You may remember at the beginning of the month that Stable Orbit’s developer Jim Offerman had experienced some technical issues with the Stable Orbit’s Black Out update. We talked to Jim about the games progress and what it was like developing a game as a solo developer.
In summary, Jim has made the decision to pull a lot of Stable Orbit’s updates and push hard with the game’s full release. There will be a public developer branch going live soon on steam which will let players follow along with the game’s development. More information on the branch can be found on Jim’s blog.
Here is what is in store for Stable Orbit from now until the games full release
Zenith (Stable Orbit 1.0)
- Orbital Management: You will be required to strategically place – and fire – thruster modules in order to maintain a stable orbit of your station. For more casual players, an automatic mode is planned that will only require you to place thrusters to keep the station in orbit. However, if you want to increase the difficulty, you can turn this off and try to maintain orbit manually.
You’ll also be able to choose the orbital path of your station. For maximum realism, you might want to stick with a path similar to the ISS, but wouldn’t it also be cool to fly over where you live? - Disasters & Events: A lot of things can go wrong in space. Meteor strikes, airlock failures, electrical fires and much more. This update will introduce various disasters and other events to increase the challenge of keeping a station in orbit!
- Advanced Truss Structures: New truss structures will enable you to build curved and circular station structures. Additionally, gimbal modules enable parts of the station to spin and generate artificial gravity for your crew.
- Pressurized Mechanics: With this system, crew members will no longer be able to travel freely between pressurized modules (Quarters, labs, etc) that aren’t connected to each other. You will still be able to construct unconnected ‘islands’ of pressurized modules, but will need to add airlocks in order for crew to be able to travel from one set of modules to the next.
- Dynamic Weather System: A simple cloud texture will not do! There will be an evolving weather system with dynamic clouds. However, it won’t just be a pretty effect – if there’s a storm on earth, that’ll stop supply pods from getting to your station!
- Sandbox Mode: Sometimes you don’t want to follow the rules, worry about the crew, and just want to create the mother of all space stations. For those occasions, there’ll be a sandbox mode where you can build whatever you want.
Be sure to check back with the Blog and Jim’s blog to get the latest Stable Orbit information as the game nears to it’s full release.
