I'm posting the weekly update a bit earlier than usual (see below).
The main thing I've been working on since launch is an update, currently available on the opt-in unstable branch, that addresses a number of minor QoL issues, plus two bigger areas:
The first is improved controller/deck support, particularly menu navigation. It's getting there, and players have generally said it's much better, but still a few areas that need work.
The second is addressing areas where players have gotten "stuck" with no obvious way to progress. While this is a game of exploration and discovery, in general players should not find themselves with no obvious way to progress the main story for very long. Because of the open-world nature of the game and many different play styles, sometimes players do or don't do things that I didn't anticipate. Sometimes these create situations where the player has no obvious course of action.
Based on the several dozen "stuck" saves I've received, I've identified and addressed about a dozen points where players needed a bit more guidance/direction. The root causes of these mostly fall into 3 categories:
Informational Goals
During Early Access, when players got stuck, I'd add hint nodes to the mission system which would suggest, but not necessarily explicitly spell out, a course of action. And these seemed to overall fix the problem as those missions no longer were reported. Later, I added categories including "high priority actionables" to draw attention to main story critical goals. And this feature partly "unfixed" the previous hints as players learned that core story missions would be highlighted in bright yellow. So I'm going back and either upgrading these goals or adding additional goals to supplement them.
To a lesser extent, it's possible the addition of goal locations has made players assume that the lack of a goal location means there's nothing to do, even when they have only one mission with a yellow objective.
Uninvestigated Objects
I suspect that sometimes players fail to investigate an object that they see, and then later forget that or where they saw it. Early in EA, players would leave planets uninvestigated and not notice the "!" unless they happened to be nearby. So I added the "highlight investigate" toggle to the map, which seems to have addressed this issue. But I've seen a few reports where players have either found flingers but never traversed them, or seen stars, but never flew over to see their planets.
Stars with undiscovered planets "glow" brighter on the map than stars whose systems have been explored. I'm pretty sure this has reduced cases of the latter, but as the map has gotten more crowded, there's possibly more of a chance of players missing them, so I've dimmed explored star systems a bit more.
I'm changing Flinger map behavior so "highlight investigate" will prominently mark any unexplored flingers with a "?" icon.
Newer Content
This mainly applies to one particular late game mission Strange Matter that was one of the last pieces of content added and no player happened to have reported this issue by launch: if the player discovers the Collapsar region, but never gets close enough to the nearby Nebula to have the crew prompt a course of action.
Anomaly, character and item sprites are loaded as thumbnails at start, full images as needed. This speeds up application start up and first game load. It also substantially reduces the baseline memory footprint.
Refactored Controller/Deck input system
Improved controller inputs for many menus, UI screens
Allow for rebinding Controller buttons
Fixed Map HUD text scaling
Show binding conflicts
Controller glyphs in menus
Controller close dev console with B
Fixed Windowed-mode resolution being reset in options
Fixed Fog of Exploration preference not being saved
Fixed issue with ship max health not being recalculated after design revert (low health percent or even destruction on leaving Celaeno)
Finally fixed "negative resource" trade bug
Plasma autofire more strongly favors target lock
Screenshot composer now uses current color swatch
Fix for "screenshot composer" ship data being used in last save
Changed artifact analysis sound in response to player complaints on pitch too high
Default branch incorrectly logging extra analytics data
Incorrect keybindings shown in some tutorial comments
Unexplored Flingers display "?" if highlight investigate is enabled
Boost brightness difference between explored and unexplored systems
Early anomaly infinite Aluminum exploit
If player doesn't research anything during the prologue, they will be prompted to return to Celaeno
Fix for an anomaly Foreboding Planet in Kyrnan space could not be successfully completed if failed the first time.
If the Aletheia travels too far from Celaeno, it will automatically be returned to the gateway
Missing Diplomat more explicit derelict hint if player missed it
More explicit hint if player doesn't purchase the Remnant Spike from the Kyrnan
Clarified Nimion Ally mission wording to make it clear there are Kyrnan in other nearby systems
If the player misses the Collapsar while exploring the Stalker region, Pirx will say something
If the player doesn't enter the Heretic Portal activated by the Pyramid, a crew member will eventually set it as an objective.
If the player unlocks, but does not research the Starlance Equation, Dr. Rama will politely remind them
Added base Italian, Russian and Ukrainian machine learning translations
Missing anomaly name localization in logs
Missing Brazilian Portuguese icon
Numerous typos
Finally, and sadly, a good friend passed away unexpectedly this week. I will be traveling Friday and Saturday for the funeral and will not be able to respond to players during that time. Thanks for your understanding and thanks for playing.
