Work is progressing well on the planet landing / dropship mechanic of StarDiver.
Orbit to Surface:
UI isn't in yet, but there will be an altitude indication on the side and you use thrusters to slow decent. Movement is similar as in-space but with drag and vertical thrusters. Depending on planet gravity it will be easy/hard to have a soft landing. For those who are not sure where I'm going with this, the genesis port of starflight had my favorite planet roving. It will be similar... but a mix of it and some other ideas I'm kicking around. I'm after a bit of a hybrid between starflight, star control, and sundog. Instead of a rover like starflight, once landed you can send out crew who will be automated explorers and stay within a radius of the dropship. your gameplay will be trying to keep them alive and dropship undamaged while your they scan for minerals, biologic data, and any special storyline things like artifacts, tech, civilizations etc.
Surface to Orbit:
I think mining in general for space games is a polarizing mechanic. Some gamers love it and can do it for ages while others find it tedious and terrible that it exists in the first place. Resource building will be needed in our game, but we plan on offering a handful of methods to achieve it. scrapping ship remains after battle, surface mining, asteroids, skimming gas giants, a few gambling sort of options tied to story etc. Hopefully we can make mining fun for a lot of gamer types and for those that hate the idea of it give them an alternate method of getting resources that they do find enjoyable.
Woooow. That's a first, never seen that in this type of game. 0^0
As always, very interesting concept and visuals !
So nice :D
Thanks. We are a year into the project and all the parts are just now starting to come together. We will soon be able to put together a trailer to show how all the parts fit together: combat, exploration, story, rpg elements, planet landing, travel, etc.