Gala Collider
Game Shutting Down
After working on Gala Collider for 3 years since the alpha release, we have finally decided to shut down Gala Collider on Steam and pause the game’s development. The game has continued to show potential (no design dead ends / good feedback from "the community") but progress building a player base and vibrant community has never made any headway due to the “perpetual unfinished state” of the game.
As we’ve gone through this year, we’ve realized that we still have a lot more we want to do to complete the game, and the pace of development is not high enough to feel like the project could reach completion in a realistic timeframe. We are also faced with the reality that the game is built on aging tech (older versions of Unity and plugins) that we would need a lot of time to refactor.
As such, we would need to either be working on the game full time, or have substantially more funding available to achieve this. This has led us to, sadly, decide that we will be shutting down the servers for Gala Collider and stopping development.
We’ve spent a lot of time working on the game, and we still believe in the unique experience it brings, so we plan on taking this experience and utilizing it towards developing new games and platform solutions.
Our initial idea is to develop a much simpler game, taking the core elements of Gala Collider and building it into something new that is less ambitious. But it is still too early to say for sure what will develop, when, and what exactly it will be.
We will still keep our discord server active: https://discordapp.com/invite/0tM1uv8T7aWP9385
And you can still reach us by email at: outreach@galacollider.com
The final day of our game running on steam will be November 25th. If you have games in progress, you can still finish them up by then but no new purchases, or account subscriptions will be allowed.
Uprising and Contest refactor
New mechanics
Uprising
Uprising occurs when a planet is invaded. Now for 3 consecutive turns your newly invaded planet will produce zero resources (instead you see a fist) and half its star value. On the 4th turn you've held it, it will fully become your planet.
In addition, any developments that are on a planet you capture are no longer kept on the planet but instead stay with their original owner and are destroyed and discarded into the discard pile.
The net effect of this change is to make losing a planet to invasion less game ending. You still suffer a significant loss of course by losing a planet, but the invading player does not get the full value of the planet right away. This change makes it easier to come back from an early loss where one of your planets was captured unexpectedly.
Contest taxation
Before this patch, if an enemy ship was in orbit around your planet at the start of the next turn, you wouldn't be able to build anything anymore because the planet would be considered Contested.
While we didn't want to entirely remove this mechanic, we also felt it could lead to some early losses based purely on a surprise move or choice you made and didn't reflect well on the game dynamics we wanted to encourage.
As a result we ended up changing the way contesting works to instead make the cost of everything you build cost one extra Component. (which you can see with the new blinking cubes around and next to the sector) – So it still sucks if you are Contested, and it is still a meaningful strategy to do so, but it isn’t as back breaking when you suffer from it.
The overall effect of this change is that it is no longer possible to guarantee taking over a section of the map based purely on having some surviving ships. As a player you feel also less locked-out and more readily able to pull out an effective mid-game reversal.
As a secondary effect, players though should note that this 1-component penalty tax also applies to anything built on their commander! So having your commander contested is now more dangerous than it was before.
Improvements
- Spacebar in battle now toggles you through the sectors
- Random maps now always have at least 2 connections to your commander and 3 across the middle of the map
New 3D models
New 3D models for:
- Echo
- Chain Storm
- Continuum Hollow
- Tilithon Command
- Great Tree
- Ima Mir
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Bug fixes
- Fix for window screen sizes on monitor settings that were close to full screen and would result in the bottom of the game window not being visible
- Fix to prevent cards from the discard and deck starting off screen before you scroll
- Additional validation code added to ensure tech pool buys remain consistent between reloads and turns
- Fix for battle numbers being blue when they should not have been
- Fixed AI sometimes not attacking
- Ship model preview works again
- Reloading a game no longer affects invasion numbers
- Invasion replay from saved games no longer happens too late
- Fixed an issue related to the tech-advance button in reloaded games
- Fixed rare AI crash situations if sector was not loading correctly
- Removed option to colonize in battle phase (was never intended to be possible!)
