Hyperventila Dev Blog #7

The last two months have been a crazy ride for development. First the indieGoGo campaign and then moving from the UK to Italy, it has been a stressful few months for sure.
Now that I am settled things can continue at a bit more of a regular pace. First of let me address the IndieGoGo campaign.

The campaign didn't reach its goal which means I will have to look at other means of funding the project and perhaps certain planned features will not make it into the initial release. However backers can still expect to get their perks, there is a post here which goes into further detail.

The campaign did raise some money which will keep development going for a short time. Living in Italy for the coming six months will also be a bit cheaper than living in London which will certainly help make the most of the budget I have right now.

If this is a game that you would like to play then I humbly ask you to support the project on Patreon. All earnings on Patreon go towards supporting development and making sure the game gets finished as quickly as possible.

Development Updates

Now, what is new in development?

There are three new ships; The "Tracker", the Mark III Transport and the PIR-3 Colonizer.

There is a new station, Gateway Station, the perfect place to start an adventure.

On top of that there are many other fixes and mechanical improvements:

Player movement on foot has been updated with a much requested directional control system, this functions more like the ships move in space where W moves you in the direction you're facing rather than simply up.

• Damage systems have been reworked and rebalanced. Skills now affect a lot more in the game.
  
• New music system that responds more closely to the current situation with ambient, tense and combat states.
• NPC ships now roam the galaxy.
• There are new planets and moons.
  
• Asteroid belts can now be found in certain systems.
• Cargo missions will now pop up at regular intervals.
• You can delete and reply to messages in your GALCOM.
• Medical stations have been added to ships to restore health after a dangerous mission.
• You can get drunk at bars... because why not, and yes this will affect movement, character stats and aim.
• Ship pilot seats can now be customized with different colours at the shipyard.
• Expanded the HUD with more buttons for ship control.
• The NAVCON now has widgets for easily locating the nearest planets, stations and shipyards.
  

Here are some recent screenshots showing some of the new features:

New Computer

Like you may have read in the previous new post, the entire development of Hyperventila so far has been on a small HP Spectre 360 laptop. While an amazing piece of tech and my favourite laptop (I love that thing), it did fall short in some areas. Processing power and graphics rendering especially weren't its strong suit and the small screen was always quite limiting in what I could do in terms of video editing. On top of that my internet connection in London was a slow ~2 mb/s ADSL connection which meant streaming of the game and uploading quality videos to Youtube was almost impossible.

Well... no longer! I now have a desktop PC with a dedicated graphics card and unlimited fibre internet! This means I shall be looking into which streaming services I could use and I will also be recording the game more often and putting it on Youtube. Expect new trailers and video content coming soon!

That's it for this news post! Keep and eye out for further updates and keep sharing word of the game to anyone you may think is interested!

Tymen, developer

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