Hi all! A quick update today. First, thank you all very much for the kind notes in my previous post. It means a lot to us. My wife is doing well. The first series of chemo is complete and surgery was successful. She will still be going through post operative radiation and chemotherapy over the coming months. She responded very well to the treatment up to this point.

Work is getting done on chapter 3 and a number of other things that I need to do to get ready for a full BETA. Here is a quick summary:

Chapter 3 – of course.

Crew missions – These missions will let you send idle crew members on various tasks that reward general and skill experience for that crew member and rewards like credits, weapons, armor, ship equipment etc. The rewards depend on the type of mission the crew member is sent on. I’ll explain how this works in detail once the system is finished.

Updated crew portraits.
Player generated portraits – I’ve finished work on loading player generated portraits. That means, you will be able to add any images you want (512x512 JPG’s) and they will load into the game for selection using the inventory or character information screen portrait/voice selection screen.

New icons for general inventory items. The new icons are simplified and made so you can easily distinguish between various items like weapons, armor, mods and grenade types. I’m also looking at ways to generate icons for the rest of the content like component parts, trade items, ore, refined ore etc. There are lot of icons in the game so I may not be able to create unique icons for everything – though most icons in the game will get a treatment of some sort.
New enemies.

New enemy ships.

Updates to the economy.

Assigned stats will affect space skills.

New devices for your ship – equipped to your hardware mount points. These will let you apply various de-buffs to enemy ships via the security bonuses and security perks in the electronics skill line.

Various bug fixes – as always.

Patrolling enemies are out – To be clear – patrolling enemies are terrible. I wasted almost a month trying to get this to work and really, when it comes down to it, it’s just an annoyance. There is already a chance that wandering into the line of sight of another enemy group could trigger “adds” to the current combat session. Add to this with patrolling enemies and it's just not sustainable. So, this is scrapped. I wish I could get my time back…but that’s the way game development works – you try something and it just doesn’t work.

I don’t have a release date for BETA at the moment as my schedule is still variable. However, I wanted to let you know that progress is being made.

I hope you all have a great weekend, and thank you for supporting Stellar Tactics!