- v1.1.9 - Changelog - 17 September 2026
Fix for a bug that has surprisingly been in the game since launch. The bug was that the particles for the player ship's forward thrusters weren't being wrapped when the exited one of the edges of the screen. This sounds like it wouldn't really be noticeable, and maybe it isn't because clearly I didn't notice it until now, but it was immediately obvious when I gave the game a little spin today. The bug happens because all of the particles are pooled depending on their size (small 1x1 pixels, medium 2x2 pixels, and large 3x3 pixels) and when a level starts the extraction ship comes in and fires a load of medium size particles (the same size as the player ship's forward thrusters), effectively going through the whole pool and touching each particle once. The trouble here is that because wrapping is disabled for the extraction ship, we disable it for its particles too, but we never re-enabl…
- v1.1.7 - Changelog - 3 September 2026
Small fix for a case where the audio implementation (BASS) fails to initialise because there isn't a valid audio device registered. Interestingly, this bug was reported by a player who is practically deaf and so doesn't have a proper audio device actually connected to their machine. v1.1.7 Full Changelog - Handling of audio failing to initialise when there's no valid audio device. Error will be handled and game will continue to run, just without audio. - When audio fails to initialise, a message will be logged to file and another displayed on the main menu informing the user of this. New Game Announcement I'll just slip this in there that yesterday (2026-09-02) I announced my next game, Terminal Reign. Go take a look! :) https://store.steampowered.com/app/4677740/Terminal_Reign/
- New Game Announcement: Terminal Reign - 2 September 2026
Hello!Today I'm announcing my next game, Terminal Reign. I've been working on this for a few months now, and I'm really excited to start showing it off and posting about it more, especially to players of my other games.So please take a look and maybe wishlist. If you like Deep Space Exploitation, I'm sure there's something here that will interest you.Terminal ReignA vast empire struggles to maintain its millennia old grip on the stars. Headed by an emperor half-deranged by centuries of rule, its power is challenged by the organising kingdoms that border its domain. To manage these threats, the empire presses anyone it can into servitude to operate its decaying military of remote weapons.Operate a remote armoured vehicle for the glory and whims of a dying empire. Undertake tactical missions, configure your command desk with an array of devices, and remain in favour to survive.
- v1.1.4 - Changelog - 6 July 2026
A small update to solve some confusion around how players are supposed to disable mines when they're first introduced in the game. It's intended that players destroy mines to disable them when they're first introduced, and maybe attempt to deactivate them via the Activator tool but then realise that it won't work. This update adds an extra message after the initial "Bonuses are available for disabling active mines." message, hinting that the Activator won't work and that they'll need to physically destroy them. I've also finally fixed the bug where the "Code Breaker" achievement unlocks as soon as you get the military codes upgrade and not the first time you use it. Feedback and Reviews There have been quite a few new players recently, given the recent sales and events, so I wanted to say thank you and to please leave a review and feedback in the forums or Discord channel. It really doe…
- Deep Space Exploitation is part of the Start Your Engine Festival! - 12 May 2026
Hello!The Start Your Engine Festival is starting now, with 86 games taking part, 28 of which are upcoming titles, and 18 of which have demos! Come take a look at all the vehicular games on offer.From the organisers themselves: "Celebration of engines in games! Whether you want to drift through mountain passes, haul cargo across a post-apocalyptic wasteland, run a transcontinental rail empire, or sail an open sea with the wind at your back, there's an engine here for you." Deep Space Exploitation is taking part, as it is actually a vehicle focussed game! This didn't occur to me during development, but it looks like it ended up as quite a slick little retro arcade flight game. I've you've not played it yet, or want to pick it up for a friend, then now would be a nice time to as it's 30% off.
