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.

We've been working on furthering our building mechanisms this first month of 2018. As we have started to get a better feel for the different systems in our game we have also started to think more about the real core of the game. One thing we knew we wanted to have was the expansion of a ship, being able to expand your base and get more room for new buildings is essential for any good building game! We thought about different approaches to this, but in the end we wanted to try to have it as free as possible and let the player design his own ship from the hull up.



We ran into a pretty tricky problem since being in space means the hull walls should be kept intact when expanding, otherwise very important gases like oxygen and temperature will leak out and kill the crew! Also, in its current state our game differs from Spacebase DF-9 by not having the inner walls be the same as the outer hull walls. Because of this we had some issues but fortunately we managed to solve them. The screenshot above has a small "possible size of ship" - limit, so don't worry about that.

• You are free to expand your ship hull as you wish by using a tile based view mode.
  
• You can drag a new area to be hull.
  
• Your crew members will take a building block with them and go through the air lock with space suits and jet packs to build the new hull block by block.
  
• The hull wall is expanded outward as enough blocks are completed to create a new space.
  
• Your crew members will finish by cleaning up the scaffolding boxes placed when building the new hull section.
  
• You are now free to build new facilities in the new space!