We've all seen this: an indie game is grandly announced, makes a lot of progress initially, and gets to a playable stage. You play it, you like it, you eagerly anticipate updates. But then the time between updates starts getting longer, and the updates get more terse. Eventually, there are long stretches of no activity at all. Then, there is a post insisting that the project "isn't dead". That's usually the last update you ever get.

I really don't want SE:SS to be another instance of this. So why, exactly, have you seen no updates for the past year and a half?

Two years ago, in October 2009, I quit my day job at Linguamatics to finish SE:SS. I had savings to last me to the end of the project, and some contract work lined up. Two days later, I had RSI so bad I basically couldn't type anymore. I proceeded to limp through to finishing dev 10, months behind schedule, working as fast as I could, maybe an hour a day. By that point my money was running out, so I switched to spending that hour doing contract work.

Since then, I have been slowly and unsteadily improving. Today I can work for maybe four hours a day on average, if I space them out through the day. Of all the things that I tried to improve the RSI (or whatever it is I have, exactly), the one thing that worked the best is exercise, so I try to get in enough of that as well.

So that's one reason for the lack of updates. The other has more to do with my own foolishness. You see, I have been working on other projects. Things like my Java4k entry, Which Fish?, Kobold Pit, Project Fruitbat, and, um, an entire OCR engine. So why didn't I spend this time on SE:SS?

When I first started putting up a feedback form for the game, I thought this would be a great way of receiving bug reports and knowing what people thought of the game. What I didn't realise was that I'm frankly pretty thin-skinned, and really could not cope with some of the feedback I got. Now, for the Internet, even the most negative feedback was rather mild. It wasn't "I will track you down and gut you like a fish," more "This game sucks. You should change it around completely. Make it 3D. And massive multiplayer. And about ponies." The vast majority of the feedback was much more polite than that, and a lot of it was very constructive.

So the stupid thing I did was that I got really defensive over the exact way I'd written the game - even bad design decisions I'd made on the spur of the moment at half past midnight. People told me again and again that the game's responses were too random. I hid behind a succession of justifications for why it had to be like that instead of realising that for a game to actually work, there has to be a clearly visible link between the player's action and the game's reaction, and there simply wasn't in many instances. Send out a well-chosen crew to explore ruins? Bang! One of them dies. Send out a single trembling archeologist to hunt prayer monkeys? She captures them with ease. This is frustrating, but I'd decided that "in real life, this is just how it works", evidently forgetting that I was making a game.

I felt that I didn't want to do a game based on the ideas of whoever sent me the most strident emails (even though I'd asked for them, even though a lot of the feedback was very constructive). I had also made he mistake of rather heavily promoting the game as nearly done, with a clear release schedule it was now impossible to meet. So I ended up pretty much not working on SE:SS at all. And when I worked on other things instead, I tended to talk about them almost furtively, since they were using up time I "ought" to be spending on the game.

The game on my hard drive is somewhere between dev 10 and dev 11 right now: dev 10 with some combat mode enhancements (like a tractor beam) and one or two more encounters. There is obviously a temptation to just ditch the project and do something completely different. Concentrate on my other projects. Start making a new game based on one of the myriad ideas I've had since I started working on SE:SS, um, four years ago.

But actually, I don't want to. Not out of stubbornness or out of a sense of owing the completion of the game to others, but because I actually really like the game. I take dev 10.5 (so to speak) out of its dusty toolshed every once in a while and just play it. And I really like playing it. I have fun. I like the graphics, the sound, the setting, the characters.

After a year of perspective, I've realised that I should make the best game I can, not the game I'm least worried about people disliking. I'm the developer, so if I don't think ponies are a good theme for the game, it won't be about ponies. By doing that, I can also let myself see where there are real problems, like the aforementioned frustrating randomness.

This has been a pretty long and maybe slightly over-sharing post. The short version is that I haven't worked on SE:SS because of RSI, and because of not coping with others' expectations.

So when will you see the next dev release? Not quite yet, I'm afraid. I have been tying up loose ends (like shutting down my unnecessary company), but I'm not there yet, and dev 10.5 needs more work before it's worth putting out as an update. I also absolutely do not want to make promises about a schedule. And I'll be working on other things too, and will actually write about them, and link to them properly.

I want to remain kind of stealthy for now, and only give a firm date on release when I have on my computer a beta version of the game, ready to be released save some typos and minor bug-fixes.

It will be done when it's done. And it will be.

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.

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:

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:

That being said, rest assured that I have been reading all your feedback, even if I haven't replied to any of it, and will continue doing so.

Nor will I be idle in this next week: I'm taking all my notes with me into this computerless land, with the aim of plotting out the remaining encounters for the first episode / expansion pack.

