2014 has come, which means that Gangs of Space has been in development for 2 years now!

2012

had been a year of trials and errors, especially due to the decision to redo the game from scratch from Flash to Unity in September 2012.

2013

has been a great and productive year!

It's difficult to list everything that was accomplished during this year, but to give you an idea: in January 2013, the game had almost no multi-player, only one system that wasn't even persistent, some enemy sprites were still 2D... In 1 year's time, we arrived to a quite larger universe, maps and minimaps, a conquest system, bases to build and manage, research, lots of content (ships, items, enemies...), missions, fight systems, shops, contracts, trophies... It's starting to look like a real little big MMO!

The most significant step has of course been the opening of the Alpha access in September 2013, starting the PR, building a community, see what's working and what's not... We are very proud of our current players, of the spirit of help and friendliness you can see in game, on the forums, and on our social networks... Thank you everyone, from the bottom of our hearts! We have learned a lot from you, and we are more determined than ever to make Gang of Space a huge success we can all be proud of!

2014

will be a key year for the game, which should - we hope - graduate from it's Alpha status during the year.

The main objective for the beginning of the year is opening the servers permanently. This implies a lot of things, but the gist of it is continuing what we started with v0.11 on the fight systems. We can already announce there will be lots of bullets in sight for v0.12, and Grouroux has even mentioned something about... a boss? But those who follow our Twitch channel probably know more about this than me.

The other big big job for us for the beginning of the year will be to do more PR in English. So far we've focused mainly on the French gaming community, because this is what we know best. But the game itself if available in English, and we know there are gamers all around the world that would enjoy Gangs of Space. So, we'll be expanding significantly our efforts to reach these players too.

After these short-term goals, here is the main dish for 2014:

• Content, more content, and more content again. Enemies, ships, missions, items, and more...
• The system defense part of the game.
• Governor rights and Administrator rights. Because dominating the Universe should not ONLY make you look cool!
• The API which will allow any hacker-minded person to access data from the game, and act on the game from the outside. Ladders, custom tools, embeddable widgets... we can't wait to see what you will come up with!
• Facilitating understanding the game. We have a lot of work to do about this: maybe a tutorial, some videos for sure, re-doing some interfaces...

But these are only the big points. We also plan to work on the research acquisition system, gate deployment, vocal chat, Twitch integration, multi-resolution support, and a bazillion other things that we will find out about together on the way...

What better conclusion for this long news than announcing the date for the next Alpha Test session, then? See you on

Sunday, January 12, 13:00 GMT

(or in other timezones)

to take with us the first step for a big new year!

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