Today we (as in, me and you) may embark on a journey into the jungles of planet 042-88B. Or maybe we’re diving into the oceans of Bromius II. A temperate outpost planet that you’ll be stuck on for awhile because I haven’t gotten around to actually balancing any of the newer sandbox features!

In the previous version I introduced outposts and construction for pooling resources. Which honestly turned out to be boring enough for me to rewrite the entire block of code that deals with player-planet interactions. This took longer than I thought, of course. Actually, it took nine absolutely grueling months. On top of 2019 already being professionally and financially the worst year of my life. Yet still and thankfully, what we (as in, me and you) have now is the capability to build a unique kind of ASCII sandbox MMO.

Each world is a large swathe of generated terrain with three Z levels representing the surface and each level above and below that respectively. While aboard your ship, you are in a special state in which maneuvering between the galaxies that contain each world is made generally painless. Aside from pirates, malfunctioning hardware or lack of a reactor on the planet in that system at least.

If you skip around the video you’ll notice that the bottom of the screen contains a box labeled “Chat Channel 1”. This will be changed to Channel 1 and will focus on taking more abstract commands like “cut tree” if the player is holding an axe and is near a tree for example. One of my goals is to expand that parser, which is linked to the players inventory and pretty much everything else.

Eventually you'll be able play the game MUD-style alongside the standard keybindings.

Anyway, what else can you do on these planets? Well I mentioned in a previous blog that gathering resources would be important but I wanted to make it interesting. And so by allowing every player visiting the planet to interact with everything on that planet in whatever capacity, whether it be as a thief or some kind of corporate prospector, we can allow for emergent gameplay.

Right now, all you can actually do is visit the planet and take a stroll on its probably barren surface and terraform it.  More info on that later! You also cant see other players yet. In other words, version 3 is just another solid step toward Apsis Online being the elusive “story generator” that its being built to be. But there’s a lot more work to do. Most importantly though are the upcoming mechanics for organizing players, ships, organizations of players and ships, and organizations of organizations. You get the point. I’m talking about megacorps!

Corporations and resources go hand in hand you know. And both of these things inevitably lead to some kind of commerce. @Space will be getting a marketplace soon! Don’t forget the body augmentations, the body harness and all types of genetic craziness that’s peeking in just over the horizon in terms of player enhancements. Also, STATS!

Stats are making a return in v3.1 so that I can start crafting ways to let players customize their backgrounds/origins. It’s just not a proper MMO without it. I’m sure you’ll all let me know if these are all bad ideas. I promise I’m listening...as long as you immortalize your concerns on @Space! Or comment somewhere, that's fine too.

Today begins an experiment in maintaining an active test server. Courtesy of Vineyard Haus who so graciously provided it. Again, the game is still pretty light on content but I now get the feeling that the momentum will be exponential. Thanks for reading!