Greetings!

Good thing it's a leap year or we'd have missed the big February Founder upload.

The Vault upload this month is bigger than all the other previous ones combined.

In fact, it's twice as big as all the previous ones combined.

So let's get to it:

## CONTENTS ##

1. Earthling Commander stuff
2. Planet Critters
3. Ship Concepts
4. Combat feedback
5. Exploration Feedback
6. Tools

Before you go further, please go grab the new ZIP file and look through it otherwise much of this will make no sense.

REMEMBER you are seeing really really early stuff. These aren't marketing assets or something.  You're seeing stuff we would never consider sharing with the general public because it's so rough.

## Earthling Commander ##

We've included the voice auditions for our female commanders.  This game is going to have many hours of audio so you can imagine how much stuff we get to listen to.

Well...not me of course. but Andrew.

You can also see the direction we're going for right now.  

 ## Planet Critters ##

You can get an idea of the planet critters in the game.   Unlike Star Control 2, you will actually fly down to a big spherical planet (ala Spore) and drive around on the surface looking for stuff, avoiding bad things and critters and shooting critters. It'll be third person still but you won't be able to see the entire planet at once but rather just the part of it you're driving over.  It's a pretty fun mini game.

## Ship Concepts ##

We will be debating these the entire time.  On the one hand, we want to honor what has come before but on the other hand, we definitely want to have our ships look pretty spectacular and take advantage of all the advancements over the past 25 years.

## Combat Feedback ##

The combat is going to be controversial.  There is no way to satisfy everyone with however we approach combat.  

You will have the people who want the combat to be old-school top down around a single planet.  You will have the people who want us to switch to first person.  

Overall, we want to design the combat around the following basics:

• Combat will take place within an entire solar system, not just a single planet
• Combat can potentially take place with up to 6 people at once (not just 1 on one)
• Combat should be third person so that you can always see your ship and recognize whatever particular attributes are unique to it in action.

 ## Solar System Exploration ##

Similar to combat, we have the solar system exploration.  This is when you emerge out of hyperspace and are flying around a particular solar system. We want to be able to have solar systems be alive (planets move, various goodies might be in the solar system, various interactive elements).  So the UI on this will be somewhat similar to the combat UI.

We'd like to get your feedback on this.

## Tools ##

This Winter we're supposed to start releasing the tools for the game.  There's going to be some delays in this area because right now, the QA team and many of our tool engineers are working to get Ashes of the Singularity and Offworld Trading Company out the door so the tools are not going to be ready by end of Winter.

The tools we are anxious to share with you are (in no particular order)

1. Conversation Editor.  This is a tool that lets us create conversations, quests, etc. that should allow people to create their very own adventures.  If you think of Star Control it's really a set of loosely connected mini-games tied together by a global series of quests.  That is what the converation editor does.
2. Multiverse Editor.  This allows players to create their own universe complete with stars, planets, etc.  It allows us to tie the quests and such with particular planets.

These two tools are pretty far along.  But without the ability to tie them together in engine, they're not real useful for Founders yet.  That is, at the very least, you'd want to be able to go out and explore your galaxy and go on adventures even if there are no bad guys yet to fight.  

Once Ashes ships (and I sleep for about a week straight) I'll be able to get this stuff sorted.

What we'd like to hear from you are: What specifically would you like to do FIRST with these tools? This will let us prioritize a bit on what needs to be polished and QA'd a bit to put up on the vault for download.

As a reminder, DO NOT SHARE anything we put up on the vault whether it be art, music or the tools.

For the next couple of weeks I own't be around much as I'm neck deep making missions for Ashes of the Singularity.  The underlying scripting engine in Ashes will probably come up in Star Control (they both share the same engine) so I'll be sharing some of the modding stuff with Ashes with you guys as well.

IF any of you are modders AND know RTS games, let me  know in this post as I can get you access to the Ashes tools early which will likely give you a head start in Star Control.

Talk to *campers* soon!

-Brad (Executive Producer)