If you think that focusing on the aerodynamic mode is a bad idea - read this post

Since in version 0.8 we implemented first version of aerodynamic mode, many people became very confused about this. Here is a few main complaints:

1. Developers decided to make the game casual.
2. Developers now have two games, so development time now will 2 times slower
3. Developers decided to focus on aerodynamic mode instead of orbital mode, so "say bye to realism", orbital mode is abandoned, "I bought the game for orbital mode", "fraud" etc. Sometimes it is a reason for negative reviews. So we should say ALL OF THESE STATEMENTS IS ABSOLUTELY INCORRECT Lets explain it in more details. First of all, we understand why you are confused. Because you never saw such revolutionary and unique approach anywhere. The only place where you saw approach which MAY SEEMS SIMILAR (But NOT the same), it is many games from AAA developers, which are often makes its games more and more casual, by deleting features, in order to make development cheaper and obtain more sales. But this is not the same what we are doing. It can be similar by the first glance, but it is illusion. We will never use such approach. For us, development of casual games is inacceptable. We are like to develop complex and hardcore games with deep mechanics. Development of casual games absolutely is not interested for us. What we are doing, it is revolutionary and unique approach for development. Currently it will be hard to explain, since this approach will show its full power only after some time of development, but in a nutshell: "Single flexible core - various game rules". Basically, we want to ask a simple question. Are we deleted orbital mode from the game? The answer is no. And we don’t plan to do it. So why you are thinking that we are abandoned orbital mode and going to create a casual game? You may think that since we are focused on aerodynamic mode, the orbital mode now will be developed extremely slowly. But it is an another illusion. Actually, since aerodynamic mode was implemented, development of orbital mode now significantly faster than before! We created a simplified graph in order to show what we mean. Look:

Hard to believe? But this is true. It first glance you may think "If developers now have 2 tasks instead of one, it means that each task now have only 50% development speed instead of 100%" But this statement is not relevant if we are talking about development using our new approach. There is several factors which makes it possible. First, as we told above, a "single flexible core". You see, implementation of aerodynamic mode took very little efforts. Approximately 5% from the all development time, or even lower. All what we need to do it is just enable friction and change world generator a bit. That's it.

With the few small steps, we created basically another game which provides even more gameplay experience

Think about it, if we can spend only a 5% of development time and as result, achieve almost 100% of new gameplay experience, it will be very unwise to not do it. Also there is another example: Some other game developers may create another game based on their previous game with very few changes, but the game will be sold on full price tag as a different game. Instead of such approach, we just added "another game" for free