Scripting In The Stars: Limit Theory
Too pretty for Earth.
I'd almost entirely forgotten about ultra-pretty, hyper-ambitious procedural space-sim Limit Theory until the ghost of Craig Pearson came to me in a dream. In the spirit of Halloween he informed me there was a neeeeew viiiideeeeeoooo before disappearing in a puff of saltires. Thanks Craig.
In one of his largest updates yet, solo dev Josh Parnell details the work he's been doing over the past two months. A lot of it involves the custom scripting language he's built to both design the base game and enable easier modding, on which he goes into detail. There's also a half hour of absolutely gorgeous footage.
While Josh seems to think the new ways he's building the game, talked about in the final chapter of the video, will be disinteresting to players, I find them fascinating. He's using his new scripting language in such a way that he can now develop bits of the game in isolation from the rest. Working on UI without loading a game world or being able to tinker with how AI reacts to certain events without graphics getting in the way. For a game that is so modular it makes a tonne of sense.
Which is something of a recurring theme throughout Limit Theory's development. Radial menus giving you access to a lot of data without cluttering the normal play screen? Smart. Daily updates for perpetually fretting Kickstarter backers? Clever. Working solo helps in a lot of this, meaning there's no levels of understanding or bureaucracy to go through to get information out there, it's all just what Josh is thinking or doing. His clear passion for his game is infectious.
There's a summary of the video in a Kickstarter update post, the next one of which should be some time around the end of October. Your guess is as good as mine for a final release date, the goal in 2012 having been the start of this year, though the current FAQ states "early 2015."