- v1.1.3 - Changelog - 16 January 2026
Small update designed to help with debugging graphics issues in the future. v1.1.3 Full Changelog Updated to latest (2023) version of Ultraviolet Framework and forked to apply some fixes Added GameEngineConfiguration.json file to game folder to allow players to enable detailed debug logging to help with debugging graphics issues Game will now log some OpenGL version info and Video Controller info on startup
- v1.1 Content Update - 17 December 2025
Hello!Today I'm releasing an update for v1.1 of Deep Space Exploitation! This update contains some (but not all) of the things I wanted to add before release but never got round to, and also some things that came from suggestions and general bug reports.I still have things on my list to add, but I really wanted to get this update out before the Winter sale and had much less time to work on things than I thought, given a recent apartment move and general holiday season madness.Anyway, the Steam Winter Sale starts tomorrow and Deep Space Exploitation will be 25% off, so go fill your stockings!And here are the things I've been working on... :)Inertia SwitchThroughout development I'd get the "why are you slowing down in space?" question, and I would tell people that I'd tried it and it's just not fun for the default movement. I still stand by that, but what IS fun is having the option, so I…
- Steam Awards Nominations! - 27 November 2025
Hello!Voting for the Steam Awards is open now, if you thought Deep Space Exploitation was a cool game that you played this year, then I'd really appreciate a vote! :)I realise with my tiny community that it's quite unlikely that I'll get any award, but I thought that any votes might provide a little bit of visibility.If you do vote for Deep Space Exploitation, then I think the Steam Deck Award is a great shout, since it is actually really great on the Steam Deck!Hope you have fun with your votes and that some of your favourite games get some recognition!Cheers! :)
- Release Stats and Bundle News! - 26 November 2025
Hello!This is post is more of a news roundup of the past few weeks since release. I've got some release stats and also some nice news regarding bundles. I would have liked to make this post either exactly 1 or 2 weeks since the release, but I've been a little busy moving flats, but that's just given me a little more time to organise thoughts and data.If you haven't played Deep Space Exploitation yet, there's an excellent (and quite long) demo available on the store page! And please do come join the Discord Server, the more the merrier. :)Release StatsGeneral- Development Time: 14 Months- Steam Page Live Date: 2025-04-09- Release Date: 2025-11-06- Release Wishlists: 4,298End of Week 1- Units Sold: 960- Steam Revenue (Gross): $7,049- Wishlists: 5,805End of Week 2- Units Sold: 1,156- Steam Revenue (Gross): $8,785- Wishlists: 6,461So all things considered I'm quite content with this. The sa…
- v1.0.10 Changelog + High Contrast UI Mode - 13 November 2025
Hello!It's been an interesting, stressful, and exciting week since the game released on Nov 6th. I'm thinking whether I want to (and have the energy to) write a break down and report as a larger post, but I'm not sure there's that much interesting to be said. All in all, the release went well, if a little quietly; reactions and feedback to the game are good, 40 reviews at 100% positive on Steam as I write this, but the audience could be bigger. That being said, I've had the chance to work on the bugs reported since the previous update, and also slip in a high contrast mode for this v1.0.10 update!High Contrast UI ModeThis was mentioned by a few people as feedback during the release. It seemed like an interesting problem to solve so I thought I'd have a go. I used a website that allows you to compare colours to check their contrast rating (check it out here), then made a post on /r/disab…
- v1.0.6 Changelog - 11 November 2025
Hello!It's been less than a week since release and things have been going very smoothly. Only 2 real bugs so far, so I'm counting that as a win. I've had great feedback on tweaks that I can make, and I've already started on some of them (see this update) and there're more to come!Thanks so much to everyone who's played, left feedback, and generally enjoyed the game. And if you haven't yet, then why not try the demo? :)Anyway, here's the changelog for v1.0.6. Changelog v1.0.6 (2025-11-11)FixesFixed a typo with for the Hull Plating MK3 upgrade which made it appear as "Hull Plating MK2" after installing.Fixed a crash caused by seeker mines checking for line of sight on the player after they've died.Fixed a crash caused by the spectro scanner caching data for an entity gets removed from the game.Fullscreen-Windowed mode no longer shows the rounded edges in the bottom corners.TweaksImproved…
- Deep Space Exploitation is OUT NOW! - 6 November 2025
Hello!Deep Space Exploitation is now fully released and available for purchase and enjoyment! If this is the first time you've seen the game (thanks for taking a look, btw) then I'll briefly explain: Deep Space Exploitation is a space mining game featuring 2D physics, fully destructible asteroids, and a story of survival under an exploitative corporation. You'll need to use your equipment wisely, upgrade your ship, and make difficult decisions in order to secure your future!If this isn't the first time you've seen the game, then thanks for taking another look! And thanks for all your support throughout the development process. Making the game was super fun, but the real magic was seeing people's reactions, feedback, and overall excitement. So thanks again :)If you've bought the game and want to help me out you can leave a review here on Itch or on Steam, share the game on any social med…
- Release Date Annoucement and Trailers! - 23 October 2025
Hello! Today I'm announcing the release date for Deep Space Exploitation! Along with releasing the two trailers I've been working on and an update for the demo.If you haven't already, go Wishlist the game! It will really help out in the run up to release :) Release Date! I'm aiming for the 6th of November 2025 (2 weeks from posting this), but in most of the marketing stuff I'll just be saying "November 2025" so that I can give myself some breathing room in case I want to spend a bit more time on anything or I find out my chosen date is a bad idea. Release will be on Itch and Steam at pretty much the same time. Oh yeah, I'm also looking at around 8.99 USD for the price, most likely with a 20% launch discount. Trailers! I ended up making two trailers, one which is all action, and one which gives more of a look at the story. I did this because I felt that the story elements were too slow f…