Until next week, Kevin
Weekly Update: September 6, 2024
Obviously the big news this week was the official graduation of Starcom: Unknown Space to 1.0. The Release Candidate had been very well tested by Early Access players in the two weeks leading up to launch, so I wasn't too worried about new players finding huge bugs. But there's a lot of uncertainty and stress around pushing the Release button.
This time, I had a mini panic attack at 1:05 pm when it was time to go and the Steam backend reported that there was a problem. Apparently it decided that there was a conflict between the game's original launch date discount from December 2022 and the Space Exploration Fest discount. Fortunately, clearing the original discount fixed the problem and I was good to go.
With so many new players, there are inevitably new issues discovered, but generally they have been either rare issues that I was aware of, or minor issues that don't require urgent fixes. Overall, I'd say the launch has gone very well, exceeding my expectations.
During Early Access I was able to respond individually to almost every player in the discussion forums, and I'm sorry that hasn't been possible with the 1.0 launch. I'm still trying to spend an hour or two every day reading player comments and responding when I have time: I do appreciate players taking the time to provide feedback and suggestions. Also, a big thank you to the Early Access players who have helped answer new players' questions. And thanks for the words of encouragement, they really do boost my energy and motivation.
Besides everything surrounding launch, this week I've been working on an update mainly focused on improving controller / Deck support. See this thread for details. There's an opt-in beta associated with it that improves controller support (as well as some other minor fixes). I think it's moving in the right direction, but needs some more work in some of the UI areas.
For the next week or two I plan to continue improving controller / deck support and adding minor QoL enhancements. Then I'll take a look and see what bigger tasks I'd like to tackle.
Until next week, thanks again! - Kevin
Starcom: Unknown Space Launches into Full 1.0 Release!
It's finally here! After 20 months in Early Access, Starcom: Unknown Space has finally graduated to its full 1.0 version. I, and more importantly the players, are very happy about the current state of the game. The game has evolved and improved with the help and feedback from countless brave commanders during EA. I couldn't have done it without them.
The official "Kepler" version has a complete storyline with:
230+ unique anomalies
60+ main story and side-quest missions to investigate
150+ technologies to research
Lots of alien factions and characters to discover, ally, trade with and/or disintegrate
Median time for players to reach the main game ending is roughly 30 hours
Images from some of the 230+ anomalies
While I am still continuing to improve the game with quality of life enhancements and side exploration content, future updates will be save compatible with the current build. As usual, there is an "unstable" beta branch where new builds will be deployed first for opt-in testing. This branch also has more detailed anonymous analytics, helping me find and fix problems before deploying to the default branch.
As always, you can submit anonymous feedback in-game at any time by pressing F8. If you have questions or issues that you want me to be able to respond to, please post in the Steam discussion forums.
How You Can Help
Some players have asked how they can help the game besides providing feedback and suggestions. As an indie developer, I depend heavily on word of mouth and the mysterious Steam algorithm and am grateful for players' help spreading awareness. Besides buying the game during launch, you can suggest the game to your favorite streamer, and/or leave a review.
But as I've said before, I'm extremely fortunate to have had a fantastic player base who supported the game throughout Early Access and provided enormous amounts of feedback, bug reports, suggestions, as well as encouragement. While I haven't implemented every single suggestion, the game would never have reached the quality it has without them. So thank you again Early Access players, and thanks to everyone has supported this ongoing journey!
- Kevin
Weekly Update: August 30, 2024
In three days, Starcom: Unknown Space graduates from Early Access. It's been over four years since I started work on this game, and over a year and a half since it entered Early Access. Thanks to everyone who has come along on this journey!
I also wanted to give a quick shout out to the players who have been helping out by answering new player questions in the discussion forums, providing large amounts of detailed feedback via F8, suggesting the game to their favorite streamers, etc.
This has been a very busy week, here are the highlights:
Last week Kepler 17318 was promoted to default and there have been no reports of unexpected new issues. I feel pretty confident at this point with the Release Candidate. Yesterday I uploaded a new build to the opt-in unstable branch. This fixes one minor anomaly bug and a dozen or so typos/grammatical issues. The bigger change is that it implements the image thumbnail load optimization I talked about last week. The short of it is that the game no longer loads a full sized version of every anomaly/item/character image that it might need. Instead it loads a small thumbnail until it knows it needs the full image. This speeds up initial loading time and reduces the baseline memory footprint substantially. It's possible this memory reduction might help with the outstanding technical issue some players are reporting with older integrated Intel laptop GPUs, but that's just a hope.
