Hello!
Since the last post I've been pushing to get the game into a state where there's enough for people to play and test while everything holds together and more or less makes sense. I'm now at that point and have a nice little chunk of gameplay showing the core loop in action, available for those who are interested to play!

The Demo
The demo contains the game's core loop, which is: Mining for resources -> Selling resources -> Buying new stuff -> And repeat. Around this there's a bit of ship and finance management that will be expanded on, but other aspects of the game, such as story progression, are not yet available.
As a bullet pointed list, here's what you can do in the demo v0.1:
- Get dropped off by the deployment ship
- Fly around looking for resources to mine, either visually or with your scanner
- Mine those resources with whatever tools you have available (guns or bombs, at the moment)
- Get picked up by the extraction ship when your time is up (there's a time bonus or fine, depending on whether you're early or late)
- Sell resources
- Buy items and ammunition for your tools
- Repair your ship
- Start a new mining run and repeat
- Get blown up, if you're not careful!
- Use Keyboard or Gamepad for controls

There's content in the demo for about 4 mining runs before you run out of new stuff to buy.

Feedback
Since I'm a solo dev, it's mostly just me playing and testing this, so the main reason for this demo is to get other eyes and hands on the game and hopefully get some feedback. To that end, please leave comments on the game's Itch page, or better yet, fill out this google form. I will happily credit anyone leaving feedback as a play tester in the game's final credits!

Progress
This project was originally planned to take 3 or 4 months to finish and release, and that window has now passed. It's probably going to take a couple more months at this point, but I've made my peace with that. I honestly think progress has been good throughout development, but there have been plenty of other things requiring my attention, and this being my first commercial game project there's a ton of first-time-round learning that's slowing things down today but will speed things up tomorrow.

With all that, please play and enjoy the demo, and leave some feedback :)