Happy holidays to everyone! We are super excited to announce the release of Star Command Galaxies Beta, just in time for a holiday break. We know this is a time of the year when you have a TON of new game options but we hope that you will download the latest update and check out the progress we have made with Galaxies.
So what does Beta mean? It means that all of our features are in the game and we feel that the game is highly stable. Does this mean bug free? Not yet, but close. We still have a ways to go on polish and balance – but we need your help and feedback for those! Please leave any and all forms of feedback on our Steam Discussions forum - we read them all and they can make a HUGE difference to the final game.
This is also only one ‘galaxy’ of gameplay. We plan on launching with two or three full galaxies of adventure, danger and intergalactic hangovers.
For those asking what have we been doing, the answer is simple: working hard on Galaxies. We hope that all that work will now start to show as you pick up the latest version of the game and go on your own adventures.
Galaxies was always conceived as a moddable, expandable, starship simulation platform that we could support for years to come. We finally have hit that point. We will no longer be chasing concepts and instead be working on new weapons, new ships, new maps, new missions and tons of surprises.
We have now transitioned into content-creation mode. We have literally been looking forward to this for 4 years and cannot wait to make some awesome adventures for you and your crew to go on.
So What’s New? Everything.
Below are some of the MAJOR areas of new features or drastic improvements.
Completely rewritten support for low-resolution screens. The GUI overall should be much more predictable and stable.
Added 9 new classes to the game: Engineer, Tactical, Science, Handyman, Scout, Doctor, Machinist, Soldier and Hacker.
Brand new crew job menu for choosing your crew members career path.
New perks menu for upgrading your crew members
New crew desires. Your crew will continue to want to grow and acquire new things like beds, art and other unique items and experiences.
Over 15 new missions.
Over 15 new weapons, items and upgrades.
New stores, new vendor missions, new stations.
Star Command Report Card: receive bonuses based on your daily performance and pay your crew their daily paycheck (or don’t…)
Completely revised happiness log and events. Crew should be much clearer on what they want and what you need to do to make it happen.
New indicators for helping you decide what each crew member should be using.
Healing and repair automation.
Countless cosmetic improvements to every area of the UI.
Brand new options menu brings the game to the 21st century.
We also have hundreds of bug fixes, tweaks and other improvements that we won’t bother listing here.
In the next weeks we will be working on new bugs that are discovered by the larger Beta community as well as polishing the Midorian campaign. We will also be shifting the game to be more area/episode driven and rolling out S.C.I.E.N.C.E. for our mod community (asap). With S.C.I.E.N.C.E. you will be able to build & add your own ships, stations and modify just about everything in the game.
We hope you have a wonderful Holiday Season. We appreciate you sticking with us after all these years. We know that some of you are frustrated with the “timeline” and all we can do is continue to work on making the game the best possible experience we can. We really want to hear from you on the Steam forums if you have thoughts on bugs, balance, missions or just general feedback.
Most of all, enjoy!
Cheers,
Warballoon
Star Command Galaxies Beta 1 on BETA BRANCH
Greetings Captains!
We know it’s been a VERY long time since we had an update. We have been working in the lab every single day on making Star Command an amazing experience and we are ready to start rolling out beta.
We just put the Beta on the (surprise) BETA branch for testing. We have done our own internal testing as well as some test with streamers to squash as much as we could. We are going to be using the beta branch to roll out more bug fixes, improvements and gameplay tweaks based on the feedback we are getting from our analytics and in the steam forums.
Below are some of the MAJOR areas of new features or drastic improvements.
Completely rewritten support for low-resolution screens. The GUI overall should be much more predictable and stable.
Added 9 new classes to the game: Engineer, Tactical, Science, Handyman, Scout, Doctor, Machinist, Soldier and Hacker.
Brand new crew job menu for choosing your crew members career path.
New perks menu for upgrading your crew members
New crew desires. Your crew will continue to want to grow and acquire new things like beds, art and other unique items and experiences.
Over 15 new missions.
Over 15 new weapons, items and upgrades.
New stores, new vendor missions, new stations.
Star Command Report Card: receive bonuses based on your daily performance and pay your crew their daily paycheck (or don’t…)
Completely revised happiness log and events. Crew should be much clearer on what they want and what you need to do to make it happen.
New indicators for helping you decide what each crew member should be using.
Healing and repair automation.
Countless cosmetic improvements to every area of the UI.
Brand new options menu brings the game to the 21st century.
We also have hundreds of bug fixes, tweaks and other improvements that we won’t bother listing here.
To be clear, we are aware of many bugs and will continue fixing these until we roll out the full beta in December.You can see our current Trello list of things we are working on here. This is always available to the public and you can see our daily/weekly/monthly progress.