- Demo v0.7.4 - UX Updates - 17 September 2025
Hello!I thought that the recent v0.7 demo update was going to be the last before the release of the game, but there have been quite a few tweaks and fixes that I wanted to get in now since they're pretty important for a demo. What spurred a lot of these updates was a recent discovery that a small but significant number of demo players weren't playing further than the tutorial because they didn't realise the demo went on. This is obviously bad because the tutorial is only about 10% of the demo, and all the fun and interesting stuff comes in the other 90%! I've written a bit extra about the bigger changes in the v0.7.4 demo update (full change log is at the bottom). Tutorial UpdatesThis isn't the first time I've made a significant update to the tutorial, the previous time I re-arranged some steps to make it harder to breeze past the important sections on how the scanner works, and this ti…
- Demo v0.7 - 5 September 2025
Hello!It's been a while (about 2 months actually!) since I've put out an update for the demo, making it v0.7! I've been working mostly on content that comes after the demo ends but I realised there are still quite a few tweaks and bug fixes that the demo can benefit from too. There are even some bigger things in there too, like the intro cutscene, and some new upgrades.Here's the full list of changes you can see in Demo v0.7! General- Intro cutscene!- Activator tool now shows more informative text- Drones will beep and complain when damaged- Drones can now be deactivated/activated- Reduced attractor beam length and width, and added upgrades to increase these- Added lateral control (strafe) upgrade- Added refurbished explosive charge- Crystals now create particles when colliding- Added background signal noise modifiers so that using different tools creates some interference with the scan…
- Cutscenes! (Prologue + Epilogues) - 22 August 2025
Hello!Recent work has been 100% on prologue and epilogue cutscenes. This has been pretty interesting from a development point of view because it's an important part of the game which is entirely story and art (at least my approach to it is).Making the CutscenesThe design goals of these cutscenes are pretty simple; the prologue needs to quickly set the scene for the game as well as give a little introduction to who you are, and the epilogues need to wrap up the story and provide a satisfying ending (though not necessarily complete closure). I wanted to use Papers Please's cutscenes as a model, since they're simple and effective, but also very accessible in terms of development and artistic skill.The actual making of the cutscenes was quite straight forward. I worked on the prologue cutscene first since it's a straight sequence without any variations (unlike the epilogues) and the storyte…
- Mines, Giant Asteroids, and Story - 6 August 2025
Hello!There has been a lot of progress recently but not a lot of big exciting things to show off, apart from maybe the mines. Mostly I've been working on story and levels to build out a single run of the game to the length I want. I think this has also been the longest break in dev logs, which shows I've either run out of interesting things to talk about, or I've been way too stuck in the details of everything and now need to come up for air.Mines!As part of adding some more chaos and danger to the levels I worked on some exploding mines. They're quite simple, in that generally they will explode if you get too close, but combining that with physics and the ability to hide them makes for some fun and unpredictable scenarios. There's a story reason for these mines being here while pilots are engaged in peaceful mining activities, but I'll talk about that a little bit more below.There's a…
- Devlog - Procedural Generation - 11 July 2025
Hello!Recently I've been busy working on procedural generation for levels, which is something I didn't originally plan for but started to look more attainable as time went on. Much like the previous work I did on path finding, there are some difficulties that come with doing this kind of thing for a free-form environment and not one that's nice and grid based, which I'll talk about more below. Even though I'm still planning to hand design a lot of the levels, this will really help to add some extra choice for players, and even open up the possibility for an endless mode once the main game is finished.Quick note on the gifs in this post: to be able to show the generation slowed down like that I hacked some stuff together (which I explain at the bottom of this post). In the actual game this generation happens in milliseconds.Deciding on Proc-GenOriginally I only planned on using procedura…
- Demo v0.6.6 - Scrap! - 29 June 2025
Hello! This is everything I've been up to over the past two weeks. Adding more interaction to the game, gearing up to create the full length of the game so I'll have an end-to-end that I can start refining, and of course working through improvements and feedback from people. So here are the major changes, minor changes, and bug fixes I've done for v0.6.6! Scrap Processor Jobs As a bit of variety and also story, I've added scrap processing jobs where you can collect items of scrap and feed them to a scrap processor which will then process them into a higher value cube. This is meant to be a bit of fun interaction but also provides a bit of opportunity for the game's story, as well as helping to enrich the game with more mission types and interactions. This is also linked to an upgrade for the player ship, which is available in the demo but hidden as a little secret... Destruction Code Up…
- Demo v0.6.5 - Next Fest Feedback - 12 June 2025
Hello! Next Fest has been pretty intense so far. A lot of feedback and chatting with players about the game. Here's a collection of tweaks, bug fixes, and even a couple of minor features I managed to get in for version 0.6.5 of the demo.Next Fest is still in full swing, so if you haven't played the demo yet, please do and let me know what you think!Laser Sight Special mention for the laser sight, which I'm really happy with (it reflects and lights up particles!).Features - Laser sight upgrade - Volume settings are now split between SFX, UI, and Music, and can be set from 0 to 100 (previously 0 to 10). This should help streamers who have more sensitive setups.Balance - Hammer easier to control - Some items are cheaper now - Crystals sell for more - Don't show cycle tool reminder on charge training day - Charge training hints at key for dropping charges from cargo - Added status notificat…
