Hey there,
I hope you were not too impatient for the next screenshots of the game, because I've been on a business trip lately, but here we go! Today I'd like to show you how you create your own ships and produce an armada in the game!

The first step will obviously be to create a factory. To do that, you build a factory module where ever you like it. I've just built a little expansion base on an asteroid, like you could build it or find it in outer space. It has a factory inside the asteroid:



In each of your factories, you can produce and construct ships which correspond to the level of the factory. You see a Level 1 factory here, so you can only build very small ships obviously. You can open the ship designer in a factory to create ship construction plans for ships you want to produce later. On the following screenshot you can see the ship designer. You can place blocks of any material. I've just created a little solid iron body for our first little battlecruiser.



On the left of the ship designer, you find several modules, like cockpits, weapons, or engines. You can place them on the ship like you do with building modules in the normal world. The top of the ship designer still lacks the display of the ship statistics and the dropdown menu for the ship type. Any ship type has several requirements, like a battle ship needs weapons and a transport ship needs storage space in the inside. Each block and module you use influences the ship statistics. For example, many blocks will increase the ship weight, which you can compensate with more or stronger engines. You can find more module types (e.g. different/stronger engines or more effective harvesting modules) in outer space, lost stations, win them in PvP battles, or research them in your base.



To distinguish the ships of each player, do not forget to put a few decorative stickers on the ship, which will be displayed in your player colour (which is the colour you define in your user profile at Space Engies forums). I've placed some simple horizontal stripes for our battle cruiser:



Once you saved it, you can click each factory to pop up the factory menu, which will display every ship you constructed, ready for production. You can also find construction plans for better ships in lost bases or as a reward for solving quests. It's also possible to share construction plans between the players, for example to help newbies to quickly get their first ship without needing to construct one... the author of a construction plan is always displayed in the list.



Click on a ship icon to produce it, if you got the according amount of money and ressources.



That's the whole deal. Feel free to be creative, build your own ships and what you have ever dreamed of! Of course, when you can afford it, build larger factories of higher levels, which allow you to use even more modules and build way larger ships! Build up your own armada and face the challenges of the game!



More screenshots of other parts of the game will follow soon, such as the info about the open pre-alpha release! Stay tuned!

Here's a new screenshot!
It shows a human space station, which Vexyde and me are currently working on. It is settled on a group of asteroid.

A public alpha version is now available. If you're interested, feel free to head to Space Engies forum Here's the download and the instructions:
http://www.space-engies.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=57

Little teaser image for the PvP arena, which will be introduced in the next version