We hope you enjoy the progress and we can’t wait to roll this out to the general public when it is ready.
Enjoy!
Star Command Galaxies Alpha 11 Released!
Greetings Captains!
We are super excited to announce the release of Alpha 11 to the general public. This is not our largest release but it is our most solid. We have spent the last couple months polishing things up, fixing hundreds of bugs, adding some long overdue features and ironing out a lot of kinks.
At the most simple level Alpha 11 should feel like a solid, but short, game. We have built missions we feel very happy about, our station system feels solid, ship combat is in good shape and crew should be responsive and predictive. In other words you should no longer be “fighting” the game. Much of this laying the groundwork for our next release: Beta 1.
We are excited to announce that Alpha 11 will be our final alpha. Our next release will be Beta 1 and from there on out our focus will be on content, balance and polish.
High level release notes below:
Mouseover info panel info added for objects in the game showing good match, bad match and other objects crew members should be using.
All missions have been rewritten or reimagined to be in better alignment with the current state of the game
Loyalty events are in the game and will be expanded in greatly for Beta 1
Fog of War fixed!!!!!
Adjusted the starting station to be more fun
Revised store building so that it is simpler and more natural.
Added in Pizzeria and Bar stores as well as ongoing missions from those stores.
Mutiny, spread disloyalty, spread loyalty and other loyalty backing elements have been implemented and will be expanded on for Beta 1
Tons of adjustments to animations, sprites, balance, etc.
Removed a ton of old code for crew desires and loyalty that was creating lot of interesting problems
Font sizes adjusted for all messages
Adjustments to when phases can be changed
Money, scrap and food now properly being added and subtracted.
Backing pieces for new crew jobs for Beta 1
Cheers,
Warballoon
Star Command Galaxies Alpha 11 RC2 Update
Greetings Captains!
Another quick update fixing some more bugs. Notes below!
Fix to exploding pirate station not giving mission credit.
Fix to occasional QuickTravel Null Issue.
Slight adjustment to character selection and build mode.
Potential fix to some Pathfinding issues that could occur over time and mess with object usage, particularly with multiple selected characters.
Relinked the ShipCombatGrol mission to the end of DestroyPirateStation
Hangover and other status effects should no longer cause someone's head to move and disappear.
Crew desires now properly save and load.
Hiding Class Change body swaps while we fix up the issue.
Fix to box deletion on right click issue.
Cheers,
Warballoon
Star Command Galaxies Alpha 11 RC1 Update
Greetings Captains!
Just a quick update based on some big bugs and errors we were seeing. These updates only apply to the beta branch! We should be looking at a community release early next week.
Changes below:
<*>Fix to FillSystem Error
<*>Minor adjustment to help with the GetTileColor() reports. This is likely not a 100% fix to it.
<*>Potential fix to ShowGUILine issue from Analytics.
<*>Fix to AimAndFireTeleportAt null reference from Analytics
<*>Potential fix to an issue where Random Empty Node missions can occasionally show up on nodes with stations.
<*>Removed Comm Hub room
<*>Fix to a GetFactionValues item that could occur on ship/station reload.
<*>The Player Station now starts out with an Arms Dealer and a Food/Scrap merchant if started without a tutorial.
<*>Fix to the Midorian Shopper having stealable supplies and teleporting their crew to attack you.
<*>Fix to EncounterVictory 190 issue.
<*>Removed start function issue.
<*>Added in new Cruise Ship hull.
Cheers,
Warballoon
Star Command Galaxies Alpha 11 is Live on Beta!
Greetings Captains!
We are proud to begin our rollout of Alpha 11. We have just put the latest up on our beta branch and we are hoping some of you can switch over and test it out. There are bound to be some crappy bugs but we have tested it as throughly as our small team can. There are a ton of new features, over 100+ bug fixes, new missions and stability stuff.
But at the most simple level Alpha 11 should feel like a solid, but short, game. We have built missions we feel very happy about, our station system feels solid, ship combat is in good shape and crew should be responsive and predictive. In other words you should no longer be “fighting” the game. Much of this laying the groundwork for our next release: Beta 1.
Alpha 11 will be our final alpha. Our next release will be Beta 1 and from there on out our focus will be on content, balance and polish. To say that we are excited about this would be an understatement.
Some high level fixes below:
Mouseover info panel info added for objects in the game showing good match, bad match and other objects crew members should be using.
All missions have been rewritten or reimagined to be in better alignment with the current state of the game.
Loyalty events are in the game and will be expanded in greatly for Alpha 12.
Fog of War fixed!!!!!
Adjusted the starting station to be more fun.
Revised store building so that it is simpler and more natural.
Added in Pizzeria and Bar stores as well as ongoing missions from those stores.
