I heard the feedback loud and clear from the early reviewers and made great efforts to address two big areas:
1) The graphics lag during game play
2) The difficulty in understanding ship-to-ship interactions
I implemented two major things to address both of these areas of feedback.
First, I tackled the graphics by implementing a level of detail system for all of the ships. That means for every ship, there are four different level of details in the polygon count when rendering onscreen (from 100% to 70% to 40% to 10%). This greatly reduced draw calls and sped up the game without sacrificing the visuals.
Second, I tackled the UI issue by re-inventing the selection control. It used to just be an arrow that pointed to ships. Now, it uses holograms to show you which ship is being selected. Once you've selected it, it shows clear options of 1) targeting an enemy 2) disrupting an enemy 3) pairing to an ally 4) cloaking an ally 5) healing an ally 6) setting a waypoint. This way you can always tell which ship you're selecting and what you're commanding it to do. Enjoy the rich UI and jump into action faster!
A couple other things that I included in this build are general bug fixes to stop some of the crashes (sorry guys! Any feedback or insight here helps though), boosted the capacity counter, added bug fix where enemy UI was showing up when cloaked.
V0.790 Release Notes
After the first week of release, I have already received great feedback on some bug fixes and tweaks to the game. Keep the input coming! Only together can we create the best VR strategy game out there.
In this build, I have fixed the following items:
- In some cases in combat, the Flagship was not able to be selected after the shell exploded.
- The Bruiser in the background of Fleet Builder would blow up when Save Game was pressed.
- It was difficult for users to find that they could delete ships using the menu button in Fleet Builder. I have added a menu prompt to help first time users out.
- If the player rushed the game menu, they had the option to create ships outside the limits of their build capacity (currently 500). Sorry, but we don't allow any cheaters in this game! :)
Finally, I am tracking down two major items:
- Graphics lag, we've heard reports of slowdown issues in War Room. I'm working on creating level of detail models to help with this.
- Crashes/freezes in War Room, we have also heard of the game crashing at times in War Room. If you have any information what is causing this, it'll really help me debug! Just let me know on the forums or email starblazer@pro2131.com. Thanks!
Week 1 : Thanks for the Support!
Hello Starblazers! This is the developer for the new VR game Starblazer. I just wanted to take a brief moment to thank everyone who downloaded Starblazer in the first week of our release. I know that it takes a lot to give an indie game a shot (much less one that has been developed by JUST ONE coder!!), so I really appreciate your support and your willingness to invest in this venture. Already, I am excited about the feedback that I have received and am hard at work implementing some of the changes that have been requested. I know that this is a long journey together, but I know we can all help create a great strategy game for VR.
