It’s almost launch time for Endless Space—the ambitiously designed ship-building, space-exploring strategy game from Amplitude Studios—to drop out of orbit for its official release. On July 4th, you can download it via your digital distributor of choice (including Steam) for a budget price of 30 bucks.

Amplitude Studios and Iceberg Interactive announced this title a few months ago, and the group of former Electronic Arts and Ubisoft developers has been churning along through updates on their YouTube page since then.

Citing a development mentality called “Creating Games2Gether”, the team has been letting early adopters of the title vote on what content makes it into the final version of the game, as well as get early looks at every in the production cycle.

Amplitude Studios’ has also been keeping fans in the loop with something that every developer should honestly be using: a progress page. (Novel concept, right?)

By breaking down the development process into several tiers and updating everyone via Facebook and Twitter, everyone invested in the game has been able to watch as the project inches towards “gold” status. Can you image if a publisher like EA used this for Mass Effect 3′s patches? God. So much time could’ve been saved in the forums by fans asking for updates.