As we promised a much bigger game world in EVERSPACE 2, we have been hard at work producing a lot of new concept art pieces. Some of you have already seen them in our weekly dev & community streams on Fridays, but we’d like to share them here, too, so none of you fine space pilots miss out on anything.


The Outlaw Viper fires corrosion missiles from afar. When closing in on its target, it switches to drone behavior and folds out its armor to fire with a battery of scatterguns while orbiting around its prey - snakey!


Armed to its teeth and heavily plated, the Outlaw Dreadnought is the Frigate-style capital ship of the Outlaws. Because of its massive armor, it is almost impossible to destroy it from afar. Pilots need to dodge its high-frequency output of barrel bombs and horrifying plasma thrower turrets to find a weak spot, fly inside and take it out with a critical hit deep down in its belly and get out without being caught in the nuclear blast.


The Colonial Light Cruiser is a true masterpiece of high-tech in sci-fi warfare: It is equipped with rapid-firing rail gun turrets that do not overheat as well as EMP bombs with an enormous blast range. Thanks to its fighter hangar, the capability of making several consecutive long-range hyper jumps, and sneaking up on its target in almost undetectable stealth mode, it is perfectly suited for taking on expansive spec ops missions.


The Carrier is the pride of the G&B Fleet. To compensate for its low mobility, it not only features a super durable hull underneath massive plating, but a small fleet of fighters and drones can also launch from openings in the hull on each side to keep attackers at bay. Those hangars also serve for mining and supply vessels to land. Consequently, security measures and defense systems are extremely sophisticated to prevent any introducers from sabotaging the carrier’s supralight energy coils and its plasma turbines.

As you already know from a previous production update here on Steam, all player ships in EVERSPACE 2 are based on a modular component system that allows for a large number of different combinations of hulls, wings, sterns / rear engines, cockpits, and attachments.



To prevent having just a bunch of generic-looking player ships, we spent a lot of time and effort in defining distinctive design rules for main and sub ship classes, as well as for all the ship components, so you can easily tell which sub-class a certain ship model belongs to.



But that’s not all! Thanks to our new texturing and modeling techniques, using floaters, decals, and emissive materials, you will also feast your eyes on much higher per-pixel details on the exterior and interior ship surfaces in addition to customizing your vessel by choosing primary, secondary and tertiary colors, which will impact the color of your ship’s glowy bits, too. We have even more ideas for further customization features and will share more when they are fleshed out.



Devices in the original EVERSPACE were items that would drop as loot from various sources and could be installed into your ship's device slots. They came in two flavors, active and passive. While active devices needed to be activated in order to apply their effect, passive devices would provide permanent stat bonuses or other benefits while they were installed.

The similarity to skills you know from traditional RPGs has not escaped us, of course. That's why we want to take this idea further in EVERSPACE 2 and have decided to link the devices directly to the player progression. That means that once found, devices will remain unlocked and can be accessed and installed at will. Passive devices were replaced by the equipment items you install into your ship, such as platings, energy core, etc.


New Devices and Device Modes offer a variety of combination possibilities and synergy effects for pilots who want to get the most out of their spaceship.

A further novelty over the predecessor are the so-called Device Modes. These are passive extensions that alter the function of a device to varying degrees. A maximum of three modes can be unlocked per device and only one of them can be active at a time. To unlock device modes, you will need special tokens that can be obtained, for example, through level-ups or as a reward for missions. The idea behind Device Modes is to allow you to tailor your build to your taste through complex synergies with other devices, perks, items, etc.

For example, there is a new device called Annihilator Virus that infects targets with a system virus that spreads to nearby enemies and causes a massive explosion once the timer ends. One of its device modes causes it to deal increased damage for every debuff active on the target. Now, if you use your EMP Generator right before the virus explosion, the target will receive extra damage for the EMP debuff. The EMP Generator, on the other hand, has a device mode that causes affected targets to lose shield hitpoints over time. Since this is another debuff, the explosion will deal even more damage.

