Well, its out and its good!

Buggy, yes, but hilarious with it.

I've been lucky enough to play the prerelease as a tester (or perhaps a crash test dummy), so feel free to ask any Qs now I can talk about it.

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Trailer.

Steam store page (will assumably be drm free on another store too).

"Ostranauts is a detailed simulation of owning and living aboard a spaceship, in a solar system where honest living is a slow death sentence. Set in the NEO Scavenger universe, where Earth has suffered cataclysmic collapse, the rest of the System lives on in a state of capitalistic dystopia.

Players will create their captain, build or customize their starting ship from the spoils of their career history, and find ways to keep their motley crew in line, fuel in their tanks, food on their plates, and the debt collectors at bay.

Detailed Custom Ship Design
Players can build their ship, in any shape, from functioning modular parts. The parts have physical properties, interact with each other, and can wear out over time.
Crew Needs
Crew members have physiological and emotional needs, ranging from basal needs like food, water, oxygen, and temperature, to more esoteric needs like privacy, security, intimacy, and esteem."

Available later this year.

Thoughts? Personally I'm excited as Ive been seeing early design work as Daniel has loaded it onto twitter over the last... year or so i think.

Looks good. Is there ship vs ship combat in this? Looking for a good spaceship combat games where you can knock out their engines, board them and LOOT!

I don't think so. It looks like it's more akin to scavenging "space hulks" and managing a crew.
Like a "Scrapyard Simulator in Space", I'd guess.

EDIT: It seems I was wrong. Read post below :)

Hey Folks! My name's Dan, and I'm the dev of NEO Scavenger and Ostranauts. Thanks Sachys, for starting a thread and for directing me here!

I still have a lot of questions to sort out for the game, both in terms of gameplay (combat, possible actions, etc.) and distribution (OS support, stores, etc.). However, I can highlight a few of my plans if it helps.

Re: DRM-free versions and other stores, I expect this will be the case at some point. Steam is just the logical place to start these days to get some momentum, so a lot of devs are initially launching there to get a critical mass, then expand to other stores. GOG have been good to me in the past, so I'd work with them again without hesitation.

Re: NEO Scavenger's "Groundhog Day" issues, that's a fair point. Ostranauts should be pretty different, as the player won't be role-playing a specific person this time. Chargen will be more like GDW's Traveller RPG, where you choose career history, skills, appearance, name, etc. Events happen to you along the way, which gives you contacts, rivals, and potentially starting ship funds.

Depending on the chargen path chosen, I hope to provide a range of starting scenarios. E.g. test pilot steals experimental ship, prisoner crash-lands and runs free on a shuttle, a desperate refugee takes out a shady mortgage to buy a junker, etc.

This video's a bit old, but still pretty accurate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4Vh4_Y37YU

And I'm expecting to focus on one specific starting scenario as a test, and adding more later. (Probably the K-Leg shipbreaker path, which starts you in a junkyard as a shipbreaker, and you retrofit a derelict and steal it to start the game)

As for combat, I expect there will be both crew vs. crew combat, and ship vs. ship combat. I'm not sure how that'll work yet, but my first attempt will probably be ships fighting almost like submarines: extremely long range, lots of sensor games, lots of counter measures, probably negotiations, and mostly done through first-person UI like scopes and sensors.

For crew combat, I'm picturing the same top-down, 2D screen we see in screenshots now, except the crew are trading NEO Scavenger-like combat moves with each other instead of the social interactions I have now. E.g. fire single shot, kick when down, tackle, threaten, etc.

The trick is that Ostranauts is real-time with pause, and on a 2D plane, while NS was turn-based and 1D. I think it can be done, but it's a risk!

Damn!
The game's really looking to be way better than I was expecting (and I was expecting it to be good).
Thanks for your GOG support, Fedor. I hope the game's development goes smoothly.

Looking forward to buy Ostranauts here.

Very nice! Looking forward to it!

Neo Scavenger was a one of a kind unique game and a true gem, but this game seems a bit... generic? Sounds like just another FTL-like, we already have tonnes of these top-down space ship games.

Looks absolutely incredible

Loved Neo, will be looking out for this.

Funny name though. Are the Ostranauts from Ostralia?

Can we play an Ostralopithecus?

Anyway, I'm not fond of top view games but I wish you good luck with this project!

New update video showing a few different things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZD2lDqt1nc

Wait a second. There was a story? I played that game a fair amount and found it hard to move past survival. Do you need computer skills to figure out the story?

No. But you need to get to Detroit in order to start the "quest". From there you'll get your first instructions on where to get next.

Welcome! If you get in touch with one of the blue-text GOG staffers, they'll be able to give your account special game-dev status. This gets you... orange text. I'm not sure if it does anything else to be honest.