Habitat Kickstarter is live!

Hey, so after a minor mixup with KS approval, the Kickstarter for Habitat has gone live. If playing junkyard wars in space appeals to you, I highly recommend you back it! After just a few hours, they are already pushing 20% of their funding goal. Not bad for a company made up of six guys.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/4gency/habitat-a-thousand-generations-in-orbit

Habitat: One Man's Space Junk is Another's Kinetic Weapon

In the future, everyone wants your junk... in SPACE!

Habitat is an upcoming space building/strategy/defense game from indie developer, 4gency, and it looks like it is gonna be pretty damn awesome! The premise is thus: The Earth is no longer inhabitable. Humankind has relocated into orbit around the planet. Near Earth space is full of both space junk and trash from the surface that somehow got blasted out of the atmosphere. You play as a team of space engineers tasked with rebuilding a home for humans using the junk you find. However, you must balance your building with defense of your orbital junkyard colony.

Sound fun? It is!

The game is currently in pre-alpha, and they are getting ready to launch a Kickstarter tomorrow next week to fund further development. I managed to get my hands on a development copy yesterday, and took it for a spin. Right now, the game is pretty basic. In it's pre-alpha form, it is entertaining in a way similar to intentionally unleashing Godzilla in Sim City. They are working on the strategy elements, but right now you can enjoy the fun of tearing down your own creations in a whirlwind of lasers, grappling hooks and rockets.

Anyway, I put together a little video of some of my gameplay last night to give you a feel for how this all comes together. Check it out!

You can learn more about the game at the official website Jointhe509th.com
If you want to back the Kickstarter, keep an eye out here: http://jointhe509th.com/kickstarter/. I will definitely be backing it!

A Different Kind of Dragon

I am a D&D and fantasy nerd in my free time, but I get paid to be a space nerd, which is also really cool! For this week's Make-it Monday, I decided to finally tackle a project that has been sitting on my shelf since Christmas. Rocket Claus paid a visit to my desk at work last year and left me a Dragon in a box... well, a Dragon and a Falcon. Not the sort that knights might try to poke with pointy things, nor that wizards might converse with in secret languages. No, this is a flyable model of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon spacecraft that sits on top of it.

The glue was still drying, so I couldn't pack the chutes yet.

Dragon capsule

Bit of nerd trivia:
The Falcon 9 is named after a ship that made the Kessel Run in under 12  parsecs

For those who are not familiar, SpaceX is the private American rocket company started by Elon Musk back in 2002. Musk is also one of the co-founders of PayPal, and the founder of Tesla Motors. He is my favorite of the next wave of transportation tycoons jockeying to fill the void left by the Space Shuttle's retirement. The Falcon and Dragon have already made several unmanned supply runs to the International Space Station, and are currently undergoing safety review to certify it for flying astronauts.

Oh, and the Falcon 9 is also being modified to be fully reusable! As in it will land on its tail, Buck Rogers style! Check it out! This test flight gives me shivers every time!

My reading list just got a lot longer.

Sci-fi AND Fantasy!

Budd, over at Sci-fi Media posted about NPR's list of their top 100 science fiction and fantasy books and it looks like I've got a lot of catching up to do. I have only read about 1/3 of the titles on the list. To make myself feel better, I can say that I have read many of the series on the list, all of the top 5 and 10 out of the top 15... so, that's good, right?

Some notable absences I felt included Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. I don't even particularly like the Narnia series, but it is certainly a formative work in the fantasy genre.

Also... No Harry Potter!? Not making a judgment, but I was genuinely surprised. I wonder if the "real world" setting causes a psychological block so that people don't think of it as fantasy. Or maybe Harry Potter fans don't listen to NPR.

What are your thoughts on the list?

Edit: The absence of Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is also surprising, given the recent HBO series and his skyrocketing profile in the fantasy authorship ranks. I actually find that fact kind of satisfying, because it reduces the argument that the selections are based on the new hotness on the book shelves. "Reduces" does not necessarily mean "eliminates." Okay, clearly I was suffering from some sort of selective vision/memory because SOI&F is #5! Please resume complaints about this being a list of "what's hot"

Also, this.