I’m just back from a vacation where I played an hour or so of Solar Trader every night (waiting for Jesse to finish off his diddlings). The thing is, every time I play, I think of new things I’d like to add. For instance…

1) Huge system with Moons: If I had it all over to do, I’d have spaced out the planets a bit more and put moons in. Jesse and I have spoken about this – it would be so cool to have missions to lunar bases. After all, if you can transport people to far away asteroid camps, the moon would just be a hop. But no, its a little late for that. Everything (gas, air use, power use) would have to be changed, along with some ancient and dusty original coding.

2) More encounters: Like 200+ encounters isn’t enough? I’d love to add new ones. Every time I see something on TV, or read a book, I think – there’s another encounter. Today, I thought about having a dream sequence that might happen while you are in the auto sleep bunk, where you fight your personal demons. It might be a fun sidebar.

3) New misssions: I’d like to add two new missions to the NQA (no questions asked) mission. One would be a photo recon of a deep-space drydock, where as soon as you go by, several picket ships go active and chase you. Another would be getting tossed into the game show “Hares and Hounds” where you have to fly a pod to a distant planet but several bounty hunters are after you. Both of these are doable – I just have to think it out.

4) Backstory: Jesse and I talked a lot about this one – it could be that you could pick these as helpful advantages (like starting with more cash and stuff). Backstories could help you in all sorts of ways. The neatest had it’s plusses and negatives – the haunted ship. Soon as you land, every rat and cat runs out and never comes back. Of course, if a haunting occurs, you take a morale hit and your passengers might go mad.

5) Patch & Go sales desk – like Pixies and the Souk and Droxias, you need a place where you can buy ship stuff. Since P&G has an empty button slot, this would be an easy thing to do. Now, before starting on one of those long long flights, you could gear up. Fun!

I don’t know how many of these I’ll ever add. Number 5 for sure – I could do that in a couple of minutes. The special missions, perhaps. Since OreLuggers is such a useful mission, it would be nice to get some variations in there. The others? I don’t know right now. I guess I need Jesse to wrap up so we can put this out to Beta.

Will it ever be finished? Anyone’s guess at this point…