Deep Space
Lunar New Year Sale!
Happy 2019!
Sincerely,
Blake Gillman
Deep Space - Collector's Edition
I want to be upfront - The pack contains no content whatsoever, it's only for people who are interested in helping support me, the game, or for collector's who want to keep the game on their library.
(You can get it here)
Thank you all so much for playing, and for supporting me!
Will you take the game off Steam?
"Will you take the game off Steam?"
Probably not. It could've done better, but I'm not ashamed that my first released wasn't good, and so I have no reason to hide it.
I don't know if groups of people are still actively playing it, but I do know that it still receives about 20 downloads a day. So long as people are enjoying the game, it won't be removed.
It's been a real rollercoaster of emotions having made this game from joy to instant depression but, I did have fun during development and I had fun playing with some of my friends afterward, and the knowledge that maybe some other groups are getting as much fun out of it as me and my friends did makes me want to keep it up, even if its rating goes down by a % every week!
All that stuff aside, I do hope that anyone who enjoyed Deep Space will also join my discord. It used to be the official Deep Space discord but now it's a hub where people hang out and game. I've met several new friends that I play games with over discord nearly every day with now. I also post my new work so you can see the games I'm working on!
https://discord.gg/ArEbAut
That's it for this one.
Hope to see you there!
Sincerely,
Blake Gillman
The game is no longer being supported
The game within 1 month of launch had over 6,000 downloads and that was fantastic, players from all around the world played with each other and it was tons of fun to be there with you all!
But, reality set in fast. For the first month, I tried my hardest to push content, a lot of people didn't get that it was early access for testing not for final play, but hey what did I expect? After a month of sleepless nights and hard work, the game just didn't stay afloat. The game to this point is at a 50% development loss, so as much as I'd like to keep it going, I can no longer afford to work on the game whatsoever.
Although, I'll still always be happy with what it gave me. I got real market experience, along with a note in big bold letters "DO MORE TESTING". I'm happy that you all played the game while it lasted, but at this point, the game still hasn't made back 50% of its development cost and would be too expensive to resume development.
Thank you all for playing!
Sincerely,
Blake Gillman
Early Access 6.0 "Naymor Arrives"
Additions
- New Alien: Mutant
- New Advanced Operator: Michael
- Valve Anti-Cheat has been added to all servers
- New Market Menu: New & Featured, which the Market now defaults to displaying
- New Market Menu: Aliens
Balancing
- Arachnid's stun attack reduced stun time from 4 seconds to 3
- Arachnid's slash attack damage increased from 71~85 to 75~85
Changes
- Almost every sound in-game has been modified
- Lobby chat character limit has been increased from 40 to 50
- Several UI changes have been made throughout the main menu and its various other connecting menus
- The end round screen now displays the operator used by the player rather than "TestPerson"
- Reduced the number of frames that a laser gun's laser displays
Fixes
- Fixed glitch where someone could choose to play the alien on the objectives game mode (which would cause them to crash)
- Fixed glitch where rechargeable abilities & gadgets would have their timer reset when hitting 0 even if the ability/gadget hadn't been used
- Fixed glitch where hunters that killed the alien, and sometimes those who were still alive would have their damage dealt & taken displayed as 0
- Fixed desync issue where laser weapons would deal a different amount of damage for each client
Community
The game now has an official community discord server which I highly recommend you check out here: https://discord.gg/ArEbAut
Notes
Reading one of the reviews I noticed there was a bit of confusion around my version setup and that having it read big numbers up front made it seem like the game was further along than it was, so allow me to clarify my process:
A game version is X.Y where x is the content update and Y is any bug/hotfixes or minor additions to that update. It's not a decimal system but rather the period is used as a separator so if I hit a 10th bug/hotfix it would be X.10 even though from a math standpoint x.1 is equal to x.10, but again it's meant to be a separator, not an actual decimal.
So say I add a new map or operator, that would be a content update so I'd take the current version (for example 12) and add 1 so the next update would be 13.0, but then someone discovered that you could crash the game by doing something on that map and I fixed it, that update would be 13.1 because it's not adding anything important to the game in terms of content, but rather modifying/fixing the already existing content.
Hope that helps!
