meet PNJ...).
  

• Multiple races can be present or if we stay in an only human world, different tribes, clans, corporations can be considered (with a reputation system among them).
  
• Possibility to board into other ships (different modes: assault, alliance, business/recruitment…) from shuttles breaking into the hull (attack) or from an airlock (friendly).
  
• Rare events can happen. Old alien structures with rare resources (artefacts) but can be dangerous situations. Or ship’s wrecks (in that case, no oxygen in the ship, characters will need a space suit to loot the place).
  
• Can the characters go out of the ship? To fix the hull for example? Or loot ship’s wreck mention above.
  
• Possibility of a mother station. The ship is a transportation vehicle to travel around the universe. When the ship is back to the mother station both become one unit through one airlock. So technically we display one “bigger”ship. Possibility to expand the base, production…
  
• So, comes the question about how to navigate between both? Having a “ship”,”base” buttons (drop-down button for example). When click on it we switch between both, so we can have a live management between both and never break the management (a notification system can help to know what’s happening in both locations).
  
• There can be different type of gates in the ship (bulletproof, fire proof, bio-hazard proof, water proof…).
  
• Characters can have stats, evolving from their actions (skills maybe).
  
• Characters customisation is a must!
  
• Having drones to help you to manage basic actions like hauling resources to one place to another, or just clean.
  
• The ship can go through asteroid field and can be damage if the protection of the ship is too less.
  

• Transporting legal & illegal supplies.
  
• Produce specific objects, resources or material.
  
• Find a specific place and loot it.
  
• Bounty (kill or make prisoner).
  
• Raid.
  

• Medical support/Surgeon room (to heal and upgrade characters)
  
• Kitchen
  
• Farming area (produce food and oxygen)
  
• Crew rooms (bed, shower, restrooms) (Different type of room depending of the rank)
  
• Living room, Community room
  
• Cloning room
  
• Storage room
  
• Control room
  
• Energy/Oxygen room (different type of energy possible, combustible, nuclear, alien resources…)
  
• Garbage/Recycling room
  
• Engine room
  
• Jail
  
• Armory
  
• Decompression airlock (different types)
  
• Mining room
  
• Production of resources rooms (weapons, food, construction resources…)
  
• Scientists room (research for new gameplay elements)
  
• Ship’s weapon rooms (need characters to operate them and ammunition specific to the type of weapons, missile for missile launcher for example)
  
• Communication room (to communicate with other ships or to trigger event, like decision making events or pure trading)
  
• Shield room
  
• Safe room (in case of attack, from inside the room we can open all the airlocks or removing the oxygen inside the ships to kill the ennemies)
  
• Escape pods room (in case of attack and escape is the last option -> escape pods are back to the mother station. You save your crew and maybe they can haul some of the most important resources with them) but you loose the ship and everything in it. That will bring a good idea to not neglect the base or ship management, or the total opposite, invest everything in a ship and take the risk to loose everything and start from scratch if the ships destroyed.
  
• Drones room
  
• Spacesuit room/changing room (can be placed before an airlock)
  
• smuggling stashes
  

I'm an Amazon Tablet user, having purchased the game from the Play Store and it's my number 1 goto game on the device. Currently I'm close to completing Normal - not yet tried the harder campaigns and I have all unlockables collected.  

Some suggestions on where I'd appreciate changes..
A 5 turret ship, 0 hangars at the 11k mark - there's a gap here. You can get a decent 4 turret + 1 hanger ship for 7200, and around 11k you have multi hangar ships but nothing for the non-hangar based until 15k.
Saving ship designs across playthroughs, so when you select the type of ship you want to build the game provides you a list of buildable blueprints (based on available tech)
More persistent rewards - e.g. either after completing a mission and getting credits, OR based on completing a campaign (with reward amount based on difficulty of the campaign), being able to invest in either upgrades for a tech, or being able to put research points into a tech.
  To be clearer here, upgrades in a tech
    - Having points allocated such that when you start a mission you already have upgrades paid for in a particular tech (e.g. range for the laser point defense). Upgrades available for all technologies that you have unlocked. Perhaps limited so you have to upgrade tier 1 before being allowed to move onto tier 2.
  Put research points into a tech
    - Spend the rewards on either offsetting the research cost for a tech or being able to full research each. E.g. Invest in Fighter 10% speed so it starts at partially completed and takes less time during a mission to complete.
Edit: Perhaps the persistent reward for upgrades or research could be automatic and based on what you invested most heavily in during the mission or campaign - encouraging players to try out new battle plans.

This would encourage multiple playthroughs to earn the persistent rewards.
For those wanting a challenge, also have in the options a setting for the start level of enemies - e.g. give enemies access to tier 2,3, 4 straight away.

Ideally for a campaign the researching and upgrading would persist and be a lot harder. 
So in the first mission I would expect to maybe research 1 or 2 items but when I started the next mission in the campaign I would have access to those 1 or 2 items and be able to keep researching. By the end of the campaign I'd have a lot more options available (ideally not everything, researching should make you focus) but the enemies would also be harder. 

Ship based experience - encourage keeping ships alive by having them get experience for kills which increases accuracy, health, shields, range, fire speed, damage. Once a battle was completed, these ships would stay behind to protect the region rather than move on to your next fight and unbalance it. 
Heroes - having a single hero that you can level up during a campaign and assign to a station or ship to give it a small boost.  When the ship dies the hero escapes in an unkillable pod but loses confidence (experience).

