Metal Beetle Ltd is now two years old!

If you follow the Space Exploration: Serpens Sector news or twitter feed, I'm sure it won't have escaped your notice that it's been very quiet. This is not something I wanted to happen, but three things conspired to make it so: moving house, my ongoing wrist/shoulder problems, and running out of savings. This last one has meant that for the past couple of weeks, I've been doing contract work every hour I could safely spend at my computer.

This isn't a situation I want to be in. I want to finish SE:SS. I have a to-do list for the core engine 41 items strong, half a dozen ship designs waiting to be used, and entire notebooks filled with plans for encounters. As with any half-finished large project, what you can see now is only a small proportion of all the work that went into it, and I desperately want to finish the game and show you the rest.

The Internet is littered with dead projects which were never officially abandoned but simply saw their update frequency decline, with some routine entry from 2002 the last sign of life, after which point the author presumably lost interest entirely. I assure you that this is not what's happening here. But while I'm only capable of an hour or two of work a day, my first priority - putting food on the table - takes up all of that capacity.

I am pursuing more avenues to get this fixed, and there are some promising signs from a new exercise regime. So eventually, SE:SS will be completed. But you and I are going to have to be more patient than originally planned.

Finally, if you have any questions, head over to the forum where I'll be happy to give (perhaps somewhat terse) answers.

Things have been rather quiet around SE:SS central lately, so I thought I'd just reassure you that I'm still alive, and so is the game project. I haven't been working on it in an attempt to finally cure this chronic wrist-and-shoulders problem, but work will resume!

To tide you over, here's a preview of the new Fleet HQ. The model's only partly done, as there will also be an inner docking ring, and more detail on the modules:

As you might have seen on Twitter, I have managed to do some work for SE:SS dev 11. This is not to say that I'm perfectly well again, but physiotherapy means I can now afford to do a little work again, with more to follow soon.

So in celebration of this, have a look at a new spaceship, the Thellurm Ember. It's what happens to the salvaged parts from a destroyed Phoenix. They're small, slow, and weak, but better than nothing in a fight. But a single well-placed shot can easily down them: