It's been a really exciting two weeks since Dust Fleet's release! The community has been so helpful and I really do appreciate all your support. Thanks to everyone who has been sending in suggestions and bug reports, it was incredibly useful in getting those early bug fix releases out. It's also been really helpful in helping to understand what features I should prioritise next. So let's talk about the future!
I've used your feedback to help put together a plan for Dust Fleet's first updates. Here's what's coming in the weeks ahead!
Update 1: Quality of Life
This is being worked on right now, and will be the next update.
Active pause
I've heard you loud and clear! Active pause is definitely something you want to see, so it's coming to Dust Fleet.
Movement and formation
Currently, when you issue a move order, ships arrange themselves into a wall formation based on the size of the biggest ship. So if you include a carrier in there, your wall could end up being enormous. I'm looking into ways for ships to organise themselves a little better in these situations. I'll also clean up some unusual behaviours, like when a ship lags behind the others.
Group by type
Ship selection was a common topic. Once you get a large number of ships, the ship selection bar becomes less useable. So, with this update, ships are going to be stacked by loadout. You can expand a stack at any time and assign to groups just as you can now. So selecting all your drilling barques will be as easy as a single click.
Keep what you capture
Ships captured during battles are currently only usable during the battle. This update will allow you to keep them afterwards!
Toggle overlay
A toggle for the the green overlay icons.
Balance updates
A rebalance of ship hull strength, with the aim to make ships last a little longer in a fight. Also, enemy difficulty will be tweaked to give a better challenge in late game situations.
Carrier manager improvements
Easy fighter selection when you have multiple carriers selected.
More...
You'll also see a number of smaller improvements and bugfixes.
After that, looking further ahead, we have more updates planned! More details about these will be announced in future posts, but here's the headlines.
Update 2: Strategy
This will be a collection of updates to improve your strategic options.
You'll get more ship management options, including the ability to upgrade and scrap ships. You'll also be able to promote them to improve their stats, and see the improvement in new stat graphs for each ship.
Rally points for each station will make it easy to get newly built ships to your front line.
These are just a few of the changes planned for this update.
Update 3: Tactical
This update focuses of the real time battles.
Your ships will gain the option to to engage at maximum weapons range, to make better use of beam weapons on mixed loadouts.
Destroyed turrets will be able to be restored during battles, depending on the situation.
In-battle rally points will be added, so newly built ships can immediately move in to a battle in progress.
There'll be more detail about these and other changes for this update as it gets closer.
Future updates
As these updates evolve the game, there'll be more to do and more to improve. I'm looking forward to seeing what suggestions come out of these updates, and will use them to plan the direction of Dust Fleet's future updates.
That's all for now, see you in space!
Dust Fleet v1.2 Patch Notes
Hello, commanders!
We've got another bug fix update for you today. This is a quick one that squashes a single specific space bug.
FIX: Instances where some players get to the end of a mission but it doesn't seem to complete. This could happen in both Campaign and Sector Assault modes.
As always, Steam should update you to this version, but to be sure you're running it, check in the bottom right of the main menu, and it should say "1.2". If not, you might need to restart Steam to get it to download the update.
Please do join the community on Discord to give any feedback, and you can find us on Twitter and YouTube.
Dust Fleet v1.1 Patch Notes
Hello everyone! Thank you so much for playing the game and for your feedback. Since launch, I've been hard at work squashing all the space bugs I can find. Here's what's included in patch 1.1
Here's what's fixed:
FIX: Starmap stuck in "updating".
FIX: Double clicking a friendly ship will select all friendly ships of the same type (correct) but also all enemy ships of the same type (incorrect)
FIX: If a mix of friendly and enemy ships are selected, player will be able to control all ships, including the enemy ones.
FIX: Nuke not detonating sometimes (nuke strike)
FIX: Reloading saved game does not restore the tally of existing ships vs scrappage.
FIX: Braddock incorrect portrait in mission "Eyes".
FIX: Blank fleets left behind after a mission when game saved during a mission.
FIX: Rekjavik unable to fit heavy turrets.
FIX: AI ships not following (or abandoning) move orders in some circumstances.
FIX: Orca unable to be captured.
FIX: All ships show as "station" in shipyard and loadout stats.
FIX: Module buttons available for stations present in the battle, causing issues when they're used. During a battle, station modules should only be available from stations in neighbouring locations, not the one at the current battle location.
FIX: On "Assault" missions, the mission is missing when a mid-mission game is loaded (see the mission text in the top left during battle), but reappears when restarting. When the mission is missing, it means the battle cannot be won.
