Been building my own modern take on Escape Velocity Nova for a while now.

Currently drowning in ship work, modular ships, rigged systems, visual changes based on upgrades and loadouts. Taking way longer than I thought it would honestly, so most of what you see flying around is placeholder stuff for now. Ship movement is still being worked on and sprite assets for the modular ships are still getting made too.

My big thing is making space feel *full*. Each star system is around 60km across and I'm trying to cram it with actual life:

* stations
* asteroid fields
* cargo traffic
* patrol fleets
* pirate encounters
* debris
* background events firing off dynamically

Chucked in a fair bit of gameplay stuff already too, missions, crew, wingmen, bars, trade, industry, player owned stations, hangars and apartments. The story arc is actually pretty deep already ( its story ive been working on for few years). Only got 10 systems in at the moment but once it's done the game generates a fresh 300+ system map from a seed every run, so no two playthroughs will play out the same.

Still rough as guts in places but the core is starting to come together.

If you grew up on EV Nova, what made those games stick with you? Would love to hear it as I'm stuck wondering am I wasting my time? is it fun to build sure...

Only real ship i've made atm is battleship, has several high slots with turrets which all track the target and are modular done most of the vfx for it but takes little to get right.

Concept I'm working on