Roidgrinder

Another busy month of grinding!Some highlights:Made the magnet pull asteroids in addition to the resource pebbles. This was a kind of happy accident. The idea randomly occurred to me and I decided to test it out. Not only does it add fun swinging physics, but it also makes the gameplay more tactical in that you can save fuel and do longer trips by orbiting around bigger asteroids.Flexmods and the spec program from early builds are back. With these you can quickly respec the ship by, say, decreasing thrust and making the cannon more efficient.Trading: removed the quota system and allowed the player to buy and sell freely. It's just more fun and understandable that way, even if it's a bit op in the late game. Also added a short selling mechanic for making money when prices go down.Simplified the renting idle mechanic, it's now automated. This one I'm still not quite happy about, there's still too much of a tradeoff with it... I'll probably have to rethink it more thoroughly.Finally succeeded in fixing a small but annoying performance issue by improving and simplifying the way that I create and destroy the visible asteroids based on data. This has been a fun programming challenge.My super talented sister (an art director) drew me better capsule artwork, I think she did a terrific job!Most of the recent dev work has been focused on just churning out content: new upgrades, lore, exploration stuff... As for the lore, I'm drawing inspiration from the original souls games and scatter slightly obscure tidbits here and there. The game's not going to be lore heavy really, but I want the world to feel gritty and like it has a history.Roidgrinder is now pretty much feature complete for launch and I am now in the polishing and beta testing phase. It still needs quite a bit of balacing adjustments, polish and QoL features. In case someone's interested in helping out with the project, I could use another beta tester or two. I cannot pay money, but I'd be happy to credit you as a te...

Took a little break from dev during the summer, now working again.There's been lots of bigger and smaller updates lately:Lootable shipwrecksStarted adding lore segments that can be found aroundUpdated art, most notably using starmap data to programmatically create the background and adding a subtle parallax scrolling effectNew ambient music tracksNew sound effectsRemoved the time-based run end condition... I initially had this idea that you would have three years in-game time for a run and see how wealthy you'll get. That didn't really work. The stress from a ticking clock ruined the exploration feel. Now the run ends (softly) after reaching a certain wealth so it's more about relaxed exploration on your own pace.Various little fixes based on feedback, I'm super thankful for everyone who's left feedback through the form!I also updated the demo build yesterday (although most of these updates are not reachable in the demo section).Next, my focus areas will be:Various negative effects for different resource types... like filling your hold with volatiles will risk explosion etc. Then upgrades that can be used to mitigate these effects.More terminal action, some kind of hacking featureMore lore work

I've done a bunch of changes based on feedback, and just now updated the Playtest version:RENT was annoying to use because it changed each month, so if you didn't periodically keep looking at it you would lose the income stream. Quick fix: made the active deals stay while only inactives refresh. This made it a lot more pleasant to use.Made the spectroscope and tradeweek updates always visible instead of them being GRIND plugins. The problem was that switching plugins was cumbersome for these upgrades that you just want to occasionally take a look at.Nuke was also tedious to use: it's now behind a hotkey and not a grind pluginEnd game upgrade: value map shows an estimated value of a region, making exploration more fun and rewardingAdded very big asteroidsRemoved the license level mechanic. It was hard to make it work with the BAM converter; to level up you needed to return a lot of minerals but otoh the bam converter was burning BAM away so there were conflicting goals... besides, the level mechanic was a bit obscure and not fun in the first place so bye bye.Added a GRIND plugin which shows current cargo contentsAdded possibility to quickly sell everything in the exchangeRemaining time visible right from the startThe screenshot should cover most of these :DGive it a try and please give me more feedback!