Just some thoughts! Really looking forward to Space Haven, Rimworld is my current favourite PC game and many of the other games that form the Space Haven ideas have been on my regular play list (Loved DF-9 even though it wasn't finished).

A few 'quality of life' improvements that should be easy to implement:

• Date (maybe time) stamp on saved files. I went back after not playing for a while and wasn't sure which was my most recent game.
  
• Show all ships in 'unlock new things screen' for ease of comparison. Most people won't have the specs memorized so being able to toggle between the ship you usually use and one to potentially unlock would be helpful.
  
• Show prices in the 'unlock new things screen'. I realize price may vary by difficulty, but it's frustrating to unlock something only to realize later that it is so expense you probably will never use it.
  
• Let my 'Saved' ship designs persist across sectors. It's annoying to have build a each ship step by step every sector when I am largely reusing the exact same ships. (With some method to delete saved designs so they are there forever if you change your mind on a design)
  
• Let me 'build' ship weapons while the ship is being 'recruited'. I have on several occasions gotten distracted elsewhere in the sector while a ship was being 'recruited' and then sent it off without weapons because I thought I had built it from a 'saved' design (because I had saved that design 10 minutes before in the previous sector) and not an empty hull.
  

Time to give you an update on what we've been working on the past month. We put emphasis on improving the user interface, since many of the game play elements really started needing it. We're working hard towards a "first early version" of the game. Everything we do is with that goal in mind. We have been tackling one problem at a time, and one by one we are able to solve them.

Above is a screenshot of our new user interface, it's looking pretty slick we think! Hope you like it too and it makes you wanna click on things and watch things move. Like a real game!



We've had one bigger problem for a long time. Linking resource usage to hull expansion. Our resource system was initially based on building blocks, meaning all facilities, walls etc. usually needed 1 or more blocks to be built. When playing the game we realized we had made a mistake. It started to take a very long time for the characters to haul building blocks everywhere, too much time. We had to redo the system a bit, to allow us to set custom material costs for elements to be built.

The hull expansion was still a problem since we needed some way for 1 block to be transformed into many tiles of hull, otherwise the hauling would take much much longer than actually building something. Fortunately the mining pods was our answer, and it makes more sense for them to take care of expanding the ship hull. Mining pods can now be loaded with a building block and enables it to build some 10 tiles at a time before having to return to load up with more building materials.



Since we were already working on the mining pods we decided to finish their build and mining animations. Really happy with the result! Look at them go, mining that asteroid for all that it has. Hey, we're really going to need all those resources so don't leave anything behind!



We have also been working on a notification and objective system. These notes will pop up to help you get started in the game and will notify you when something is going wrong. Will be really important to guide the player to understand the game better!



Another screenshot of the user interface. Oh right, characters have their own inventory system. You can equip them with weapons or other items you find aboard ships!



Above is a screenshot of the tile based gas system. You can see the different view modes down to the right, currently oxygen is selected. Apparently this ship has low oxygen in a small room, where the core is. It's recommended to build walls around the core and other refinery facilities. They heat up a lot and some produce hazardous gases. Seal them off and equip the room with a spacesuit door to allow crew members to work safely near it.



The crew job management system. You can assign your crew members to take care of various things. This menu needs a little polish still but it's working well!



Arnie has some lunch and his stomach starts to grumble. Straight off to the toilet he goes! Ever seen anybody do his business so fast? Didn't even pull down his pants!

• Is the time of the year right for an indie game release? For example, releasing on Christmas and fighting for visibility against all AAA games is pretty much suicide. Releasing when some big gaming event like E3 is going on is not good. What other games are being released, do we have a chance with Youtubers for visibility at that point?
  
• If we do a Kickstarter, is the time of the year right? Same type of things apply as in above statement.
  
• Has the game been tested enough and bugs ironed out?
  
• Is there a Steam sale going on on that date, or has there just been one recently?
  

• Stay tuned! And if you want to help simply give the link to this forum post to a friend, or refer them to: http://bugbyte.fi/spacehaven
  
• You can share this album on a relevant Reddit subreddit or another forum you frequent! https://imgur.com/gallery/revSa
  
• Remember to follow the game on twitter, facebook and now also instagram.
  

I first played Space Border Alien Encounter and FTL, I loved these game back in 2014/5, so I searched similar game and found Battlevoid. I also enjoyed a lot, so if Space Boarder can inspire further to the make of this Space Haven, I'd really love to see it. 

Shilliea gained the ability to use the Capture Ray as part of the ongoing effort to hand out new techs to various species to help differentiate them.

A side effect of this is likely unintended and is very not intuitive.   YOUR marines can be "captured" by a Shillea ship that happens to have a capture ray equipped which will of course turn them back around on you.  Your ships will then destroy it, but it looks like the marines "bounced off" the enemy ship and is rather confusing.

ENEMY marines are actual "ships" with shields and a single weapon port, so they are immune to your capture ray, as one would expect.   But, your marines are still considered "fighter" class with no shields and no weapons, so they are targetable by the capture ray.

If a new release ever gets worked, please add this to the ToDo list.  Theres no graceful way that I can see, other than a straight up IF(ship!=marine){do Capture} //else do nothing   type logic so that the ray just fizzles.