Next plans
We are testing universal shipyard options this month, plus working on:
- Potential larger changes to the Invasion game mechanic
- Better opponent replay information in the form of enemy movement trails
- Further work on single player puzzles and tutorials
With of course bug fixes and many other features on our timeline!
Thanks for following our patch news and we hope to see you on our Discord server where we have a stream every Wednesday. We are very quick to respond and always open to playing a game!
Be well,
Team Gala
Patch release 0.7.6.2: Tech, Scan, Models and Stars
This month we did a lot of behind the scene testing and development of feature changes and we have a couple already ready for release and happy to share with you all.
Improved Explore Experience
Colony ships now have a new module called SCAN 1 which allows them to see what planets are one-jump away from their current sector. This means that you will no longer need to guess which planet is better to colonize and makes the early game a lot more meaningful by forcing players to review and select the best planets to colonize early.
The game previously would require too much effort to scan a planet before sending a colony ship, the opportunity cost of playing a card or sending a ship was just not worth it. Scan changes all of that, in a good way.
Advance technology slot
For a while now we had planned on releasing a card that advanced the technology slots for you, but ultimately we decided to instead just add a button that does it for you.
The "Advance Tech" button starts at just 1 Research cost to use and advanced the technology pool by one "slot" by dropping all the cards down one step on the conveyor belt. (This is in addition to any at turn start movement of the conveyor)
After the first buy though the cost will immediately go up to 2, then 3, then 4.... so if you want to get 3 new cards it would get costly at 6 Research (1+2+3). However even a single click each turn can really help you speed through the options to find what you are looking for before the next shuffle comes.
So many 3D models
Over the last few month's we've been getting a lot of 3D models added to the game, thanks to James Carol's great work.
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[previewyoutube="OFPQrFNf6Fg;full"]
Visual improvements
- Star symbol now flashes when a player is within 10 Stars of winning.
- Star gen icons now appear, animate and make a sound each turn to make it more obvious that they are important.
- Star's earned is back to being a bar for both you and the opponent.
- The toggle to show/hide your tech pool was removed and now your tech pool is just always displayed. This should make it less likely you forget you can buy technology.
Balance Changes
This month it looks like we lowered Sylith power level in testing, as a wind-fall the damage card mechanic and the need it created to re-balance things.
- Stinger lowered to 2 attack from 3 and bombard value increased to 2 from 1.
- Scythe attack lowered from 5 to 4, raid ability replaced by Torp 1.
- Brood Nest infantry value lowered to 2 from 3.
- Continuum Hollow cost increased to 4 from 3.
Bug fixes
- Fixed reload bug where tech pool would advance incorrectly sometimes.
- Fixed some specific reload issues in global effects modules from game replays.
- Fixed issue where Nebulae would apply modifier twice when reloading.
- Fixed issue where ships with zero attack could not attack when they had a boost from an attack module.
- Some tool tips got disabled when first loading to not overload a new player. (still more to do here, but it is a start)
Future
We are working still on brand new scenarios that will replace the current ones. They will be more like multi-turn puzzles that slowly teach you mid to advance game play strategies.
In parallel we are testing two game play changes that should help soften early-game wins to make it easier for you to still come back from any early disadvantages in the early game. While they are still being finalized, the mechanics around this are centered around reducing the penalty for being contested and making newly invaded worlds less productive.
Beyond this we are also exploring some mechanics around upgrading cards to higher tech (instead of buying new ones) which we have started internally testing with positive results.
Eko Puteh just finished a half dozen new artworks for us, which will start appearing on cards too.
And we are even looking at a shift in how invasion works to make it potentially more like regular combat too.
Plus a lot lot more in store!
Thanks for being with us as we continually refine and improve our game. We would love to see your voice on our Discord channel where we all hang out some time. Be well,
Gala Collider team