Some poorly written insight into this amateur's game design process.

Make what you want, of course, but for what it's worth I was looking forward to this game, too. I think you have a really good concept here.

 

I definitely still have plans to release this. The only reason I'm not working on it right at this moment is because I don't have the financial means to be a full time developer (what Away Mission needs from me to be the best game it can be). That is what I'm hoping to get from releasing my current game. Which I believe I have a good chance at getting, since financial success doesn't require all that many unit sales since my cost of living isn't very high, especially for a gamedev.

Hehehehhe.

The necro's & PM's really force me to agree
I'll update this with some design insight that correlates with both Away Mission and ink & Paper Engine: Lord Ragnavaldr and the Wishing Stone.

 

While I develop my ink & Paper Engine (formerly traveler's tales), I actually find myself (maybe subconsciously, maybe coincidentally) having a few similarities to Away Mission. Beyond the parts of the "engine" that are supposed to be shared. Just yesterday I decided during encounters/story, the player can talk to their party members to get their opinions, and then at the end of designing that part of gameplay, realized that is so similar to how I wanted the Captain (Player) in Away Mission to be able to consult all their Officers, at the officers table, for their plans & opinions.




I also noticed a lot of similarities when creating the moddable portion of the game. (That stuff is all text, so a bit more boring. It has to deal with how with the Emergence portion, the modder can create their own World - Maps, Factions/Races, Character Classes, etc.) Away Mission might end up being a bit of a simplified version of our current game (but with more complex systems, A.I., animation / a.i. director, etc.)

While I develop ink & Paper engine, I'm beginning to think that by the end of it, I'll be able to reuse a significant portion of the game logic (more than I planned with Paper Engine v1.0 vs v2.0) maybe even just ending up making Away Mission a complete overhaul mod, but with updated animation & A.I. (Paper Engine 2.0). That is the plan all along, anyway. The only exception would be if Away Mission's design just doesn't fit with Paper Engine, and needs its own thing.

So at least there's that; good news that it's a good possibility I'm doing some Away Mission work while working on Lord Ragnavaldr and the Wishing Stone.

At the very least, designing & learning from releasing LRatWS will teach me a lot when I return to work on Away Mission. Especially the emergent gameplay / procedural storytelling portions.

If anyone is interested, I wrote a bit more about this part of the design process in my current live devlog.