One month ago, we have announced a series of deep changes in Gangs of Space. It's now time to give some news about our progress on this new road we've outlined.

TODO #1 - Destroy the universe

Progress: 21,7%

The game design phase is now complete, which means we have to re-do most of our promotional materials on the website and our presskit. And of course, we have to do all the ingame implementation too, although most of it is not strictly necessary for the first test rounds.

TODO #2 - Empire vs Empire

Progress: 84%

This is the key feature of the new Gangs of Space experience, and thus it has been at the focal of our efforts so far. Most of it is complete: on your Gang management webpage, you can launch attack waves on the other Empires, and defend against them. And if you are lucky enough to be an Empire Administrator, you have extended abilities to do so, too.

The remaining parts are mostly the finishing touches: improving the UI, and adding facilitative alerts on all these new events.

TODO #3 - Politics

Progress: 79%

The politics part of the game had 2 major features:

• Transfer of influence from one Gang to another (a form of "vote" to form Alliances inside an Empire)
• A web-based messaging system (which is not only used for politics, but will play a big part of it)

All of this is done and can already be viewed here and here (if you are logged in).

Our view on politics hasn't changed from the start: this is more about people interactions than gameplay features. Our role is just to provide you with the tools to facilitate these interactions.

TODO #4 - Planets

Progress: 67%

Plant are implemented in the game: they evolve, they produce PP (Production Points) and influence, enter into revolt if you don't pay their maintenance costs, you can dock on them to build constructions or acquire technologies...

Also, the management interfaces are not designed yet (and thus - of course - not implemented).

TODO #5 - PvE

Progress: 60%

We are talking here about quite a big set of very diverse features. These are the one that are complete (or almost complete):

• A new progress of the difficulty over 28 "levels" of difficulty
• A new generation mechanism of enemy groups
• The complete renewal of the Pirnat faction
• A new drop generation algorithm

The big missing things are missions and status toward factions. And of course adding more of these factions...

TODO #6 - Mining

Progress: 5%

We have designed the new resource system, but... everything else is yet to be done! We might start with a very simple version of mining in order to not delay the tests for too long, and improve that in future versions...

TODO #7 - Procedural generation

Progress: 78%

Most of the mechanisms are implemented, but the various parameters of the algorithms have to be chosen and tweaked until they give results that are consistent with the new feeling of progress we want to give in the game.

This picture illustrates a template to create a level 1 system. We have to define all the probability curves of all the values, which is not hugely complex but is quite time consuming, since we have to generate a LOT of systems to be sure it feels right!

We also have to create more "pieces" that can be used in the creation process: planets, stars, backgrounds, lighting systems...

TODO #8 - Technology

Progress: 64%

Here too the hardest part is finished: game design and implementation.

Now we have to create the "content": the items and ships that will be appropriate for the new difficulty curve. Where we used to have only 1 item in each category ("a Gun") we will now have multiple variations over 3 tiers ("a 3-Way Tier 1 Gun"). And of course each of these will have infinite variations of their characteristics (like the previous research system, without the player being in control of the point allocation).

TODO #9 : Announcing the next test session

Progress: 0%

We are doing our best to try to open a test session in December, but we can't guarantee to make it in time. Many things are still very much in flux, and some things are not designed to the point where we are confident we won't have bad surprises. But we are working on it, as best as we can!

In the meantime, feel free to hop on our live dev streams on Twitch if you want a see a glimpse of the things to come!

(and don't forget to vote for Gangs of Space on Greenlight while you are at it! ^^)

#