Yes, I have had to balance improving and tweaking the graphics with getting everything to simply work
Once I have a stable build, I will be addressing all those issues and more.
Better Weapons - I'm already updating the weapons from those shown in the video. These will definitely be improved before the alpha release.
Better Animal Aliens - again, you could only see a few of the animal-like aliens in the video. I am working on improving the AI and textures for these guys, and you will see some new screenshots of them soon.
Better Intelligent Aliens - You don't see the bipedal, intelligent aliens in the video, and for a good reason. They need to be redesigned to match the improved graphics. "What improved graphics?" you ask? Well ... you should have seen the original
The main thing I'm working on is redesigning the planet save/load function. Originally I was using a pre-defined function to do this, which worked great at the time. However, as I added features to the game, certain things did not laod correctly, and I had to make little workarounds for each new feature. I decided to create my own script for loading and saving each level/planet/cave. It is working, but it is not yet implemented for caves, and is still missing a couple features.
Here are some other features I want to work on once the alpha is stable and ready. So these would come after the alpha release, but would be ready for the commercial release:
Ancient ruins - not every planet will have them, but occasionally the player will discover the remnants of a civilization. I think this will be interesting especially in cases of dead/uninhabitable planets.
Cities - Living cities with intelligent aliens to either interact with or fight. These would have to be on life bearing planets.
More variation - I have a bunch of different surface, atmosphere, liquid, rocks, plant and alien types already. Conceptually, adding more variation is easy, but I want to get the whole thing working and up to a certain quality standard before I go into adding more variation.
Weather effects - rain, snow, lightning and other more unusual phenomena will be added to different planets. There is already a day/night cycle and wind, which you can see in the video briefly when the geyser goes off.