I'm normally averse to roadmaps in games. I don't want to be a developer that promises things I can't deliver on, but I also understand the desire to build hype and communicate intent with the player base. It also doesn't help that I myself don't know what I'll be working on at any given time. My work flow is intentionally ad hoc, working on things either when the mood strikes me or when it's most efficient to take on a task, rather than forcing something to meet arbitrary deadlines, so what you're seeing is stuff I already have lined up and feel relatively confident about. To that end I'm going to try monthly roadmap/release cycles and see how it goes. If it doesn't work I'll switch to something else. With that out of the way:

Layered Dialogue System

December saw significant reworks to the dialogue system, and I intend to keep working on that. The next major hurdle will be to support "layered" dialogue involving multiple dialogue files. This will hopefully allow me to do cool things like more dynamic events at stations, recruiting crew members, arena battles, as well as any other dialogue down the road that needs to be loaded on runtime.

Loot tables:

As I alluded to in the December update, I intend to add adjustable loot table data files. I eventually intend to allow for random world generation, and this would be the first baby step into doing just that.

Arena battles

I've always loved the idea of people being able to play with premade fleets in relatively low stakes, simulated battles, where if you lose it's not a big deal and you can always try again. There's a lot of cool things you can do with the idea and it blends in very organically into both the universe and game design.

Arena battles would allow players to toy with faction specific or end game fleets without going through the long process of building their own, which will be excellent for early game or for players wanting to learn ships, be it modded or vanilla. You can do challenges for fun, for bragging rights, and to earn money and reputation. Plus it's a great way to add lore to the game by allowing players to live out historic battles, under the guise of running a highly detailed computer simulation (the same in universe tech that you use for testing out builds in the ship editor). I plan to have different factions have access to different arena fights, giving yet another reason to seek out the various factions and interact with them.

Down the road I might even connect it to various quests, allowing players to unlock new fights, or get involved in quests regarding the seedy underworld of arena battles. There's lots of potential and I'm excited to see where it leads.

Random Events (Signal Interference)

Random events have been on the back burner for a while internally, so I want to give them another pass. The main thing is to introduce a few random events into the pool to spice things up and hopefully serve to motivate and inspire additional changes. I want to avoid creating too many at once as making tons of dialogue files so early into development adds a lot of needless maintenance overhead, but a few wouldn't hurt.

I also plan to have them generated randomly by star systems. I'm not sure yet on the exact limitations and parameters, but I'm thinking that systems will only be able to generate a limited number of random events at a given time, and be throttled by significant time delays on making new ones. The idea being that you should be rewarded by flying around the whole system and exploring a bunch, rather than hiding out in safe or familiar territories. Neutral or uncharted territories will have a have a much higher chance of finding random events, while safer or more populated places will have a negligible chance. There's a lot of work that can go into fine tuning such a system, but I want to at least get the groundwork laid out for it.

Crew Improvements

I'd like to get some more work done on crew members this month, but it's a fringe goal. There's a lot of things that need to be fleshed out on the crew system so it may or may not make it in.

The plan is to make it possible to recruit crew members from stations for a cost or SP. I'd also like to see newly recruited crew members require a personal quest be done before you can use them. This will likely be reserved for hand-made crew, rather than generic ones which will be randomly generated and ready to go from the start. I'll also likely include a means of telling the random ones from the hand made ones as a QoL.

Factions will also eventually have their own pools of both custom crew members and parameters for generating random ones. For instance a missile focused faction would have missile focused perks for many of their crew. Not terribly hard, but still lots of work to get it all set up and populated with the right data.