Limiting and polishing the concept

Well, I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted at first. It would be a game about collecting people with a space ship and forcefully taking them to a "space school". It would be gradually harder to manouver the bus as you acquired more students.

With the right aesthetics, it could be cute.

However, as soon as I had the basic mechanic of flying and deploying a tractor beam, I learned that this concept does not make for a very fun game. The risk was very low, the objective too easy and, frankly, some amount of violence has to be going on: violence makes things REAL - danger and decision. 

So I decided to insert enemies, to limit resources and to force the player to land every now and them, incresing the danger and decision-making aspects of it.

Very soon the school bus original idea was inadequate for this gameplay. 

I am a strong believer of building story around game design, so I changed the story to accomodate this new design. Now you still capture people, and this is still the goal, but with all the weapons and adventuring, it felt like a this was a perfect game mechanic for a...

...slaver.

Yeah. I could have gone with bounty-hunter. In fact, I still might, but right now my gameplay is not so heavy (or effective) in action to justify this route. Plus, I still want to maintain the "the more captives you have in your ship, the harder to drive" mechanic, so it makes sense to capture many people - and not just a few choice bounties.

So that is the direction I am following now. As it is, I hope to implement some quest mechanic for you to convince people to join you rather than forcefully take them, but if this proves too hard, we´re sticking with root slavering.

Thank you for reading. I hope to have this game out until next year.