This is the kind of decision-making we're aiming to promote with these systems, and we would love to hear your thoughts about it on our Discord server, our EVERSPACE forum, or in the comments below.

Being able to explore new and strange planets has always been one of the biggest dreams for many space game enthusiasts. In space simulations, where exploration for hundreds or even thousands of hours is the main pillar of the game, there is no way around procedural world generation, and we’ve already seen some great examples for this concept. However, there are some fundamental downsides to it.

For starters, working with high-quality, pre-baked global illumination solutions in procedurally-generated environments is not possible, especially if the game world is truly seamless. Secondly, game designers have much less control over gameplay and environmental design in procedurally-generated game worlds, which only gets worse when trying to implement a proper story campaign, featuring cutscenes and scripted events. In fact, we spent a lot of effort and time managing randomization and player frustration in the original EVERSPACE.

Since we dropped the roguelike formula in favor of a persistent open world with fixed handcrafted locations in EVERSPACE 2, we can now take the overall experience to a whole new level, especially on planetary locations as you can see in this planet exploration GIF (too large to upload here).

However, having handcrafted planetary locations with super hi-res height maps, high-quality illumination solutions, large set pieces featuring lots of surface details as well as lots of interesting activities going on in the sky and on the ground, comes at a price: They not only take a lot of time and effort to create, they are also very memory-heavy.

To manage your expectations: We really want to prioritize those features mentioned above. What it means though is that we're not able to implement a large number of explorable planets, rather, we're focusing on a few that are most important to the story and the overall game experience. Also, there is no way around the fact that these sections will impact load times by a few extra seconds but hey, we like to think seamless atmospheric descending is totally overrated anyway.

So, if you want to see more of the all-new planet locations in-game as well as Ship Devices and Device Modes in action don’t miss today’s dev & community stream on Twitch, YouTube and Mixer from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm CEST / 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm EDT.

See you online,
Michael and your dedicated ROCKFISH Games Team

It sounds like right out of a sci-fi horror movie: An aggressive virus is spreading around the globe, causing great uncertainties, severe supply chain issues and cancellations of big international events pretty much everywhere. Unsurprisingly, all our GDC meetings with major platform holders and potential console co-publishing partners have been canceled, too. We are now setting up conference calls or meetings at upcoming events. Right now, we are prepared for everything and are hoping for the best. In short: We have to deal with a lot of uncertainties regarding business development, external game production as well as marketing and PR.

Another issue is that some AAA blockbuster titles will hit our initial Steam Early Access release date: The hotly-anticipated open-world sci-fi shooter RPG Cyberpunk 2077 was recently pushed back to September, plus the brand new sci-fi looter shooter RPG Outriders from Square Enix has just been announced to release the same month, too. Obviously, there is quite an overlap between those audiences and ours, so we have decided it wouldn't be wise to directly compete against two sci-fi shooter RPG juggernauts, leaving not much room for any other sci-fi shooter coming out at the same time.

Considering all those new challenges, we had to make a tough decision about postponing the EVERSPACE 2 launch on Steam Early Access, now aiming for early December this year. Consequently, we’re also pushing the closed Alpha back to the end of May and the closed Beta to August. We will reach out to backers with creative rewards towards the end of this year.

Even if this is just a strategic decision to mitigate commercial risks when major market conditions change, we are fully aware that some of you won’t be too happy about this, but we hope for your understanding. Thankfully, we’re in a financially comfortable position, so the project itself is not at risk, and we are developing the game internally as planned. This extra time also means we’ll have more content for you to enjoy in the closed Alpha, Beta, and Early Access builds.

Okay, now that we've got that news off our mental stack, let’s finally talk about some new awesome stuff in EVERSPACE 2.

