Greetings Pilots! Wow, it seems like radio silence is all I could offer this month...

It's been real quiet since I last wrote. Besides slacking off a little, I had to fix up 0.2.4 and have been slowly planning on changing the development cycle up. I feel this is necessary as despite my attempts to address some long-standing issues, I was stuck focusing on newer elements more.

What this means is that the smaller, monthly updates from last year's and onwards are being phased out in favor of longer, more refined ones, with occasional fixes post-release. I will continue to write monthly posts to document these changes as I continue progress. In fact, if everything goes as planned, and the state of the project deems it satisfactory, in around 2 more updates later Astrov will enter its alpha stage of development.

Speaking of progress, here is what I've been working on so far:

Foundation for scenarios have been implemented - Currently having "Instant action" modes as a proof of concept, this module adds short, but more focused missions or other events intended for quick, replayable sessions. In its current state, triggering jumps or player death leads to a scoreboard which ends a scenario in action; but larger, story-based shorts are planned for future release.
Starting from 0.2.4, the next two scenarios are available:

Survival - A simple, wave-based mode where you start with ships of your choice and try to defeat as many groups of hostiles as possible. There is no option to repair your hull in this mode, so avoiding damage is crucial.
Endless - Similar to survival in nature, this mode differs in the fact that you get jumped by attackers constantly. Always keeping afterburners at the ready is recommended.

And finally, some fighter-related tweaks were also made, making them a little more aggressive compared to earlier releases. They still refuse to fire missiles since I made some modifications to base weaponry, but that fix is coming in the next update.

So that's it for now. Next post detailing progress will be written on the end of June, next content update ETA on the other hand will in about 3 months from now.

Thank you for reading!