FIX: Hold Fire does not work for ships that have already begun shooting at a target.
FIX: Mission: "Nobody likes packing" - Script lock if asteroids are destroyed at the beginning.
FIX: Repair turrets continuously fire even after something is repaired, instead of switching to other ships to repair.
Thanks again and please be sure to leave a review and your feedback so I can keep making the game the best it can be.
See you in space!
The Day You've Been Waiting For!
Hi everyone!
It’s the day we’ve all been waiting for!
Dust Fleet is now live on PC! 🎉
Thank you all for your support throughout development! I’m super excited to show you everything we’ve accomplished through development, and I hope you enjoy Dust Fleet much as I enjoyed making it for you.
If you would like to connect with our community, you can check out our Twitter or YouTube! Don’t forget, you can leave us a review, share part of your journey, tell us about a bug you’ve found, or just to give some feedback in our Discord.
That’s it for today - I’ll see you next time.
Dev Diary: It's happening!
Dev Diary: It's happening
Hi, I'm Glenn, developer at Orbiting Disco, and this is another Dust Fleet dev diary.
Okay, where to start.
Well, I think the big headline is that it's finished.
Almost.
We're still working on all the last-minute clean up and launch prep, but it's true - Dust Fleet is launching REAL SOON™. We're gonna be on Steam, GOG and the Epic Game Store.
So what's in the finished package? Let me talk you through it.
THE CAMPAIGNS
Dust Fleet comes with two main campaigns. The first is Prelude, which is mostly a tutorial. Those of you who have played the demo will have played this already, although it is slightly tweaked from the demo to account for some new gameplay mechanics. The main campaign, though, is all-new. Defence of the Dust Zone sees you pitted against a rogue element of Earth's government intent on finding something hidden deep within the Dust Zone. You as the player have to help the people who live there, the Zoners, to fight them off and protect the Dust Zone's secrets. To do that, you'll be playing through a series of story missions and initiating your own battles to keep the enemy at bay.
All the missions are fully voice acted by a great cast, and I'm really proud with how the story turned out.
But that's not all!
SECTOR ASSAULT
Once you've completed the campaigns, Sector Assault is waiting for you. This has similar gameplay to the campaigns, but on a randomised map with no story missions. Just you vs an AI. You can tweak map size and difficulty to get the kind of challenge you want. The full tech tree from the campaign is here too, giving you plenty of scope to try everything out that you might not have gotten to in the campaign.
THE EDITOR
When I was making Dust Fleet, I quickly realised that hand-coding scripts for the missions was just not going to work. So I wrote an editor. But I didn't like it, so I wrote a better editor. And then I decided that if it worked for me, it could work for everyone! So, the game ships with the same editing tools I used.
Now, these are a little complex, and the game won't ship with a full manual for them because it would be huge and no one would want to read it, but I think I'll probably do some walkthrough videos to help you get started. I also can't guarantee any particular level of support for the editors - it's just me here, and I just won't have the bandwidth to be able to answer all questions and issues that might arise from using them. But as long as the game is alive, I will make it my goal to tackle bugs and make sure they continue to work. Ultimately, if the editors see a lot of use, I'll be relying on you the lovely Dust Fleet community to help each other where you can.
Also, the editor and game includes support for mod.io. If you don't know what this is, it's a place where users can share mods for supported games, a lot like Steam workshop, but it'll also work for our players on Epic and GOG. In the case of Dust Fleet, the mods will be campaigns created in the editor. With just a few clicks, you can get your campaign up onto mod.io, and other players can download it in the campaigns menu of the game. So any campaign you make can go straight into player's hands.
IT'S ALMOST HERE
So, the game is coming real soon. You might have caught me chatting with Justin from Media Indie Exchange and Jirard from The Completionist during the recent REMIX live event, where they played through 20 minutes of the game. That was quite exciting, my first ever media event. If you missed it, I've posted that part of the livestream to the Dust Fleet channel. We've got other things in progress as well, so you should be seeing a lot more from Dust Fleet very soon.
I'm really proud of Dust Fleet, and I hope you enjoy playing it.
We're excited to be participating in the Steam Next Fest! Catch our livestream on Thursday, June 22 at 12pm EST where we will be showing off the latest demo.
We're excited to be participating in the Steam Next Fest! Catch our livestream on Tuesday, June 20th at 7 am EST where we will be showing off the latest demo.
This stream is pre-recorded and will be looped through the duration of Steam Next Fest.