Mutiny, spread disloyalty, spread loyalty and other loyalty backing elements have been implemented and will be expanded on for Alpha 12.
Tons of adjustments to animations, sprites, balance, etc.
Removed a ton of old code for crew desires and loyalty that was creating lot of interesting problems.
Adjustments to when phases can be changed.
Lots of new analytics for tracking bugs and errors as well as which missions are getting completed and when.
Money, scrap and food now properly being added and subtracted.
Backing pieces for new crew jobs for Alpha 12.
Give it a shot and please put any bugs up in our new Alpha 11 bug section.
Cheers,
Warballoon
Star Command Galaxies 10.42 Released!
Greetings Captains!
We have pushed out a new update for addressing some of the issues we were seeing over the last week and some other tweaks we wanted to address while we continue to work on Alpha 11. Patch notes below!
• Fix to the Sprite3DObjectBase Null Ref
• Fix to Player Scrap Null Ref given when no Scrap Containers are found on the player's ship.
• Fix to food adding to player ship if no food currently exists on the player ship.
• Removing several old tutorial items that were somehow erroneously getting called and causing errors.
• Protection for null ShipSlots if inadvertently sent to ReleaseShipSlot
• Fix to IndexOutOfRange when boxing objects.
• Potential fix for IndexOutOfRange FOW exception.
• Potential Fix to FastPathfinder.Find OutOfRange.
• Potential fix to PickUpKits Null Refs
• Protection against Module/Store based null refs in Encounter Victory
• Fix to Phase name request post Phase dropping out. Will be fixed better in Alpha 11
• Potential fix to objects/mobs spawning in walls
• Shield Systems should once again work properly after being boxed and unboxed
• Teleporting out into the middle of nowhere should no longer have the propensity to crash the game
• Patch fix to potential Captain AI Shields issue
• Stations that save with the wrong hull type should no longer crash the game.
• Characters without a sprite should no longer try to move said sprite within the game world
Take her out for a spin!
Cheers,
Warballoon
Star Command Galaxies 10.41 Released!
Greetings Captains!
We have just released another fix that should be addressing some other issues that are coming in from our analytics. Notes below:
• Fix to Pirate Shuttle Isolated Storage Exception.
• Fix to GetTileColor(). Stupidly left that as >= rather than just >.
• Fix to MoveMainCamera Null Refs
• Adjustment for NodeGUIManager Null Ref.
• Fix for the FastPathfinder.Find IndexOutOfRangeException. This seems to be what was causing the knockback crash.
• Fix to Enable Shield Null Ref
• NavGridGUIManager adjustment for when the current node is unable to be located for whatever reason.
• Setting up default Ship Path in case we (for whatever reason) wind up with a null Ship or Station.
• PopState should no longer try to mention that a stack is empty as opposed to doing it's expected behavior, which is skipping the call.
• Adjustments to shotgun knockback distance
Take her out for a spin!
Cheers,
Warballoon
Star Command Galaxies Alpha 10.4 Released!
Greetings Captains!
We have just rolled out Alpha 10.4 with a bunch of bug fixes. We have our Unity analytics giving us some great info from your play sessions and, most importantly, any crashes you are running into. We have addressed a lot of issues many of you were running into. Notes below:
• Fix to GetTileColor IndexOutOfRange Exception
• Fix to ShieldHPMB Null Reference Exception
• Fix to AddToPlayerScrap and AddToPlayerFood Null Refs
• GetParticles now allows for null to be a return type, rather than just erroring out if the particle isn't there.
• Fix to EventNotificationGUIManager LoadedTextPanels Null Ref
• FastPathfinder's Path Finding algorithm now properly respect the boundaries North and East of the ship, not just West & South.
• Particle Pool FSM now properly checks to ensure activeParticles has something to use before accessing it.
• GetState now properly checks to ensure that the tile is within map boundaries, returning the footprint as a null footprintstate if not.
• Null Reference fix for WarpJumpFSM.
• FillSystemButton should now properly check to ensure that it is not being called if the Placed Object or the Game Object it refers to have been destroyed.
These are all pretty technical but should greatly improve performance and stability. Keep exploring the stars!
Cheers,
Warballoon
Star Command Galaxies Alpha 10.3 Released!
Greetings Captains!
We have released Alpha 10.3. These are smaller tweaks that focus on battle missions happening more frequently along with some new balance to all ship and crew weapons. The build is live now!
We are also hard at work on Alpha 11. Currently we are cranking away on a brand new mouseover system that should give a lot more context when your crew members interact with their environment. We have also brought back in the Midorian's and started work on their galaxy with new missions, starbases and adventures. We will push that to beta in the coming weeks for everyone to test.