Since this change could introduce new bugs and the current build is very solid, I will not be promoting it to default before launch.
In other news, the Youtuber/streamer Splattercat, who has helped Starcom's visibility enormously over the years (and indie games in general) uploaded a new video on Wednesday. He also mentioned likely streaming(?) the game on launch day. Anyone who enjoys learning about new and upcoming indie games should follow his channel.
I've also started to investigate what I want to tackle in the next post-launch update, but I'll save that until next week when I hopefully will have a clearer picture and a bit more bandwidth.
And I finally figured out why the workshop home page wasn't showing player designs by default: I had originally set it up as visible only to players who had the game, which apparently prevents the home page from displaying anything, even if you had the game.
Until Monday! - Kevin
Weekly Update: August 23, 2024
Just over a week to official graduation!
On Tuesday, Kepler 17318 was promoted to default. By player reports, the game is in very solid shape with few bugs, so barring any surprise serious issues I've decided this will be the Release Candidate. It adds full, professional German translation, plus fixes a dozen or so minor issues and typos.
With the Release Candidate up, I'm now starting work on what will hopefully be the first post-launch update.
One thing that I've wanted to tackle for a while is image loading. When the game first launches, it loads some of the most common image assets. Then, when the player first starts a story (a "story" in the game's logic is a content chunk) or loads a save, it loads any image assets that it knows that story needs. Loading a single image doesn't take super long, maybe 10-20ms on my computer. This only ever needs to happen once per application start, and at the start of Early Access there were maybe 100 images, mostly anomalies. But now there are around 500 images, which equates to 10 seconds of loading. Again, this is just once per application start, so not terrible, but if it could be reduced that would be preferable.
An obvious solution would be to wait until an image is needed before loading it, but there are areas in the game the game where many images might suddenly be needed all at once, such as in the ship log or cargo bay, which would produce an unacceptably long stutter mid-game.
After some investigation, I determined that the time to load images and create their sprites was roughly linear to the size of the image. Since the size of an image is the square of its resolution, and anomalies are 1024x1024, I could load a 64x64 thumbnail of every image in the game in the time it took to load 2 full anomaly images. Maybe not exactly that many, but in that ballpark.
Earlier this week I created an editor script that generates 64x64 thumbnails for every image. Now where previously the game loaded images, it will load the thumbnail. Specific UI elements can tell the game that they need the full resolution version of an image and the content system will load the full version only then.
A side effect of this change is that preliminarily it looks like this reduces the baseline memory footprint of the game significantly.
It's possible this change may have some unforeseen negative consequence (for example when first testing it I discovered some areas where images looked super jaggy because the appropriate full sized image wasn't being loaded), which is why I'm not going to try to rush it into the launch version.
Until next week! - Kevin
Kepler 17318
Kepler 17318 adds professional German translation, plus some minor fixes.
Full list of changes:
German translation
Plasma autofire will now target neutral obstacles
Fix for Dolson repeated conversion
Fix roughly a dozen minor typos
Validate blueprint name on save
Several minor fixes
Weekly Update: August 16, 2024
Last weekend I promoted Kepler 17317 to default, which had the remaining high priority changes for graduation. There have been no reports of major new issues, which is very reassuring. I'm working on another patch for next week to fix a few minor issues and typos, as well as incorporate the professional German translation.
To ensure the smoothest possible graduation, I've been holding off starting on any significant changes until the release candidate is ready, but I've started at least thinking about what order I want to tackle new content / features.
I'll probably post a player survey soon, but I wanted to start by asking players what they would like me to prioritize. Let me stress that I'm not committing to delivering anything specific at this point, but here are some candidates:
More Off-path Exploration
There are a lot of things the player can find that aren't directly tied to the main storyline. These range from small things like void derelicts to larger narratives like Wiskamug.
Late Game Content
There are a few narrative threads that players have said they wanted some more resolution for, such as the Nimion and Kyrnan war.
Continued Play Mode
Some players have expressed interest in some kind of continued play mode, possibly via procedural generation. I'm not 100% sure what this would look like, so maybe players who are interested in this can describe how they envision this mode playing?
Creation / Mod Tools
One of the big changes from Starcom: Nexus was separating content creation out from the Unity Engine. Theoretically, this means that I could make some of the tools I've used to author the game's content available to people interested in creating their own stories, anomalies, missions, etc.
Let me know which features/changes are most important to you, either from the above list or something else. FYI, I'll be offline until Sunday, so I won't be responding as quickly as usual to discussion comments.
