Space exploration is an upcoming RPG by Metal Beetle Ltd. It's a work in progress, but you can download a development preview now.
In SE, you are tasked with charting the long-abandoned Serpens Sector, a region of space reached through a wormhole near Earth. Each star system you visit brings you an encounter with something - ancient ruins, other humans and many dangers. The map and encounters are chosen at random for each game, which means that each game plays out differently. We release new previews every once in a while and are very interested in any feedback - so once you've tried it out, head over to the forum and tell us what you think. The intention is to release the base game for free, and create expansion backs for sale. SE is intended to be a game of discovery, and will contain many hidden truths to be discovered by the dedicated player. Screenshots
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2008-11-13: Big Ball Of Wool
As I talked about in my previous post, one of our goals in writing encounters for Space Exploration is to make the encounters as interconnected as possible. That is, your actions in one encounter should in some way influence your other encounters. This may be in mundane and general ways, such as gaining some space gold you can later spend, or in specific ways, such as offending the Gloptians, causing them to shoot at you on sight.
The aim is to prevent the feeling that you're just "doing one thing after another". Instead, the you and the game should construct a little narrative each time you play. You make meaningful decisions which affect the rest of your game, and you can see causal links between things. The number of encounters in the current dev versions is pretty small compared to the number there will be in the release version. (And indeed there will be several months at the end of development where the game engine won't really change and we'll be busy writing encounters.) But even now, I try to strive for a well-connected game. Compare these two diagrams. 
The first one is a diagram of the connections between encounters in dev 6, and the second is the same diagram for dev 7. (With the encounter names obscured, because there are now some plot-related encounters in there I want you to discover for yourself.) As you can hopefully tell, the second diagram is much more interconnected and confusing than the first one. (And features such lovely terms as "vvivv' tetetehete".) As I add more encounters, this diagram will become more and more interconnected, and less and less readable, until we end up with a giant tangle of connectivity-wool. That's what we're aiming for - a giant tangle of connectivity wool.
2008-10-30: Tea with the vicar. Or: Things to come.
We're currently hard at work on the combat mode for dev 8. It's looking very good so far, though a lot of little things still have to be figured out. So don't take this screenshot as a measure of how it's going to look precisely...
2008-09-18: Dev Seven
After quite a lot of work, dev 7 is finally out! You can download it from the sidebar on the right. Major features include:
There has also been a lot of code cleanup and bug fixes, which will really help the project in the long run. Next up for dev 8: tactical space combat. Since we're still very interested in your feedback, we've made a proper website for the game and started up a forum. So if you have any comments or suggestions, or need help with the game, visit the forum.
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