What about some gameplay?

Hi, all.

We’ve been waiting a long time to make this announcement, but now it’s finally time to reveal some more details about our game.

The core gameplay loop of Age of Space has always been about mining, building, execution, rewarding, improving and doing it all over again. The execution aspect has already been through several iterations throughout the years, but now we are finally super excited about it, and we hope you will be too.

To verify the concept we made a demo for both internal and external testing. This demo is quite limited but it’s enough to show where this is going. In the video, we played as a full squad, but you will be able to fleet up with any combination of AIs and friends. The demo mission is very short and only contains simple kill objectives, so consider it a placeholder.

So what have we changed, and why? We have previously pitched the game as a “Squad Scale RTS”. We decided to remove the classical RTS part of it because after a lot of testing we couldn’t quite make it work. It was difficult making it a varied experience, and co-op didn’t quite feel right either. Also there are other great existing and upcoming RTS space games that cover that section of the market.

So what happened? For the longest time we had been dying to try out an alternative design for the combat inspired by one of our all-time favourite games; Guild Wars. With this design players would explicitly control an individual ship and have the rest of the squad controlled by AI (similar to heroes in Guild Wars). So we gave ourselves a 48 hour deadline to make a prototype and, even though the prototype was buggy and kind of rough, we all got very excited about it. We could also see how this would solve a lot of the problems we were having with the more classical RTS design.

Some of you might be disappointed about this change while others will share our excitement. Every decision we make is with the intention of making a better game and we are confident that this was the better design for Age of Space.

Next up, we’ll address some of the most frequently asked questions about the game:

Can I try the demo? If you already have a key then yes you will soon get access to this demo. We’ll also hand out a few new keys on our Discord community. We’ll release more keys later this year once the vertical slice is complete.

Is it instance-based? Yes it is. You deploy from your base and warp to the mission spot which is a limited but large 3D space area where you execute your mission. In other words, it’s not a open world game.

Is everything playable in co-op? Almost; there might be a few solo missions out into the mix, but all contracts that allow multiple captains will be playable in co-op. When playing a story mission, all players that have this story mission will get progress if the mission was successful.

Why is the release date set to “When it’s done”? We’re sorry that we can’t be more accurate about this at the moment. There are too many external factors right now so we prefer not to set a date yet when there’s a strong possibility we would have to move it anyway. What we can say is that it will not be in full release in 2020, but there are likely to be possibilities to test a demo of it in 2020. If you are interested in testing, the best place to be is on our Discord community.

So what happens next? The next milestone is making a vertical slice of the game. With this demo we want to show more of the context of the game moving through the different phases; mining, building, planning, executing, rewarding, improving. The actual amount of playable content will still be limited, but from a technical perspective we will have solved most of the difficult problems which puts us in an excellent position moving forwards.

If you have other questions then feel free to ask them in the comments section below :)

Thanks for your patience and understanding,

PodPal Games