First of all, I want to say a HUGE THANK YOU to all of you who have already picked up a copy of Space Station Continuum. It's fantastic to see so many people who want to play the complex, reality-based space station management game we're creating.
If you haven't grabbed your copy yet, you can still take advantage of the 10% launch discount for the duration of the Steam Summer Sale - ending July 9th.
Since Space Station Continuum launched into Early Access on Wednesday, there have been seventeen updates released already!
These updates have included:
Thirteen Bug Fixes
One New Feature
And an assortment of tweaks and improvements
Here's a look at the latest release notes found in the Main Menu after loading the game: June 28 2020: - Stopped the Solar Panel Info panel from appearing on top of the build component menus. - New Debugging features for better error handling.
June 27 2020: - Added this Release Notes panel! - Stopped the Solar Panel Info panel from appearing on top of other menus.
June 26 2020: - Station Exterior and Use Manifest settings are now saved between game sessions. - Fixed a bug where Station Modules could sometimes be rotated incorrectly when loading a saved game. - Fixed a typo in the Tutorial instructions (D'oh!). - Using the Spacebar to trigger launches now works correctly with the Manifest Manager. - Fixed a bug that would cause some Docking Ports to report that they were occupied (and therefore unavailable for attaching new Modules) when they were not.
June 24 2020: - Updated Module Attachment and Interior Placement logic to clarify that new Interior Equipment CANNOT be added to existing Modules when a new Module is being launched. Interior Equipment must always be launched in a Crew or Resupply Vehicle. - Fixed a bug where the Solar Panel Info panel could interfere with creating a new save game. - Fixed Tooltips for icons in the Manifest Manager appearing BEHIND the Manifest Manager. - Added the "Return to Earth" button to the Astronaut Info panel. This allows you to decide when your Astronauts should try to go home via a docked Crew Spacecraft, rather than deciding to do so on their own. - Fixed a bug where Autosaving could close the Save Menu while you were using it. - Early Access Release!
All of this has come directly from the involvement and detailed feedback from you, the community. With your continued support over the course of the Early Acccess process, Space Station Continuum will become the best space station management game it can be!
What's Next?
Space Station Continuum has a long way to go until it's finished, and we're only just getting started. Keep a lookout for regular update posts here on Steam summarising recent progress, as well as larger blog posts detailing upcoming features and major releases.
If you want to get more involved with the community during the development process, think about joining the Space Station Continuum Discord server: https://discord.gg/4ckdeBu
We're a friendly bunch, I promise!
Thank you all, and fly safe.
- John
We have Liftoff!
After years of working on this project in every hour I could find, I'm elated to finally be ready to share it with you all.
During Early Access the game will have many bugs, and be missing many features, but with your help it will improve over time into the complex Space Station management game I've (and hopefully you've) been wating for.
Currently, the Early Access version of the game includes:
A Tutorial scenario to guide you through the basics of Space Station management.
A Sandbox Mode to let you experiment with the game's systems without restrictions.
The ability to save and load your Stations in Sandbox Mode.
Speeding up and pausing the game time.
Seven types of Spacecraft.
Two types of station modules, each in Four different styles.
Three types of solar panels including simulated energy production, consumption, and storage.
Simulated Astronauts who require food, sleep, and bathroom facilities to stay healthy.
Interior equipment including food stations, beds, bathrooms, research stations, batteries, and storage compartments. Each in a variety of styles representing different eras of spaceflight.
EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) suits that can be flown manually outside your station.
Simulated disasters including asteroids and meteor storms.
An original soundtrack inspired by the different eras of spaceflight, all in a classic video game style.
The current Early Access build DOES NOT INCLUDE the main Career Mode, or any of the technology research mechanics that will enable progression further down the road. These are in active development, and I'm looking forward to sharing them with you as soon as they're ready.
An early preview of the upcoming tech tree
You can look forward to this and many more features as development continues.
Today's release marks the beginning of a long journey towards completing the game in its final form.
That's right, Space Station Continuum is entering Early Access on June 24th 2020.
We'll be sharing more details between now and then, but for now please enjoy a few new sneak peeks in the above trailer. We'd also like to share some answers to these commonly asked questions about the Early Access process:
Why Early Access? Space Station Continuum aims to become a complex and engaging simulation of building and managing a space station across many decades. To achieve this will require time, testing, and most importantly feedback from the community. Early Access is the perfect way for us to develop the game that we envision without rushing to meet deadlines and cutting complicated features, while benefiting from real time feedback from you, the players.
Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access? We expect the Early Access phase to last for one to two years, depending on the community reception to certain features and ther overall direction of the game.
