It's Thanksgiving weekend here, so Happy Thanksgiving to all of you who celebrate it! And thanks from me to everyone who has supported Starcom game development over the years, and especially to the playtesters who have put in so much time suggesting improvements for the game.
I'm considering the current version in playtesters' hands (Betelgeuse 10805) to be the Release Candidate. This is the version that will be available to players at the start of Early Access (barring any last-minute discoveries of serious issues).
There's a lot of non-dev work that I have to do between now and then, but things have been ahead of schedule (a rare event in gamedev), so between other tasks I've started working on the first post-launch update. This will initially be available as an opt-in beta. Currently, I'm working on some QoL and minor gameplay changes:
Improved controller support
Revert, undo, redo in the Shipyard
"Tactical slicing": if there is a module-specific drop, targeted removal increases the drop probability. E.g., if you need a missile component, shooting off the enemy's missile launcher before the ship 'asplodes increases the likelihood of that drop.
Thanks for reading, until next update!
- Kevin
Update Notes for Build Betelgeuse 10805 (minor update)
Changes for 10805:
Initial gamepad controller support (experimental)
First time welcome/analytics info
Playtester names in credits
Fixed several null reference exceptions
Various performance improvements
Early Access Home Stretch, Quick Update
Starcom: Unknown Space is now a little less than a month from entering Early Access. At this point, the game feels very solid and players of the latest beta have not identified any critical issues.
This week, after doing a full playthrough and starting another round of close beta tests, I did some minor optimizations and started working on game controller support. I was pretty quickly able to get controller working for most in-game functions (steering, plasma weapons, etc.) and UI navigation for "most cases". This still leaves quite a number of areas where a controller either doesn't work well, or at all (most notably the shipyard).
Since my goal is to have a release candidate "freeze" this week (meaning no changes other than fixing critical issues), and I won't be working on Thursday (Thanksgiving in the US), it remains to be seen how far I'll get with controller support before launch.
Once the release candidate is ready, there will be a (hopefully final) closed beta on that.
All for now!
Update Notes for Build Betelgeuse 10701
With Early Access now less than a month away, this is likely the last new content update as I aim to get a solid release candidate ready in the next two weeks.
Release Notes:
Changes
Station news items
Preloader text while application loads
Misc. changes to Nimion/Kyrnan story
New region, story, gameplay elements
Region placement changes
Skill changes:
Diplomacy removed and folded into Xenoculture
Skill checks show more info
Skill checks can be either "expert" or "team" based
Skill Techs: technologies that provide bonuses depending on team skills
Changes to crew injury info
Changes to crew starting skills, progression
Changes to Crew UI
Additional conversation topics for Cdre. Yu, Dr. Rama and Goryr
New techs
Drop rate adjustments
Additional progression analytics
F8 feedback notifies on success/failure via HUD (if in game)
Seperate fire control for secondary weapons
Game credits panel in Main Menu
Fixes:
Exceptions during mission evaluation should now be lane-isolated
Diplomat mission could soft-lock progress
Environmental texture seam visible
Changed spawn-over-distance particles (missiles, hull burn) to improve performance
Cache content ids to reduce string-related garbage collection
Numerous minor fixes reported from last playtest
Early Access Release Date
The big news this week is that Starcom: Unknown Space will enter Early Access in a little over a month on December 14!
Based on player feedback from the last closed beta, I feel that the game is in very good shape. But there are still some areas that I’d like to improve further before then, so I expect one more closed beta before then to test additional changes and bug fixes.
Since the last update here’s what I’ve been up to:
Compiling feedback and fixing bugs from the last round of closed betas
Station News
Changes to some existing missions, story lines
New region and missions
Mines
Significant changes to crew skill system
As I’ve mentioned previously, the crew skill system is one of the few areas that didn’t have an equivalent in Starcom: Nexus, and so has required more iteration. I’m still tinkering, but for those who’ve played one of the betas, here’s what’s changed:
Merged Diplomacy into Xenoculture. This matches the command crew count with the skill count, solving weird anomaly phrasing issues like the “Kepler vs. Kepler” debates: crew role assignments are determined at the start of an interaction and should remain consistent until the interaction is complete. These are also the two skills with the most overlap– it’s often not clear why a check would be Diplomacy vs Xeno, since all diplomacy in the game is with alien races.