Now, copy protection started with licence codes. You buy a code, you enter it into the program, and that allows you to use the full version. And the idea is that you are not allowed to share your code with other people. But there isn't really any way to prevent that from happening. So licence codes aren't really copy protection. So they're more a way to clearly indicate which parts of the program you need to pay for. If you're using the full version without having bought a code, you're doing it wrong.

But because it's so easy to share licence codes, companies have been trying to find ways to do "real" copy protection for decades - and created a bunch of invasive technologies now euphemistically called "Digital Rights Management". The newest fad is to require people to stay connected to the Internet whenever they play the game. As we've seen in the recent Assassin's Creed 2 debacle, this doesn't work particularly well!

Even very pervasive DRM can and will be broken. And the fancier your DRM system, the more enticing a target you are to people who like breaking DRM.

So the expansion pack for Space Exploration: Serpens Sector is not going to have any kind of copy protection, or "Digital Rights Management". I played around in my head with using licence keys, but you have to download the expansion pack when you buy it. Also giving you a license key to enter doesn't add anything but inconvenience. And the contract is still exactly the same: don't play the expansion pack without paying for it.

Of course some people will do exactly that, but there is frankly no way of stopping them. So why should I spend my time and effort trying? I'd rather spend it improving the game.

In summary: Please buy my game, so I can eat and make more games. I won't put in any copy protection, because copy protection doesn't work and just makes life worse for you, and because I've got better things to do with my life.

See also: No Horse Armour.

This download weighs in at rather more than the previous version, mostly due to the addition of music, and also because of the size of some of the new combat sprites. As previously stated, the game's music is being created by Rozovian.

So with dev 9, the two most frequently mentioned problems were that fuel was too scarce and that the game didn't give you enough feedback for your decisions. I hope to have fixed both of these in dev 10 - the former through difficulty levels that affect how much fuel you need, the latter through better writing.

If, for example, you send out a crack team to hunt monkeys, and one of them is killed, the game makes it clear that this was a freak accident, and not a bad decision on your part. If, on the other hand, you try to send out a lone, bookish crew member, your security officer will ask you to reconsider your choice. More or less politely, depending on whether they like you.

Let me know if it works. And let me know what you think of the new combat mode.

Finally, I would like to thank you for your feedback, support, and patience. Dev 11 will hopefully take rather less time than dev 10, as I mostly plan on doing cleanup and filling in some gaps.

For now I want to show you the new paint job of your spaceship in a bit more detail. When I made the 3D model for it months and months ago, I was fairly rusty at Bryce, which I hadn't used in a serious way for a couple of years. In particular I had forgotten how to make metallic textures. This resulted in a rather ugly and far too bright texture for the ship. I think you will agree that the new texture is much better.

Finally I would like to apologise for no longer replying to all feedback emails. I had originally made it my policy to reply to everyone who supplied an email address but the state of my wrists means that I need to focus on programming the game. I hope that I will eventually be well enough again to work through the backlog - and I will of course continue to reply to any questions you have.

In the first two videos I'm doing my best to fight the cruiser with all my skill and defeat it each time, sometimes narrowly. In the final video I intentionally use bad tactics for fighting against a ship of this type and lose as a result.

While recording, I took care to always use the mouse to issue all commands. Nearly everything in the combat mode can also be done by keyboard, by pressing the key underlined in the option you want, and I'd recommend playing the game that way - but using the mouse made it clearer what was going on. Please blame the sometimes erratic movements of the cursor on my still-damaged wrists.

Because I was showing off the combat mode's features, I did everything more slowly than necessary, and spent a lot of time talking to the crew. A normal fight would be faster-paced. Also, as before, the music in this video is by Rozovian. The track used is more or less what will end up in dev 10 as one of the two space combat background tracks.

Addendum: Actually I just realised that these tracks are older than I thought they were. The music-loading code picked up the wrong set. So the tracks are approximately like this, but better. Sorry!

(Remember that you can now follow the ongoing work on Twitter.)

(As an aside: The ship is named after the Cambridge astronomy department's late cat.)

In other news, I have created a twitter feed for the company where I hope to give a more detailed account of my work on SE:SS. I think a lot of people might find it quite interesting to see how I'm going about making the game. At some point, I will also put up some videos of how I create the spaceship graphics. I've already tried recording some, but I realised that I need a microphone - otherwise, my voice is drowned out by the computer's fan.

To tide you over until that happens, here's another glam shot of a new spaceship:

Anyway, to divert you while you wait, I've done you a render of some Neman spaceships. The Nemans are set to play a rather more prominent role in dev 10...