Fast-paced combat in open space as well as inside of interior locations will remain the main pillar of the EVERSPACE franchise, so location awareness in 3D space as well as strafing quickly in any direction is key to survival. This is a reason why playing in 3rd person view is advantageous. However, we know from the predecessor, there is also an avid group of space pilots who put game immersion above everything else so we’re spending quite some effort on designing detailed cockpits with fully functional instruments for each player ship subclass. Let’s have a look:


Early concept art of light fighter cockpit interiors focusing on maximal FOV and minimal obstruction by display panels.


With its focus on forward-oriented combat at high speed, cockpit interiors of the medium fighter class resemble the layout with centralized instruments in military jet fighters of the 21st century.


At the price of a partially constrained view, ships of the heavy fighter class will feature sturdy cockpit interiors equipped with large displays, making pilots feel always comfy and not lose control even when taking a few frontal hits...


3D modeling of the Interceptor cockpit.

You can see in the early concept art above that each cockpit interior is based on the exterior geometry of each subclass, so when swapping views the transition between exterior and interior looks accurate. The distinctive cockpit designs will also make you immediately aware of which subclass you are currently piloting.

As the cockpit system is modular, it even allows us to display certain parts of the geometry based on the ship’s tier, class or subclass. So are the positions of the display panels, whereas the interior materials will be based on the color scheme of the ship.
Similar to the original EVERSPACE, we'll have special effects displayed on the cockpit's windshield based on the status of the ship, like the current damage and shield level. We also plan to display vital information on the cockpit displays so that you can even play without any HUD elements for the ultimate immersion of space piloting.

Now, before some of you ask: We still haven’t decided if we will support VR at some point. All we can say is that based on the experience from the predecessor, supporting VR is a ton of work for many reasons (like overhauling the UI, rebalancing the game, optimizing to demanding VR specifications) for a total addressable market of presumably close to 35 million on PC and console.

At first sight, that number doesn’t look too shabby. However, the technical requirements for VR, as well as significant fragmentation issues and major marketing challenges, have to be factored in.

To elaborate a bit further, optimizing for PSVR on a regular PS4 all the way to the brand new Valve Index with its proprietary VR controllers takes even more effort than porting a typical PC game designed for mouse + keyboard input to also run console with proper gamepad controls from last-gen to current-gen and even to the next-gen.

On the marketing side of things, we have seen non-VR players who ignore or hesitate to buy games with a VR tag. While on the other hand, quite a lot of VR players miss or have trouble altering graphic settings in games with optional VR support, resulting in negative reviews and complaints about performance issues in VR, which of course hurt overall sales. Last but not least, it would actually be hard to justify to our entire community if we spent a lot of development resources exclusively on a feature for a comparatively small group of players.

Therefore, we decided to look at VR as a separate platform that requires a solid business case to make it worthwhile to support. Long story short, EVERSPACE 2 for VR is currently not on our list, but who knows what kind of deal might happen in the future…?

As you have probably seen in our vlog about player ships, we also spent a lot of time and effort on making sure that our modular design approach does not lead to a pool of generic-looking ships. Our mantra is that every model has to look slick and distinctive but also fit in its subclass. While we were very pleased with the community feedback on our ship designs so far, we felt the original bi-wing design of the Assault Fighter was underwhelming if not a bit awkward, so we decided to come up with a redesign.


Aero spikes on spaceship engines? Yes, please!

Apart from that, the redesigned Assault Fighter is our new favorite player ship, and we would love to hear your feedback in the comments below or on Discord.

What’s a looter shooter without a devastating superpower attack that you can unleash to gain back the upper hand when under great pressure...? Exactly! Think of your class-based Super in Destiny or Ultimate in Anthem, Overwatch or any MOBA.


The ULT ability “Static Overload” temporarily turns the Sentinel’s primary weapons into lightning guns, firing arcing electricity at enemies and everything around them - annihilate by electrocution, that is.

For those who are new to this, here is how it’ll work in EVERSPACE 2: Ultimates (ULTs) are special ship abilities that can be activated to unleash a mighty offensive or defensive power. They need to be charged by shooting down enemies, or, later in the game after the right perk has been unlocked, they can also be charged by other means, e.g. by collecting energy orb remains or getting hit by lightning.

