Because it can't hurt to ask. What's on the immediate horizon for VO besides just iPad polish?

Finishing Harpos trident

I second this, be nice to see what might be getting worked on and coming down the road.

i'm hoping more enhanced asteroid textures

I like the asteroid textures... except for the ice ones.
Asteroids do need a better work on their 3D model. To eliminate all those long sharp edges.

I'm liking the bugfixes we've had lately. :)

Devs: How about roadmap?

Just take a week and throw in a new ship or something. Change of pace. Then return to the other more important stuff...

The next "big thing" on the roadmap is the Persistent NPC Creation tool for both PCC and devs. Basically an adaptation of the mission system (sort-of) and Kourier bots to allow someone to create persistent NPCs and have then show up at particular times and do particular things, or continuously fly between particular places, and have various dialogue trees and the ability to hand out missions and items and the like (or be killed and drop items, obviously). So, basically, you can talk to some random convoy captain and he can be all like "Have you heard the story of Scary Ace Guy? He is occasionally seen in Sector Blah Blah and is one of the few people who knows how to make the Neutron Blaster Mark V" or.. something, I dunno, you get the idea. It's a tool, it has a lot of different potential uses, from PCC mission content to just "dynamic universe" content, to Special Event type content, and so on. This has the potential to make our universe a lot more "alive", and create a great deal of content without a lot of time investment (beyond making the tool).

I chose to do the above, rather than some other very specific gameplay improvement, because it allows parallelization of development: once the tool is available, I can be doing stuff with it, the whole PCC can be doing stuff with it, rather than us all waiting for Ray/Michael to finish one specific gameplay thing. When resources are limited, I prefer to put the time into tools that have the broadest potential to tap the most available development resources (Persistent NPC Tools, Event Tools, etc).

This is planned for (roughly) the next month or two, and is being juggled, at present, against a bunch of different opportunities for marketing and things due to launches by various electronic companies, some of whom are also willing to pay us. There's a lot of interest in VO on the "10 foot interface" (ie, playable on a TV with just a controller), from companies who make phones, or make TVs or make consoles (obviously), and we're doing some work on that as the combination of both exposure and money are.. good. This is not an OUYA-specific thing, think more along the lines of many-billion-dollar electronics companies. And obviously, as usual, I can't say a lot more about it, but it's Good For The Game (while, perhaps not being the most thrilling addition for a PC player).

We're also waiting for our Oculus Rift to arrive, and we'd like to try supporting that whenever it shows up.

There are also some smaller gameplay enhancements planned, that mostly hinge on me and various content, missions and other things. I've been sick since April 28th (I shit you not), and I just came down with something new on like Sunday, so I have not been operating at anywhere close to normal capacity, and most of my efforts have been spent on the "business development" stuff for the above corporate-relationship stuff. I'm also going to E3 in June for more "business development" and getting sick on airplanes.

But, things have calmed down lately (briefly? we'll see), so I'm looking at digging back into some content work this week, assuming I'm not entirely too ill to do much of anything. There is at least one new PCC mission that's ready to roll, and I'd like to maybe get some new ship stuff going.. I know people have been waiting a long time for the Trident variants and the like.

Obviously, we've also been fixing things whenever we can in-between, like the long-standing "red flash" slowdown and swarm-slowdown, which ended up being inventory related of all things.. we improved the default Windows sound, and a bunch of other stuff. I want to improve the TempKoS and NFZ situation sometime soon as well, and make it closer to what I originally intended, and integrate some of the recent feedback on that.

So, that's where we are. Some cool stuff coming. I wish it was all gameplay-content development, but the Kickstarter didn't happen and the iOS launch, while pretty cool, did not inject us with some big block of capital, so I'm back to "juggling stuff" based on available opportunities. This is not what I would ideally choose (I want to Make VO, not "Develop Business"), but it's how a lot of independent developers stay in business, from us to Human Head to High Voltage to everyone else I know.

Cool.

or.. something, I dunno, you get the idea.

You should start knowing. It's this sort of stuff that's most lacking from VO (texture, reason to play, content, plot, call it what you will), and it's what makes good games (see e.g., EVN or Skyrim) worth playing for more than SpaceQuake PvP giggles.

VO has now been ported to everything but my new fuzzy logic toaster oven. How about some reason to play the game already?

Should have thrown more at that Kickstarter, Lecter.

Lecter I have copious amounts of notes and documentation for what I want to do with this kind of feature, that isn't the problem. It's keeping the company alive long enough to add it, and then not having some kind of "instant success" required to still be in business. Yes, the massive number of ports has taken us away from that, but has also paid us and kept us going.

All this still sounds very good, thanks for the update. I'm bummed I missed the kickstarter, I would have like to contribute whether or not it made a difference. Hope you get feeling better.
Thanks.

I just hope either PS or Xbox is the target of the next port.....

Sorry to hear you were ailing...Hope it wasnt a computer borne virus. (You did wash yer hard drive before posting..)

LOL tarenty, you have no idea.

I just hope either PS or Xbox is the target of the next port.....

Just to clarify, we are not doing any new platform ports at this time, nor are we planning any. This is just making control-scheme stuff work (joystick on a TV), which means accounting for overscan on TVs, making sure fonts are all sized properly, and doing virtual-mouse implementations that use gamepad input. This is a lot shorter development timescale than doing any new platforms.

Think like.. Android-powered Smart TVs and stuff like that. Or phones with wireless HDMI dongles, where you use a bluetooth gamepad to play on a TV with your phone as the "game console". That kind of thing. New use-cases, not new platforms.

Same with iPhone, we'll eventually add support for those, but it's a new use-case on an existing platform, a lot smaller time investment than, well, Playstation or Xbox or whatever.

Sounds like stuff some PC players have been trying to work around on the big-screen for years too. :)