Missions - and Tutorial!

Like I mentioned, the game is in the stage of finally adding content!

The most important part is a goal - someway to drive the player to explore, not just for the loot but for some sort of story. Had to finally step in and make a real Dialog System, tied to encounters. It took a while but it's very flexible and already supports a few decisions. Complex quests might be further away.

The simplest contract - "Kill this for me for X credits"

Responding to a simple distress call - careful, you might answer it too late!

I didn't know how much I needed quest markers until I added them. Being procedural, the galaxy map can be a bit disorienting.

You might notice I simplified the UI quite a bit. All these borders felt silly and Web 1.0, and I may have overcompensated on the sobriety. That said, I like it and it's unified across the game like this. Took some inspiration from Besiege - simple and clean is better for this sort of game.

A sample of the new UI.

With the new dialogue system, it seemed it was time to finally add a tutorial on how to play. Completely optional and skippable, but it introduces you to the basic controls and what you need to survive. The nice part is the tutorial is really just an encounter you find on the first sector that only plays once. No extra code needed!

With all this modal dialog and quests, I decided to add a tutorial.

In the next update I'll explain the new Upgrade system (it's really neat, I promise) and the small AI improvements I've made. Down the line is a "build me a ship" system - where you get to unlock certain ship blueprints that you can add to your fleet for the building cost, maybe even unlock them by quests.