A recent influx of visitors from jayisgames.com has resulted in a new torrent of feedback emails. Rest assured that I will answer all of them, but it will take a while - I currently have some 202 messages in my "Feedback - Todo" folder, and will find myself with literally no time to answer any of them until Tuesday.

That said, I'm very happy so many people are so enthusiastic about the game, so by no means take this as a request for a cessation of feedback!

Selected links to news/blog coverage of dev 9:

• Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Kieron Gillen covered the game, mentioning its crew management and monkey hunting aspects amongst others.
• Nine Over Ten just put up a post on dev 9 and the upcoming plans for dev 10.
• Star Controller, who previously previewed SE:SS, have a new post on the game, talking about some of the new features and significance of names.
• RPG Codex also posted an update about it, adding a RPGCodexese in-joke about Adhara that took me a while to unravel.
• Inside Mac Games covered it in their news section.
• RPG blog "I Waste The Buddha With My Crossbow" had a look at it and liked it a great deal.
• The game also appeared in the news roundup of Norwegian site Gamer.no. I admit to speaking no Norwegian at all, but I think they liked it.
• German site Gaming XP also reported on dev 9.

Furthermore, amazingly, this site is now on the first page of the Google UK search results for "space exploration", crowding out various real-world space probes. I feel almost a bit guilty about this. (And Metal Beetle's site is on the second page for "beetle".) The algorithm seems to have taken a liking to my sites.

This is merely an interim report from the trenches of reading feedback messages. The response to dev 9 has been overwhelming, and largely positive. I have now answered (nearly) all feedback messages that had a return address attached, but this still leaves a lot of others I need to read through.

Things beyond Metal Beetle are currently taking up most of my time, which is why this has taken me so long. But soon I will be able to return to working on SE:SS in earnest.

So what has my analysis of the feedback messages thrown up so far? Well, the most frequent complaint has been that fuel in dev 9 is rather too tight. This is simply an oversight on my part, and one I will address in dev 10. Of course, fuel will never be plentiful, since the limitations that fuel imposes make up part of the gameplay by making the player choose where they can afford to fly.

Relatedly, many people report that they consider games where they haven't managed to reach all stars on the map to be games they "lost". This is a bit confusing to me, since it feels akin to saying that any game of Pac-Man not played until the final 256th level - is lost.

Still, what these two things boil down too is that the game is rather too hard for may, and also too unpredictable in its difficulty. Then again, there are also plenty of players who like the difficulty as it is. The obvious resolution is to add difficulty levels, which is indeed what I intend to do.

So what's the plan for dev 10? The main focus will be on the space combat, where I plan to more or less rewrite the combat user interface, and introduce planets and a larger playing field. Beyond this, I'm not certain yet. Difficulty levels, perhaps.

Numerous feedback messages have also stated that there is still very little variation in the game's encounters, and this is obviously true. So far, I'm still concentrating on improving the game's engine, rather than adding lots of content. This is simply because the engine needs to be more or less finished before I can write content for it. The encounters that are there so far have been rewritten numerous times, and I would rather not have to rewrite a hundred encounters each time I change something about how the game works.

The above points aren't the only things I have learned from the feedback messages, but this is already quite a long post, and to detail each idea for improvement and its reasoning here would make my hands fall off.

But rest assured that there is plenty of thought going into my plans for the game.