Skill checks are either team based or expert based (i.e., combined team score vs. highest score). As a result, for anomalies specialization tends to be better.
Officer training techs. These are techs that give bonuses where generalization tends to be better. E.g.,, +15% resource drops for every officer with at least 1 Astro.
Overall rebalanced anomaly skill checks.
Additional details on skill checks.
Until next time!
Update Notes for Build Arcturus 10409
This is a larger than average update with lots of changes as we get close to Early Access release.
Release Notes:
New story lines
New factions
New anomalies, conversations, discoveries
New techs
New weapons, weapon variants
Additional music tracks
Changes to initial wormhole event
Mission changes, updates
Increase resource reward scale
Initial achievement set (see known issues, below)
Command crew portraits
Home gateway marker
Dev tool improvements
New mission actions, conditions
Item pickup notification colors
Faction damage modifiers
Improve analytics
Additional settings:
Speed dust
Lens flare on/off
Heading vector
Color blind thermal
Fixed soft-lock bug due to save timing with planet surveys
Misc bug fixes from player feedback, error logs
Known issues:
Game freezes for several seconds when loading new stories (e.g., start of exploration mission)
Due to how Steam injects the game id, achievements are not triggering in the playtest build
October Progress, Quick Update
After the last round of closed betas, I’ve been very busy working on all the things needed to get Starcom: Unknown Space ready for Early Access. As I’ve said before, I’m aiming for a 2022 release and I still feel good about that timeline. Expect a more specific date soon.
I’ve done a lot since the last news update, here’s a minimal-spoiler summary of the significant items:
New mission/story lines
Two new alien races
New anomalies, conversations, discoveries
New technologies
Changes to item drops
Changes to existing mission flows
Increase anomaly, drop reward scaling
Enemy weapon variant
Initial achievement set
Command crew portraits
Various dev tooling improvements
Additional game options for performance and QoL
Misc. bug fixes from player feedback and error logs
I’m still working on some of the new content, but plan to start a new round of closed-betas soon, hopefully next week. Because of the large number of changes, I’ll probably break the test into 2-3 groups, so if there is a game-breaking bug that slipped through my tests I’ll be able to patch it before the next batch goes out.
Again, if you’ve signed-up for the mailing list you’re eligible for the random test invite.
A few YouTube streamers have done sneak peeks of the game play. Obviously, these contain some spoilers, but if you haven’t played Starcom: Nexus and are unsure what kind of game this is, these may help give a sense:
As a solo dev making a game in somewhat of a niche genre, I’m very grateful to YouTubers/Streamers for the visibility they’ve given my games (and indie games in general).
All for now, until next update!
Crew & Skill System
Here’s a quick summary of the progress I’ve made since the last news update:
Work on content for a new storyline. I won’t go into detail here to avoid spoilers.
Started work on an updated version of the trailer.
Various fixes based on additional tester feedback.
Crew portraits.
Speaking of crew, I thought this would be a good time to talk about the new crew system.
If you played Starcom: Nexus, you may remember that your ship’s crew were a nameless, faceless resource that helped with repairs and could be killed in combat, but that was about the extent of their gameplay impact.
For Starcom: Unknown Space I wanted to give crew more depth, at least in providing a command crew with names and some contribution to gameplay besides ship repair.
Here is how crew currently works. Bear in mind that this is a new feature and will likely undergo additional changes before and during Early Access:
Shortly after the game begins, the player acquires a command crew of six cadets. Over time as they gain experience and rank, you can increase their skills in different areas: Tactics, Engineering, Diplomacy, Xenoculture, Biomed, Observation, and Astrosciences.
Skills offer several different benefits:
Skill checks: Some anomalies and alien encounters require skill checks which can have a variety of outcomes. For example trying to repair an alien artifact might require a successful engineering check.
Insights: Similar to skill checks, during anomalies and encounters a crew member may pass a hidden skill check that reveals some insight. These might help provide hints for some puzzles, additional lore, or extra discovery.
Performance boosts: Each skill offers some gameplay benefit outside of anomalies and conversations. Engineering speeds up repairs, observation extends scan range, diplomacy improves trade prices, etc.