Each Ultimate is tied to a specific ship subclass, designed to exploit its full potential. For example, a certain heavy subclass might have an energy shield that reflects incoming shots back to the attackers, while one of the light subclasses unleashes a power that allows the ship to quickly teleport between targets, leaving behind a shredding energy trail, corrosive mines or web fields.

Sounds very exciting, right? Well, if you want to see more of the new cockpit interiors, how the Assault Fighter blockout looks in-game, and also get a taste of the Sentinel’s Ultimate electrocuting waves of enemies, join today’s dev stream on Twitch, YouTube and Mixer from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm CEST / 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm EDT.

See you online,
Michael and your dedicated ROCKFISH Games Team

In this January 2020 update, we’ve got cool new drones, hot UI improvements, and some scalding concept art pieces for you to look at. But before we move on to those, we’d like to give you an update where development of the Early Access version is currently at and how the Prototype was received by some four thousand test pilots and the press.

Given the positive feedback, we had received on the early demo version at various gaming conferences, we were quite optimistic about releasing the Prototype out in the wild. However, letting our superfans take it for a spin on all sorts of hardware setups and without us being able to watch over your shoulders is another thing, so we’re extremely happy that we have received nothing but overwhelmingly positive feedback from you guys and the gaming press alike. Anyone who missed out on pledging on the Prototype, go check out the #gallery channel on our Discord! There are some truly amazing screenshots from the community as well as yet another awesome fanvid from lol_bye on our YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNxe5zL5oC4

While the Prototype has been out for a bit longer than a month, we’ve been busy cracking on the Closed Alpha, which is still scheduled to be rolled out to eligible backers around the end of April. We’re making good progress on creating the game world and implementing the main missions. We already had a lot of fun during the first internal playtest last Friday and plan to share some gameplay footage in future development updates for your viewing pleasure.

If you have played the original EVERSPACE you may have noticed that drones were more of a ‘thing’ than in any other (space) game. Due to our limited budget back then, we could not afford to create a plethora of high-detailed enemy spaceships. However, having a lot of opponents with a broad range of behaviors was paramount to keep things interesting, especially for a roguelike. So, coming up with many types of different drones was the way to go.

While we now have a bigger budget for EVERSPACE 2, we still like the concept of throwing even more enemy types with all sorts of capabilities at you while keeping our production costs at bay. So, without further ado, say hello to our latest drone family members:



The Outlaw Sniper Drone uses a targeting laser to focus on enemies from afar. If the line of sight is not interrupted for a couple of seconds the target will be hit by a deadly rail gunshot. If you are quick enough you may be able to evade the shot, but your main strategy should be to take cover before the drone fires. Close in on the drone while avoiding being in the open for too long in order to take it down or turn the tables and snipe it with a rail gun yourself.



This drone is packed with devastating explosives, and it only has one goal: to close in on a hostile unit and crash into it, triggering a huge explosion. Luckily, the Detonator Drone is quite noisy once it settles for a target, so you will at least hear that it’s about to annihilate you if you do not initiate countermeasures immediately.

In our previous update, we already had a sneak peek of some UI tweaks for item management. Today, we are excited to share even more improvements as well as some entirely new screens with you.



A top-level screen that offers specific menus depending on the pilot’s specific docking situation. It serves for quick navigation for both mouse and gamepad users. You can see at a glance which interactions and services are offered.



Storage and Inventory are now separated for more clarity and better item management. There is also a revised Item Info window with current stats showing more details than before.



Some stations or traders will offer to purchase ships. This interface was designed to have maximum screen real estate for showing off your new object of desire in all its beauty. Ship details are available in two modes, simplified and detailed. This is the simplified version.



The job board is a job board is a job board. Pilots can get jobs here, who would have thought? The purple highlight marks jobs that are above the player's level and therefore potentially difficult. On the right side, you can see the rewards for the job as well as a small preview of the standing of the respective faction you're doing the job for.



