Early Access Plans

Hello everyone,

As we have released Early Access update version 0.8 recently we wanted to let you all know what our plans are for the near future.

Soundtrack

We are happy to announce that we plan to release the official Vanguard Galaxy soundtrack, composed by Firefly. Many of you have let us know that you love the music. Maybe as much as we do. :) The soundtrack will be available soon, with a large portion of the proceeds going directly to Firefly as a way of supporting her work.

The soundtrack is not complete by a long shot and will be updated as more tracks become available.

Supporter Pack

Alongside the soundtrack we will also be releasing a Supporter Pack (during Early Access) for those of you who want to further support the development of Vanguard Galaxy, as some of you have asked for. First and foremost this is a way to support the game but we wanted to make sure it comes with something extra too.

Captain Callsign

Submit your name (callsign) and your favorite faction to become a part of Vanguard Galaxy. Your callsign will be added to the random name generator for NPC captains, meaning you and other players might just encounter your name out there in the galaxy. Next to that we will add Exclusive Decals and Exclusive Titles as well. The exclusive decals will be apart of a decal system we are adding soon, it will be the first step in customization of your ships.

Please do not feel obligated to purchase it, but the two of us are grateful for every single one of you that does!

Future plans, the next beta phase

The next beta phase will start a few weeks after releasing the Supporter pack and Soundtrack. In this update we will keep the general focus on more Quality of Life features and bugfixes. But we want to highlight a few features that we are very excited about.

Crew, officers rework, boarding, leadership tree

Crew as we know them now will become officers. Another type of crew will be added that you can look at as the basic force driving your ship (next to ECHO of course!). They will be put into a few categories that give you different bonusses. For example a small mining bonus for the number of crewmembers you have that have affinity for mining.

The Recruitment center space stations will become an important hub to recruit and possibly train more officers. Crew will also become a loot item, you can 'rescue' those escaping an exploding ship.

One category of crew is going to be marines that is specialized in boarding. Boarding will involve a few steps that need to happen to make it work. The mechanic is not yet fully worked out, but these steps can look something like:

• disable the enemy ship such that it gets into a boardable state
• assign the crew to go and board
• the boarding process needs to succeed. Your crew will have to fight their way through the ship and take it over with enough of a skeleton crew. This will involve some sort of simulation to determine how well its all going or if it will blow up in your face because they managed to sabotage the reactor...
• fly it back to a space station with a "dry dock"
• repair the ship or break it down into useable parts
• profit :)

In order to further expand on the crew theme and also have a baseline for future fleet developments we will introduce the leadership skill tree in this update as well.

More "endgame" content - Bosses, Expeditions and Size Restricted Portals

The conquest area is a dangerous place and it's only going to get more dangerous. Fight bigger and more dangerous enemies to get more exclusive loot. For example blueprints for the legendary equipment.

Expeditions
The goal is to make a new scalable activity similar to how patrol and bounty missions work, but with more variation such as chained missions and more variety within them.

Size Restricted Portals Not every portal is built for a Destroyer. Size Restricted Portals will get those smaller ships back in action, since in this activity you can only enter through a portal with specific ship sizes. We'll have to flesh it out more, but it will be a portal going to a system where there are multiple poi's and dangerous enemies. But with hull upgrades (the next point), your small ship will be quite capable itself.

Hull upgrades

When introducing the dry dock we will also introduce a way to specifically upgrade the hull of your ship. Adding (faction) specific bonusses that will give you more freedom in controlling what the ship is going to be really good at.

Larger ships: Size 6 (Battlecruisers/Barges)

With the size 5 ships (such as Destroyers) introduced in update 0.8 it's time to keep the trend of bigger ships going. This time it will be the turn of battle cruisers. And if we're lucky maybe another ship type that can be included in the size 6 group. It may or may not carry something. :D

More torpedo types

Currently torpedo's are just a bigger boom, but basically a missile. We plan for more type of torpedo's that will fulfill a more utilitarian role. Think of EMP bursts (something needs to be able to help disabling a ship for boarding), Mining and Salvaging oriented payloads.

Robotics

Currently we have deployable turrets in the game that have some use in the early game, but they quickly are outpaced by your own ship's loadout in combination with crew and skills. So we want to rework the deployables in order to make them more useful throughout the game. These will have a power level more in line with that of your ship as you will be able to configure their loadout. And this will also give you a wider range of options in their usability.

Things we won't forget

Besides all these features we have plenty more plans to further improve crafting, trading and industrial gameplay. The story will also continue. We will also invest more time in adding more sound effects.

What comes after what comes next

One thing missing from the feature list above is a new expansion of the max level and more areas of the Galaxy to explore. This will come in the update we like to refer to as the Empire update. In which we will introduce fleets, building your own space stations, starting your own faction, methods of exploration and the beginning of the grand finale for the story. All this will be coming in the future, but for now, not the near future sadly.

We hope you like our ideas for Vanguard Galaxy and are looking forward to input from you. What are you looking forward to the most?

We are very happy with how the closed beta stages helped shape the game. Drop by our Discord and join the fun. Join the Vanguard Galaxy Discord

Cheers,

Bat Roost Games