How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version? The full version of the game will be a much deeper and longer simulation experience, with clear goals and construction milestones to aim for. It will have many more systems and equipment types to manage. Some features that are currently in the planning stages or early stages of development include:
Thermal management systems
Research tech tree for unlocking new equipment and progressing through time
In-orbit construction and manufacturing
Satellite launching
Space tourism
Asteroid mining
What is the current state of the Early Access version? The current version of Space Station Continuum is in a basic but playable state. It includes a short tutorial to familiarise yourself with the controls and systems onboard your station, as well as a Sandbox mode where you can build without limitations. This mode features saving and loading of your creations. Currently, the Sandbox mode includes:
7 types of Spacecraft.
2 types of station modules, each in 4 different styles.
3 types of solar panels including simulated energy production, consumption, and storage.
Simulated Astronauts who require food, sleep, and bathroom facilities to stay healthy.
Interior equipment including food stations, beds, bathrooms, research stations, batteries, and storage compartments. Each in a variety of styles representing different eras of spaceflight.
EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) suits that can be flown manually outside your station.
Simulated disasters including asteroids and meteor storms.
An original and growing soundtrack inspired by the different eras of spaceflight, all in a classic video game style.
Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access? Yes, the price will increase as more features and content are added to the game.
How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?
Community feedback will be very important for deciding which new features to prioritise and which systems require further balancing. Discussions in the Space Station Continuum Steam Community and Space Station Continuum Subreddit will regularly feature sneak peeks at upcoming content and questions about the community's thoughts on recent additions.
With all of the work that has gone into preparing the game for Early Access we have come to a point where we no longer believe that the current Demo provides an accurate view of the game. We are therefore removing it from the store page today. Watch this space for an updated version in the near future.
Thanks!
- John
Progress Update: Time Control
First of all, I hope you're all keeping safe at home.
It's been a long holiday weekend here in the UK, so I'm finishing it off by posting a small update on some of the recent progress made to the game.
I set out this weekend with the goal of adding some progression mechanics to the game's Campaign Mode. Making it so that Astronauts perform research to earn money, which you can use to buy more station modules and equipment, which you can use to produce more research, and so on.
I'm happy to say that this feature is now a part of the game, and works rather well to inject a sense of purpose.
Implementing this also led to a whole sequence of features and improvements that needed to be finished in order to make it work. The most significant of which is time control.
You can't rush science. Unless you're the commander of a space station in Space Station Continuum, in which case just press a button and increase the flow of time by a factor of up to 100! This can really help when you've got your eye on an expensive new station module, and just don't want to wait for your astronauts to generate enough funds in realtime.
However, you'll need to be extra careful when running the game at higher speeds, as with faster research comes faster everything else. Your astronauts will get hungry, sleepy, and need to answer the call of nature much faster than usual. So you'd better make sure that you have adequate facilities on board to fulfill thier needs, or you're going to have a useless and incapacitated crew on your hands much sooner than you might expect.
Adding a feature like time control requires huge overhauls to critical parts of the underlying simulation, including electricity generation and storage - which is now much more sophisticated than before.
I've also made a few other miscellaneous improvements, including Astronauts now losing Muscle Mass much quicker if their needs aren't being met. This means they'll have to return to Earth much sooner if they aren't being looked after properly.
The next step is to integrate all of these resource and money accumulation changes into the save/load system so that the game can keep track of your progress as you build your station over time.
Then it will be time to enable the first version of the system for unlocking new technologies, and at that point we'll have a game on our hands!
Stay safe and stay home, and I'll see you in the next update.
Eventful Horizon - A brand new track in an amazing 80's Synthwave style. Asteroid Heart - A remastered and much longer version of this Bowie-inspired classic.
[previewyoutube="A-OXkAt43nU;full"] If you already own a copy of the soundtrack then this update has been delivered into your Steam Library for free. And if you don't then there's no time like the present to support development of the game and get some great music in return.
Thank you to everyone who has bought a copy already, and I hope you enjoy these new additions!
- John
The Countdown to Early Access
Space Station Continuum will be releasing into Early Access this year.
Before it does, there are three key elements of the game that are going to be overhauled, improved, and expanded upon. I'm going to write about each of them here so that you can get an idea of what to expect on release day.
Energy
Energy is an integral part of the simulation in Space Station Continuum. You need to generate and store electrical energy to run practically everything onboard your station, and you need to get rid of thermal energy to prevent everything (and everyone) from overheating.
Electricity If you've played the demo, then you should be familiar with the way that electricity is generated using solar panels.
That won't change much before the Early Access release, though different methods for generating electricity will be coming in future updates.
What is changing is the way that electricity is stored. In the demo, battery storage is built into each of the station modules that you launch and attach to your stations. This means that if you need to store more electricity, you need to launch more modules. This is:
Expensive
Annoying
And leads to large stations full of empty modules, added purely for their batteries
This is changing thanks to a new type of interior equipment: Batteries.
Beep Boop
Batteries can be added to your station just like any other interior component and will be launched either as part of a new module, or brought up to be installed by an astronaut during a crew or resupply launch. The capacity, power output, and efficiency of these batteries will be upgradable over time.