Similar to the inventory screen, you can modify your ship on this screen and view the vessel’s properties. However, elements such as upgrades, extensions, appeal, and perks are still subject to change. Again, ship details are available in two modes: simplified and detailed. This is the simplified view - take it with a pinch of salt.

Another area where we had to make some compromises for the predecessor because of budget limitation was lore and storytelling. That said, we still take pride in having innovated by introducing a proper story campaign including event-based exposition to the roguelike genre for the first time ever. We highly encourage any space pilot to play through the very end of the story in the original EVERSPACE as there is more to its plot as you might think at the beginning.

Thanks to your fantastic support, we are now able to work with Joshua Rubin, some of the finest in video game storytelling, to tell an even bigger story within a world full of exciting lore in EVERSPACE 2. Of course, we don’t want to unveil any secrets or spoil major plot points, but we think it is ok to tease you a little with some gorgeous looking concept art for the cinematics, right?









So, we hope you like what you see. If you want to know more, especially about everything that comes with the new screens, check out our latest game dev stream where Erik, our fabulous Community Ambassador, shares more details and gives a sneak peek of the first mission, too: https://youtu.be/YKEAK2tWUTk?t=4022

Enjoy, and see you in space!
Michael and Your dedicated ROCKFISH Games team

Now that the dust of our wild Kickstarter ride has settled and most of the team has had a short but much-needed break from the immense workload of the past few months, we are finally set to bring you the production update that all early adopters were probably desperately waiting for. This time, we omit the video and skip directly to the essential news, so you can start playing and getting involved.

Since our last update in November, we have mostly focused on getting the Prototype ready for deployment in December, as promised, and we’re excited to let you know that Steam keys have just been sent out to all eligible backers. Now, we know from our previous Kickstarter that some of our emails tend to end up in the wrong place, so please make sure to check your spam folders, too.

Even though we are still early in development, we’ve been working hard to make the Prototype run on a broad range of PCs, and you can tweak the graphics settings in the all-new graphics options menu to your liking. Of course, it would be tremendously helpful for further optimization of the full game if you shared your PC hardware specs, graphics settings, and experience in our revamped forum.

Speaking of which, the EVERSPACE Forum has been revamped and is now open again for discussion and wild chatter. While all categories, threads, and comments have been carried over from the original EVERSPACE, a lot has changed in structure and design for better usability in the new EVERSPACE 2 Forum.



Also, existing forum users keep their badges, ranks, and comments. However, when logging in to the new forum for the very first time you will have to reset your password once. Newly registered users have access to all categories right away. Your Kickstarter ranks for EVERSPACE 2 can be requested from ROCKFISH Games moderators via direct message. Please note: These new ranks will overwrite those from the previous game.

In parallel, all registered backers should also automatically get their respective roles on Discord by end of the week. Backers who join our Discord server after that will have to contact any ROCKFISH Games community member on Discord individually to receive their role.

In EVERSPACE 2, the powerful mining corporation Grady & Brunt will play an even bigger role than in the predecessor, and you can look forward to encounter a lot of new content like big capital ships and special purpose vessels as you can see in the concept art and blockouts below.


Grady & Brunt utilize sturdy vessels with special mining equipment for heavy-duty work in the Beltagrades.


G&B Mining Barges can carry megatons of ore, also known as "Piñatas de mena" amongst Outlaw pilots.


Armed to the teeth, the all-new G&B carrier class was commissioned after too many raids on G&B ore transports hit the company's bottom line, hard.

Now, while the work on the Prototype is complete (please note: there won’t be any updates as the team is now working on the full game), we also have a little sneak peek of the improved item management UI which will make it easier to compare stats as well as drag & drop and sort items by category.


Lots of UI improvements to sort, compare, and drag & drop items.

