Buying, Selling Ships... IN SPACE.

The month's almost over, I'll be able to retire the "IN SPACE" suffix soon.

At 9am today, I pushed out a version that had buying and selling of 8 different ships. I was quick to call that "feature complete", which is perhaps a bit hasty. There's still plenty that I really want to get done by the end of February.

• Rewrite persistence system to use localStorage instead of cookies, and then use the new persistence system to store trade history, ship position, sector coordinates, what ship the player has purchased, and anything else I'm forgetting.
• Player loses when they run out of fuel. Permadeath is harsh, but it makes venturing out into the void a real risk. Not so much of a risk when you have a fast ship, but still.
• Have a player inventory screen to see what's in the hold and what price you paid (to remind you not to sell for too little).
• Warning klaxon when low on fuel.
• Experiment with inertial movement - this would really change all the ships' accelerations and top speeds to make them feel right. It will also require a slow "life support" cost to maintain the tension of getting from sector to sector.
• Achievement for getting a lot of money
• Achievement for exploring a lot of systems
• Achievement for limping in to a system with less than 1% fuel
• Achievement for reaching distant sectors

We'll see if inertia gets in. And achievements. At one point, I was thinking about having asteroid mining as a thing you could do. That's not getting in.

Even though I'm looking at a lot of features that'd be neat to see in the game, I can still look at what is in the half-full glass, and be fairly satisfied. I've wanted to make a game something like this since playing TradeWars on the old BBS systems I dialed into back in 1988. Yikes.