Dev Diary 3 - Demo Feedback and Improvements
Hi everyone!
It's been a super busy time here on the Orbiting Disco space station, so let me fill you in on what's been happening.
DEMO FEEDBACK Those of you following Dust Fleet on Twitter will have seen plenty of Tweets about the game making the journey to PAX East. The demo was available to play there and was also released on Steam for anyone to try out. Feedback has been really good, and I learned a few interesting things about how people play the game.
As many of you correctly spotted, the demo can be tough, but it also doesn't put any real pressure on you - enemies don't attack you between turns meaning you can take your time building up your fleet and attack when you're ready. This was a conscious choice for the demo, as I didn't want players getting into too much difficulty. In the full game, depending on game mode and settings, there will be reasons to force you to expand, and enemy attacks you'll have to deal with.
Another point raised was that, while you can see enemy ships on the starmap, if there's a mission at a location, there's no way to tell what you'll be facing. This happens because enemies that roam the starmap are different to the ones you get in scripted missions. Enemies in missions are only spawned for that mission, and disappear again afterwards which of course means that until you start the mission, the starmap has nothing to show you. I'm going to see if I can rectify this by getting the starmap to reach into the mission data and pull out some of the ships that will be used in the mission. I still want to keep it a bit vague, as missions have a lot more going on and I wouldn't necessarily want the player to know eveything that's going to make an appearance.
Another question was about why squadron fighters are automatically rebuilt as long as a single ship makes it back to it's carrier. Some have pointed out that it's not realistic or doesn't make sense. And yes, this is one of those choices that makes more sense as a gameplay element than for realism. As fighters are destroyed, the value of the remaining fighters goes up, since they carry the value and veterancy of the squadron. It gives the player a mini-objective to keep those remaining fighters alive and get them home safely. This also helps the player not feel discouraged about using them, because they have every chance to get them back as long as they're careful.
And finally, yes, I'll be fixing that bug with the unit audio being very loud. Sorry.
MINING AND RESOURCES
Something else that came out of the demo was some uncertainty about when to use drilling barques.
During battles, drilling barques can mine asteroids in the battle area. If there are stations nearby, you can then use the resources you've mined to build ships. If not, you get to keep those resources for later.
In the starmap view, drilling barques currently don't do anything, but I've been working on some changes here.
As you progress in the game, you'll have more and more stations, and as you fit them with refineries the amount of resources you gain will increase - a lot! In longer games resources are no longer an issue. While the enemy will attack your stations, it's easy to get to a point where this is nothing more than a minor annoyance. So, I've made 4 key changes here to give players more to do in managing their stations and spreading their territory.
LIMITED RESOURCES: Resources per location are now limited. They'll run out, and when they do things like refineries will drop to 5% of their normal output.
MINING DURING TURNS: Drilling barques will now also mine some resources each turn on the starmap. If the location they are at has none left, they too will produce resources at 5% of their usual rate.
RESOURCE GENERATORS: There's a new technology on the tech tree - a resource generator. As you progress up the tech tree, you'll unlock these modules, and be able to fit them to industrial stations. They can generate a steady stream of resources at locations where there's nothing left to mine, BUT... they need something else to work, which brings me to point 4...
POWER: In addition to resource generators, power generators have also been added to the tech tree. These can be fitted to science stations, and provide power to neighbouring stations. Resource generators, shipyards and station sensor arrays now require power to function. The good news is that even though only science stations can generate power, you don't have to keep everything close together. Any station that is receiving power can retransmit any power it doesn't need to its neighbouring stations. So you can build a network of stations that use power, and distribute your power generation however you like. As you progress down the tech tree, you'll unlock bigger and better power generators, which is good because resource generators will use a lot of it!
If you like the look of the game or enjoyed the demo, make sure to wishlist us! If you want to be kept up to date with progress on the game's development and connect with our community, you can check out our Twitter, Discord, or YouTube!
That's it for this update - I'll see you on the next one
Hello everyone! It's time for another dev diary. In this update, I'll be going over
Testers playing Dust Fleet & their feedback
Bug squashing!
New Tactical Overview view!
Behind the scenes of how I design ships
Ship building
Thanks for watching and be sure to join the Discord and follow on Twitter!
Dev Diary 1
Hey everyone! I did something a little different this month and published a dev diary! This is the first dev diary in what I hope to be many more. In this update we’ll cover:
-The Gameplay -The Setting -History of the game’s development
Tune in for the next dev diary where we’ll dive even deeper into the game! In the meantime be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our Discord to get future updates.