You can watch the changes in action in our most recent dev stream on the ROCKFISH Games twitch channel or on Youtube (starting at 53:33):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqrGlNPLHns

Happy Holidays and see you in space!
Michael and Your dedicated ROCKFISH Games team

In the full version EVERSPACE™ 2, there will be at least eight star systems, each divided into zones with different threat levels and featuring numerous hand-designed locations to discover, between which players can travel freely. Further surprises await daring space pilots in the form of procedurally generated locations styled after those in the first EVERSPACE title, offering even greater variety for player pilots.

The combination of fixed, hand-designed and procedurally generated locations and events with ingenious design rules offers the best possible gaming experience while allowing a vibrant and stunningly beautiful game world with countless trading stations, shipyards and secret locations in a visual quality that is not possible with purely procedurally generated game worlds.

One of the biggest fan wishes to be able to fly down to planet surfaces is now also fulfilled in EVERSPACE™ 2. Planetary levels are designed by hand for maximum visual quality and gameplay control. Differences in gravity and air resistance as well as new types of enemies put the skills of pilots to the test, and provide further variety before players tackle new missions on ground stations, equip their ship or trade. Watch our gamedev vlog below for more:

https://youtu.be/n-9fBi0uWNw

Don’t want to wait until late 2020 to play EVERSPACE™ 2 on Steam?
Support us on Kickstarter and get the demo THIS YEAR!
https://www.everspace.game/go/kickstarter/es2steamnews

A common critique about our previous game was that there were not enough enemies and other alien creatures to encounter. In EVERSPACE™ 2, we want to take things a lot further. Not only will we improve the visual quality of the established NPCs and alien creatures of the predecessor with the aid of the talented folks at Volta, Streamline Studios and Liquid Development. We also want to have new types of enemies and more wicked wildlife in space that might freak you out, make you smile or just scratch your head…

https://youtu.be/AxxRcCRo4GA

Don’t want to wait until late 2020 to play EVERSPACE™ 2 on Steam?
Support us on Kickstarter and get the demo THIS YEAR!
https://www.everspace.game/go/kickstarter/es2steamnews

Due to our limited budget for the predecessor, we only had three vessels in the base game to choose from and added one more in the Encounters expansion. But, we took great care that each of them offered unique play styles, much like classes in an RPG.

While the gameplay diversity of player ships in the original EVERSPACE™ was much appreciated by our fans, having a much bigger pool of spaceships with deep customization possibilities was in high demand by the community for our next space game. Well, we heard you loud & clear, so check out our latest vlog!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Sf320epLNg

Don’t want to wait until late 2020 to play EVERSPACE™ 2 on Steam?
Support us on Kickstarter and get the demo THIS YEAR!
https://www.everspace.game/go/kickstarter/es2steamnews

With EVERSPACE™ 2, we're making a big leap from a roguelike to an open-world space shooter RPG with a 20-30 hour story campaign. Check out our first vlog giving you a glimpse of the expanded game world and the story of our upcoming game. Our creative director, Uwe Wütherich, will lead you through the beginning of the story in EVERSPACE™ 2 and the in-house production of the animated cinematics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA8YM8dGDdc

Don’t want to wait until late 2020 to play EVERSPACE™ 2 on Steam Early Access?
Support us on Kickstarter and play the demo later THIS YEAR!
https://www.everspace.game/go/kickstarter/es2steamnews

We're very excited to announce that the Kickstarter campaign for Everspace 2 just launched! The sequel to Everspace won't be a roguelike, but an open-world space shooter with deep exploration, tons of loot and classic RPG elements.

Your invaluable feedback helped make Everspace the success it was, which is why we'd like to get you on board as soon as possible. With your support we will be able to stay in full creative and financial control and increase the overall quality of the game. So please have a look at our reward tiers and maybe help us unlock a few stretchgoals as well. We would also like to point out that anyone backing on a digital game copy of Everspace 2 will receive a playable Demo Version before the end of this year!

Kickstarter:
https://www.everspace.game/go/kickstarter/es2steamnews