Like all equipment in the game the less efficient a battery is, the more of the electricity that passes through it will be converted into...
Heat
Heat is the troublesome byproduct of any process that is less than 100% efficient. All equipment in Space Station Continuum that consumes electricity will produce some amount of heat, based on its efficiency rating.
Heat is already simulated in the demo, but it may not be very obvious. You can enable a very basic thermal overlay view by pressing CTRL + T. Other than changing the colour of this overlay, heat doesn't have much of an effect on anything yet. That's going to change before Early Access, with improvements including:
Simulating heat for every component in the game (not just station modules)
Degraded performance, damage, and total failure for components that are too hot/cold
Improvements to the Radiator system for getting rid of unwanted heat
Changes to Astronaut behavior based on the temperature of the module they're in
All of these changes will make designing the energy generation, storage, and radiation systems on your station a much more challenging and interesting task!
Humans need stuff. Machines need stuff too, and all that stuff has to come from somewhere. Initially that somewhere is Earth. Everything onboard your station will have to be shipped up into orbit and stored away until it's needed. Both standard and temperature-controlled storage lockers will be available, the latter of which will consume power.
Eventually you may find yourself needing to store things before shipping them back to Earth, rather than after shipping them up to your station...
Developing all of this equipment and technology for your station will take time and resources. With the right balance of power, heat, supplies, and crew, you'll find yourself moving up through the technology tree and onwards through the eras of spaceflight.
An early preview of the Tech Tree
With each of these elements in place, the core mechanics and pregression loop will be well on their way to being complete. At that point the game will be ready to open up to Early Access and start actively involving the community in it's development.
Let the countdown begin!
Available Now! Space Station Continuum: The Original Soundtrack
Now you can support development of Space Station Continuum by purchasing a copy of The Original Soundtrack!
Space Station Continuum: The Original Soundtrack features music inspired by the many decades of human spaceflight in a classic video game style.
New music will be added as development continues, with one never-before-heard track already included.
All new tracks will be delivered for free to existing owners of the soundtrack as soon as they're added.
Early buyers will be rewarded with the most value, because the price will increase for new buyers as the track list grows.
All funds raised through sales of the soundtrack will go directly towards development of the game.
Each track includes two versions: A high-quality MP3 file and a lossless FLAC file.
Space Station Continuum: The Original Soundtrack
Thanks to Steam's new native support for Soundtracks, you'll soon be able to support development of Space Station Continuum by purchasing a copy of the Original Soundtrack!
New music will be added as development continues, with one never-before-heard track already included. Three more tracks are in active development right now, with one coming very soon!
All new tracks will be delivered for free to existing owners of the soundtrack as soon as they're added. Early buyers will be rewarded with the most value, because the price will increase for new buyers as the track list grows.
All funds raised through sales of the soundtrack will go directly towards development of the game.
We're starting off 2020 with a sneak peek at possibily the most requested feature of all - Saving and Loading!
Click for larger version
This simple but very important feature will allow you to preserve your creations between game sessions, and of course recover from unexpected disasters!
It's also a critical step on Space Station Continuum's path to becoming a deep and rewarding management simulation.
Saving & Loading is the first of many new features that will not be added to the free Demo. It will only be available when Space Station Continuum releases into Early Access later this year.
Watch this space!
- John
The Future of Space Station Continuum
Greetings Astronauts,
Today marks the end of our Kickstarter campaign, and as you've probably seen - it wasn't successful.
We may not have made it all the way, but we came ever so close - raising 75% of our funding goal thanks to 270 excellent backers. If you were one of those 270 then I'd like to extend my sincere thanks for believing in this project and doing your part to help it get made.
What does this mean for the game?
In short, it means Space Station Continuum isn't happening. Not anytime soon, anyway.
The timelines discussed on the campaign page are based on me working on the game full time, or very close to full time. Without funding that's not possible. I'll be moving on to other things, and might continue working on the project in my spare time, but I don't expect much to happen in the next few months.
I'm not saying that the game will never happen. I just can't commit to a solid timeline at this point.
But it isn't all bad news!
In this past month we've seen an incredible response from people all over the world who want to see a reality-based space station simulator come to life.
Thousands of you downloaded and played the demo. Hundreds of you pledged your hard-earned money to fund the game. And dozens of you got in touch via Kickstarter, Twitter, Steam, and elsewhere to share your excitement for the game. Your kind words have made all this hard work feel worthwhile, so thank you!
The demo will continue to be available on Steam and itch.io for the foreseeable future. I would at least like to finish adding the final content from the unlock milestones that weren't reached. This might happen over the coming months, but again, I can't promise a solid timeline right now.
So from one space nerd to another, thank you, thank you, thank you for playing the demo and supporting this campaign. Maybe next time, eh?
