Yesterday I got the component and ship designer up to their base level with the new interface elements. I’m very excited — this is a major step forward toward getting the game into a demo-able state. I hope to have a video in the beginning of March, probably a week or so before we start any crowdfunding efforts.
One of the big questions I’m waffling on right now is how to handle ship construction, and especially launch stack construction. Right now the game treats every spacecraft as a unique flower — when you design it, it is built and launched just like that. There’s no design that’s retained to copy to other ships. That’s generally OK for the spacecraft themselves, but it also means that the launch stack for each ship needs to be constructed along with it, and that’s just not fun — the huge rockets and fuel requirements to launch the spacecraft is a fun problem to solve once, especially when you’re lifting something particularly huge, but I’m thinking I want to allow you to declare a spacecraft as a launch stack, and then simply have the system use it to send up the other ships and stations you design by automatically mating them together.
I’m going to think about it some more, but how ship designs vs. ships vs. utility objects interact is a UI issue that I’m going to have to put some serious thought into.