Rebel Galaxy

I am so damn excited for this.

Greatly enjoyed the time I got to spend with this today. If the galaxy is procedural and the game doesn’t miraculously get worse between now and release, then we’ve got a day one purchase on our hands.

Only real downside of the experience was getting stuck in a battle where I was horribly outclassed and thought that I was warp inhibited, so my ship tangled with a small bandit fleet and nearly got shredded against the command ship. Around that point I realized that I could just warp away whenever I wanted, and that it was an extremely good idea to do so immediately. Limped back to my origin planet, repaired, then tried again. The point where I was sold on the game was when I ran into that same command ship about 20 minutes later, still lurking on the same travel lane.

Haha, your downside sounds like the reason I have a special place in my heart for this kind of game :)

It was only a downside until I figured out I was overthinking it. Thought they had a gravity well generator or something, and at the very least I now know I can go back there and finish them off after I get some real weaponry. :)

Warp is inhibited by proximity to objects, and to a greater extent proximity to hostiles - later, better warp drives will reduce that inhibition distance. So if you can get clear with some booster usage, you can always get away.
Later weapons will include leech missiles and EMPs for making it more of a sure thing :)
Of course, enemies will get those too…

Want. Looks great.

This may be spoilerish, but Ominum needs Xell and I went to the trading coordinates and see a trader protected by a mercenary. How do I contact the trader? He’s flying around me and seems friendly enough. Is there a communications hotkey?

There are 2 ways to hail - you can either have them focused and use the command menu to hail them (Y or CTRL), or you can use the scanner (back or TAB) and when you select them you’ll see an option to hail.

Any ship with the little wireless symbol above their reticle badge is hail-able.

That’s the primary work we have left to do. Got a backlog of about 40 ships and a couple of alien races to integrate, along with scripting their mission/event content and plugging in the other guild missions/data, and finishing off all the story missions.

Very much enjoyed my hour and a half I spent with this today. When can we pre-order?

I ended up putting five hours in RB before closing down for the night, and I assume until the game is available for sale :(. Thanks for letting some of us give it a whirl, I greatly enjoyed it and will be a Day One buyer.

Some nits to pick:
–My mercenary was killed in a battle, so I flew to the nearest station to hire another, and it was exactly the same guy: same name, same face. Kind of kills the immersion.
–Similarly, I believe the bartender looks exactly the same in every station. It would be great to have some variety there. (Maybe I’m wrong on that point, but it always seemed to be the burly guy with a mustache).
–When I’m backing out of menus for missions and equipment and such, sometimes I’m using Escape, sometimes not. I found that slightly bothersome.
–On the map, is there a way to search by name for a station? If I was looking for a particular station at which to sell items, I was just moving the cursor around until I found it, which was a pain. If there is a search function, I missed it.
–Your cash on hand appears often in the upper left, but I wish it was a bit more prominent – perhaps a bolder display.

FYI, I had one crash the entire five hours, so I found it relatively stable. I was on a tractor beam mission and ended up in a battle – it froze as I grabbed the goods from the hauler. Maybe my machine couldn’t handle all the action. That was the only technical problem I had in five hours. I am playing on a three-year old laptop, Win7 64 bit, 2.53GHz with only 4GB RAM. Not great specs, so I think Rebel Galaxy performed quite well considering.

Those are all just little niggly things. I had a great time and look forward to the release. Thanks again Travis.

My biggest complain of the game is how wildly inconsistent the threat ratings are. To many “Low” ratings where my ship got absolutely torn up.

Sad I didn’t make it into the preview for this (long weekend with no internet in the mountains somewhere), but very interested based on the description/thread. Still not entirely sure I understand what it is, but I like what I think it is!

Yes to different solar system appearances. We’ll aim to make them as varied as we can (different backgrounds, makeups, stations, features)
Yes, you can lock a target. With gamepad it’s left shoulder, with KBM… I think it’s Z?
I basically use engine trails to determine orientation. Because of the angle, I couldn’t think of any other way that you’d be able to actually correlate.

-I chose to do more unique mercs knowing they’d ‘repeat’ rather than more generic ones with random names. I choose to believe that they eject and are scooped up :) Maybe I’ll add a message to this effect when they bite it.
-There are 2 bartenders in this sector (one robot one) I’ll end up adding a few more, but they’ll definitely be clones at the end of the day. No way for me to cover all the stations with completely unique ones. I may get some color changeups in there too for some cheapjack extra variety.
-Which menu couldn’t you ESC out of? The only one I’m aware of is conversations, because you actually have to select a choice and we can’t assume it
-At present there’s no name-search on the map, but pressing UP/DOWN on the d-pad cycles ONLY through stations.

Yeah, a lot of the difficulty ratings to start with are best guesses which we will hone in as we go.

I was referring to the hierarchy of menu choices when you’re at a station. If I choose Missions, then I get two boxes, new missions and mission log. Say I choose new missions, that leads to a new list. When I’m done, if I recall correctly, I needed to use my mouse to select the higher level boxes, rather than ESC. I just wanted to keep hitting ESC to back out and get to the top level of station choices. But I don’t have the game in front of me, and perhaps my recollection of this is wrong.

Is you main ship fully customizable? I do not mean that you will simply end up with the best gun, engines, shields, etc… but where you can do kinds of strategies with a wide selection of tech? IE: Stealth ship that launches hordes of fighters vs a bit ship with lots of guns or something else?

You can get a wide variety of ship types, from the little 2-turret corvette you start with to a dreadnaught with a ton of turrets. Big tradeoffs in armament/maneuverability/speeds/hold size. If you want to sit back and cover the thing in long-range turret weaponry and never broadside, that works, or you can be small and nimble and dodge things and get in close. There’s a pretty good bit of variety.

Can I be a carrier?