Until next week!
- Kevin
Build 17317 Update
The Kepler 17317 has had been on the beta branch for several days without reports of any significant issues, so I'm setting it to default. Some minor fixes, a few mission hints and two later game void regions:
Two new mini late-game exploration void regions
Minor adjustments, additional hints to guide players in a few stuck points
Adjust discovery sound volume
Patch for the prevented completion of Tomb of Ock Juk if Ermyr ally in late game
Fix for missing localization strings on one mission
Fix for negative fighter count
Fix for NaN on specific projectile
Fix for rare mission bug in Forbidden Planet
Suppress non-critical exceptions appearing in console, added instructions for closing console via F11
Gamepad specific help notifications
Refactor analytics to collected detailed only on opt-in branch
Removed Early Access pop-up, FPS indicator
Update game icon
Several typos
As always, you can submit comments/bugs/suggestions in game via F8 or in the discussion forums.
Weekly Update: August 9, 2024
It's been a very busy week here. As I mentioned two weeks ago, I took a mini-holiday last week, which was nice. The day after I got back I posted the announcement of the 1.0 graduation date (Sept 2) and have been hard at work ever since.
First of all, there's a new opt-in on the Beta branch. It's not a huge update, but it did have some changes necessary for graduation. Full list of changes here:
Two new mini late-game exploration void regions
Minor adjustments, additional hints to guide players in a few stuck points
Adjust discovery sound volume
Patch for the prevented completion of Tomb of Ock Juk if Ermyr ally in late game
Fix for missing localization strings on one mission
Fix for negative fighter count
Fix for NaN on specific projectile
Fix for rare mission bug in Forbidden Planet
Suppress non-critical exceptions appearing in console, added instructions for closing console via F11
Gamepad specific help notifications
Refactor analytics to collected detailed only on opt-in branch
Removed Early Access pop-up, FPS indicator
Update game icon
Several typos
If I don't get any reports of serious issues from unstable branch players, expect this branch to be promoted to default in the next few days.
Besides this build, there's a lot of work that isn't directly related to development, including:
Updating the Logo versions and Steam store assets (and then updating them again a few days later when Steam increased the default resolutions)
Updated Trailer
Reaching out to streamers for possible coverage
Misc PR stuff
Preparing the game for release on GOG
Thanks for reading, until next week!
- Kevin
Early Access Graduation: September 2, 2024
After over a year and half in Early Access, Starcom: Unknown Space is finally getting its 1.0 full release on September 2, to coincide with the start of Steam's "Space Exploration" festival!
Recent players have been very happy with the state of the game, which has grown enormously since the start of Early Access and now has a complete main storyline with an ending (or two?).
Full release does not mean that development is done, although to ensure the best possible experience for new players, for the next few weeks I will be focusing primarily on bug fixes, missing hints, and "quality of life" improvements (plus some additional content). But after the game reaches 1.0 launch freeze, I plan to continue doing what I've done for the past 18 months: listening to players and improving or expanding in the areas they want. I've started brainstorming more side-quests and exploration rewards, and am considering ways to make the content authoring tools I've created available to modders who want to add their own anomalies and stories to the game.
Development by the Numbers
Here are some numbers to give a rough sense of how the game's scale has changed since the start of Early Access:
Betelgeuse (first Early Access build) 75 anomalies 1264 mission logic elements (the fundamental building blocks of the game's narrative content) 25,000 words Median player time to end of available content: 8.1 hours
Kepler (Current build) 225 anomalies 4926 mission logic elements 90,000 words Median player time to end of main storyline: 29.7 hours
How You Can Help
Some players have asked how they can help the game besides providing feedback and suggestions. As an indie developer, I depend heavily on word of mouth and the mysterious Steam algorithm. Besides buying the game on launch day, you can suggest the game to your favorite streamer, and/or leave a review.
Brave commanders can also opt-in to the "unstable" beta branch which gets new builds first. This branch also has more detailed anonymous analytics, helping me find and fix problems before deploying to the default branch.
But as I've said before, I'm extremely fortunate to have had an enthusiastic player base who supported the game throughout Early Access and provided enormous amounts of feedback, bug reports, suggestions, as well as encouragement. Just to put some numbers on it, I've received over 8000 in-game feedback comments via the F8 system in addition to the hundreds of discussion forum posts. While I haven't implemented every player suggestion, the game would never have reached the quality it has without them. So thank you again Early Access players, and thanks to everyone has supported Starcom games!
