Spaceship Idle: Design, Build, Explore & Battle

Over the past year, I set out to build Spaceship Idle as something quite ambitious: an incremental space grand strategy autobattler. It was an exciting idea. Persistent progression, prestige systems, evolving spaceships, and automated tactical combat, all wrapped in a long-term strategic layer. On paper, it felt like a natural evolution of what I’ve been building since Industry Idle and CivIdle. But as development went on, reality set in. When Two Genres Pull in Different Directions Incremental grand strategy and autobattlers are very different genres. Incremental grand strategy is about persistence. You grow stronger over time. You prestige. You carry knowledge and bonuses into future runs. The joy comes from compounding progress. Autobattlers, especially multiplayer ones, are about fairness. Matches need to be relatively even. Matchmaking needs to work. Players need to feel they had a fair shot. When you combine persistent progression with competitive matchmaking, something breaks. If progress carries over, matches become uneven. If it doesn’t, the incremental layer loses its meaning. Designing around that tension proved far more difficult than I anticipated. At the same time, grand strategy and autobattler are both deep genres on their own. Each demands careful systems design, balancing, UI clarity, and long-term content support. Trying to fully merge them turned Spaceship Idle into something too large for a one-person indie developer to realistically execute at the quality level I want. That was a hard realization to accept. Splitting the Vision Instead of forcing one game to do everything, I’ve decided to split the original vision into two clearer directions: - A spaceship autobattler - An incremental grand strategy game Spaceship Idle naturally fits the autobattler direction. But I've decided to put it on hold and focus on the incremental grand strategy game. It's less of a creative decision and more of a practical one. The Multiplayer Burden A multiplayer gam...

Add a highlight feature for tutorials - tutorials will now highlight relevant UI elements Reworked module cooldown indicators. The previous implementation has performance issues on low-end setups Fix a bug where add-ons from victory fail to include add-ons from previous ship classes. After this, you should get one guaranteed add-on from the current ship classes, and the rest of the add-ons are rolled from all unlocked ship classes Add tooltips to add-ons in the Peace Treaty popup

Welcome to Playtest Patch 0.10. This patch is packed with content and improvements. I hope this patch will be a solid foundation for game mechanism - and I can build upon it for future content release. Frigate Class Frigate class ship is here: with new weapon type - drones. It has 10 new weapons. All ship blueprints have been extended to Frigate class, which has 40 more modules (110 in total). Catalysts, Directives and Add-ons (more on that later) now include Frigate class. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45459390/967dfcd9294d4e7551466d3a3e9638f2a60b710b.png Add-on Crafting In my previous post, I have talked about the rationale for the add-on crafting system. To sum up: Basic add-ons are acquired from battles Advanced add-ons can only be crafted using a recipe Each ship class unlock basic add-ons and recipes {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45459390/18326d312ee4d35274af9010afaf4606809eddd0.gif With this crafting system, the add-on value in the peace treaty has been adjusted as well. Previously, an add-on of the current ship class was worth 50 peace treaty score (PTS), the previous class was worth 25 PTS, N-2 class was worth 12.5 PTS, and so on. Now, an add-on of the current ship class is still worth 50 PTS, and add-ons from all previous ship classes are worth 40 PTS. New Construction / Add-on UI To help with managing an increasing number of modules and add-ons, those two UIs have been revamped to add a grid view and search function. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45459390/b176972b72cf64db192a69bc8e8418d31c02d84c.png Add-on mechanisms have been standardized: they now have unconditional targets (which is always effective) and conditional targets (usually within a range, and is effective when the condition is met). This is basically how most add-ons works already. Now this information is presented in a tabular format, which should make it easier to read {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45459390/86fa462ad25b4dd21a44933ab7ab2373c3576d65.png New HP Bar Animation A new HP bar animation has been added to indicate the damage t...