Early Access 5.1
Fixes
- Fixed Alien Versus Hunters being marked as locked
Community
The game now has an official community discord server which I highly recommend you check out here: https://discord.gg/ArEbAut
Early Access 5.0
Additions
- New Game Mode: Operations
- New Operations Map: Sanctuary
- New Door Type: Unlockable
- New Enemy AI: Mini Arachnid
- New Enemy AI: Large Arachnid
- New Enemy AI: Slug
Balancing
- Increased Discharge Cannon range from 7m to 10m
Changes
- The ship when loading into The Valiant now says "The Valiant" instead of "U.S.S AES"
- Servers now display what they're hosting (The map & game mode)
- Bullets no longer effect physics like props and curtains as a test to see if it reduces crashing
- The main menu bin is no longer clipping in the floor ramp
- Increased the height of the spectate camera
- Servers now include basic information at the top above the chat
- Increased lobby refresh rate from 0.5s to 0.2s
- Create room screen now features the map "U.S.S AES" displayed as "USS AES" since that is the map's network name and what will be shown on the servers list
- Made player camers more centered on the player
- Increased occlussion culling to static level props, reducing GPU usage (Plainly: Reduced graphics card stress)
- Added lightmap to Sanctuary map as an experiment to reduce GPU usage, if successful may add to other maps
- Reduced flash intensity for the sake of not blinding players on the new map, with the added bonus of the standard game mode feeling more eerie with less bright flashing
- Changed bullet tracer & flash color to red
- Guns no longer consider aliens and players as solid objects and therefore the restriction of being unable to shoot while too close no longer applies to them
- Changed the order in which game modes display, prioritizing the functional ones over the currently non-existant ones
Fixes
- Fixed glitch where when the host left the room the player still saw themselves as being inside of it even after being kicked out
- Fixed glitch where loading certain network resources at runtime could cause the game to crash
Community
The game now has an official community discord server which I highly recommend you check out here: https://discord.gg/ArEbAut
I've met a lot of awesome people and hang out there all the time, as well as give in-advance discussions on upcoming updates.
Notes
The operations game mode has brought a lot more Host-focused content which means it's even more important than before that the host be someone with a decent PC and internet for the sake of keeping smooth gameplay. Due to this there are also several possible glitches that could occur should the host leave mid-match, so please be wary of this. Thanks.
The "Sanctuary" map for the new Operations game mode will not be added to the creation-queue just yet as it is still in testing. To create a server hosting this map you must create a custom room, random matchmaking can still place you in rooms with these new game modes but will not automatically host one.
One Week After Release
Hi, I just wanted to go over my personal experiences and what it was like to have my first game released on Steam.
I think for probably the first half hour it was the greatest moment of my life, and every moment after that has been the worst.
The next few days after release was complete sleep deprivation, I was drinking as much caffeine as I could and every few hours I was pumping out a bug fix or content update. I didn't stop until I had to go to work, where it stormed hard.
It's hard to place this into words, but it was that day 3 that really made things go downhill. I had tried my hardest to explain to the overall community that this game was early access and supposed to be for testing but many were still calling the game greedy due to a lack of content.
I had felt pretty shit at that point having gone 3 days without sleep and I ended up getting into a fight with my family. It rained on my way biking to work and I almost got hit by a swerving truck driver who yelled at me to "get off the road" when it was a highway and I was biking on the shoulder of the road since there was no sidewalk and a railway on my left. I remember getting to work and just feeling depressed and angry.
Depressed that my game wasn't doing well and that I was fighting with my family, but also angry that people couldn't understand. They kept calling me greedy and just being "in it for the money" for the game's lack of content. It pissed me off that they couldn't understand that the release was working exactly as it was meant, it was meant to be a large-scale test to find bugs before adding new content and it was free-to-play. I ended up finally going to sleep after work for only about 5 hours before getting up to work on the game more.
Going to work again the next day I faced another storm and similar thoughts. At this point, my game's views were dropping after several personal attacks on me brought the game's store down. Once again a fight with my family ensued when my mom came in and started a fight with me about how I need to stop taking the reviews "personally" because its "just business" and that she ran her own business and knows what its like, to which I responded with "You don't know you have no idea, if a few people who hated you from high school walked in to your store the plaza doesn't pick up your building and make it disappear like steam does to my game". In-between customers during dull periods I would work w/ pen and paper sketching out a new map for the game.
This work at home on the game took priority to me, after all it was the career I wanted in life but noticing my preoccupation with it my boss cut my hours, leaving me back to eating ramen noodles every day (which was what I was already doing but now I can't even throw a salad in to the mix). My friend had attacked one of the members of my community for which I scolded him and which caused him to also negative review my game out of a temper tantrum.
So here I am, having to push content updates for a game that wasn't yet ready for it, and which got blasted with negative reviews who either didn't understand it was for testing or who just wanted to attack me personally. having my hours cut, in debt $235 for the budget the game won't be making back, my family fighting me, my friend is gone, and the promise from others online that any game that I do publish will get negative reviews by them simply because they don't like me. And all I could wish is that they understood my vision of the game, what I saw it as and what I know it could be. I'm not very good at multiplayer coding but I thought if I tried hard enough it'd work. So now I accept the reality, this game was a bust, and maybe that'll change with these future updates, but for now, I have to accept the hand life dealt me. And so I will continue to work without sleep until the community is happy with what I've created.
Sincerely,
Blake Gillman
Early Access 4.2
Changes
- Optimized floor colliders making them take up massively less processing power
Fixes
- Fixed falling through the map
- Fixed glitch where you couldn't rotate the camera on the U.S.S AES map
This update in particular massively reduced the number of colliders active on the maps and as a result, should result in a really large CPU performance increase.
Early Access 4.1
Additions
- "How to play" popup now comes up every time you enter the main menu scene since a lot of people are having trouble figuring out how to play
Fixes
- Fixed a glitch on The Valiant where the alien could fall through the map from walking on open vents