Tech discoveries: A new aspect I’m experimenting with is some tech tree nodes can be unlocked after a minimum skill is reached and the probability of unlocking a tech per minute will rise depending on the skill level.
Design Challenges
This new system adds some new design challenges and there’s definitely still some work in figuring out the best solutions:
Don’t Lock Content
I don’t think it will be fun for players to be locked out of a fun side-quest because they rolled poorly in a skill check. At most, a skill check might allow a player to change the result of a previous decision. This places a limit on what kind of skill checks can be incorporated into anomalies and quest lines.
Phrasing
Anomaly text can refer to crew– for example noting that “Lt. Rouge-Chemise has been wounded in a rock slide.” However, I want to maintain the flexibility that crew members may change: maybe a story event swaps out a crew member, or I give the player the ability to rename their crew. So in the current system crew aren’t hard-written into the content, instead identified in text by their role, e.g., [CREW_ENGINEERING]. The text parsing system can then replace the symbol with the appropriate name. This works pretty well, but there are some challenges. One playtester already noted that the current system chooses crew by highest skill, but a crew member can fill more than one role, leading to an awkward situation where [CREW_BIOMED] helps [CREW_XENOCULTURE] but they’re the same person.
Also, it’s not practical to use pronouns: English has three forms for each (he/him/his vs. she/her/hers) and writing anomalies littered with [CREW_BIOMED_SUBJECT_PRONOUN] would be way more trouble than its worth, not to mention making localization a nightmare.
Getting Some Respec(?)
An open question is if/how skill respec-ing should work. Since players will learn the importance of each skill during the game, it makes sense to give them some possibility of backing out of a focus. At the same time, I’m not a fan of unlimited respec. There are a number of possible solutions: maybe there’s a rare anomaly that allows for respec, a one-off technology that when researched allows it, or crew can respec at certain ranks.
Specialization vs. Diversification
Right now, most skill effects are determined by the command crew’s combined skill against some difficulty. The only exception is insights, which is based off the skill of the most skilled team member. There’s not a huge incentive to have any well-rounded crew: you’ll get the same check benefits from having all specialists, plus better insights. Ideally, I’d like there to be some interesting trade-off between specialist and generalist.
Meaningful vs. Balanced
Giving players the ability to assign skills should have some noticeable game play impact. At the same time, no major game mechanic should move from “over powered” to “tedious” based on skill choices.
No Depletable Resource
One side effect of removing the old “crew as disposable resource” mechanic is there’s now no critical depletable resource the player needs.
Final Thoughts
The crew/skill system is the most significant new feature that didn’t exist at all in Starcom: Nexus, so it may take some iterations to get right. If you have any thoughts, feel free to share them in the discussion forum.
Testing & Progress Update
Two weeks ago, the first large round of playtest invites were sent to random mailing list subscribers. There have only been about 40% as many testers as emails sent so far, which was expected: some emails end up flagged as spam (check your spam folder!), some players want to wait for the full release, people are busy, etc.
I’d like to thank everyone who has participated in the tests so far: your feedback has been incredibly valuable in identifying bugs and areas that need improvement. If you haven’t received an invite, there will be frequent rounds of testing before the game enters Early Access.
Speaking of which, the latest round of tests seem to confirm that the game is in good shape: players like what they see and there have been very few serious bugs.
A few weeks ago I opened up Starcom: Nexus as it existed four years ago at the start of its Early Access. It’s been so long, I’d forgotten how much has changed!
Feature-wise, the current game is close to where Starcom: Nexus was when it entered Early Access. There are some features missing, but there are also a number of improvements that weren’t in at this point. Quality-wise, I think it’s already ahead. And of course there are a lot of brand new features that never were added to Starcom: Nexus.
A frequently requested feature now in: Autopilot
In terms of content, Starcom: Unknown Space has around half the content as Starcom: Nexus did at the start of its Early Access, at least in number of planet anomalies, explorable sectors and alien races. While it’s not important that Starcom: Unknown Space match Starcom: Nexus‘s content point for point, I want Early Access players to feel like they are getting enough gameplay for their money. The good news is that a lot of Starcom: Nexus‘s content was added in the last few months before entering Early Access, but I don’t want to get too focused on matching quantity at the expense of quality.
So it’s still too soon to be able to announce an Early Access date, but I feel like progress is going very well.
