I spent most of the last week testing and fixing bugs in preparation for the next round of Closed Betas. By Wednesday I had a release candidate and have now started to send out batches of invites. So far, I've already received a lot of valuable feedback. There do not appear to be any serious game-breaking bugs that should prevent the larger beta from proceeding, so I'll be sending out additional larger rounds of invites over the weekend.
One person reported the invite being flagged as spam, so double-check your spam folder.
If you don't get an invite, don't worry, there will be more rounds before the game enters Early Access. Also, there's another opportunity for playtesters:
Observing a player experience the game for the first time visually can sometimes identify issues that analytics data and feedback submissions can't. During the development of Starcom: Nexus, there were issues that I identified for the first time only after watching a player play the game at a convention. I haven't done any conventions for Starcom: Unknown Space, so I'm lacking data in this area.
If you know how to record and upload a video playthrough to YouTube, but haven't received an invite, let me know by emailing me at starcom@wx3.com and I'll get you access. You don't need to be a professional streamer: I just want to observe some candid first-time player experiences.
One final note, there are a number of Steam key "scammers" who try to get keys not to play games, but to resell the keys after the game launches. To combat this, all playtest keys are not for resale: they activate the playtest product version.
- Kevin
Build for Playtest Round 3, Patch
Fix for misc, minor issues uncovered during acceptance test:
Trade tech not unlocking
Bug preventing crew from displaying correctly
Tier 2 module pricing
Initial region sometimes not added correctly
Build for Playtest Round 3
New content, features for Playtest Round 2:
New techs
Refactor arrival mission
Emissary story line
Expanded conflict story line
Map notes / details
Closed Beta Preparations, New Mission System
If you're on the mailing list, you know that I'm aiming to start a new round of playtests very soon. The last week has been spent trying to cram as much new features and content in before now, when I'm switching to testing, fixing and polishing those features. I don't expect to encounter any major delays here, but you never know.
Once I have a stable build, I'll send out a small wave of playtest invites in the next, and if the first wave doesn't encounter any major game-breaking bugs, I'll send out a larger batch soon after.
If you don't get an invite this round, there will definitely be more before the game goes to Early Access.
If you're interested in the technical side of things, I just posted a new blog entry talking about the design of the mission logic system.
All for now, until next update!
Shipyard Evolution
Development is going ahead at full warp. I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to keep you all updated on what I’ve been doing. I’m going to try to post more regular updates with a quick snapshot on what I’ve been up to, as well as some more details on particular aspects of the game.
The game has been through 2 small rounds of closed betas at this point and the feedback I’ve been getting is very positive. I’m aiming to do a larger beta once the next batch of features and content are polished to my satisfaction, probably around the first week of September (fingers crossed).
In the past month, I’ve worked on:
Started working with the composer, Moritz, on music for the game
Crew UI work, started working with the portrait artist on crew character portraits
Implementing player controls for secondary weapons
Missile and beam improvements and technologies
Heat dissipation and simulation
Shipbuilding updates
Lots more minor tasks and features
I mentioned in the announcement that the shipbuilding system has undergone a significant overhaul, so I thought I’d give a little more detail on that.
In Starcom: Nexus ships were built on a hexagonal grid with module prefabs. In the game logic, a ship consisted of a hex coordinates and the corresponding module. Each module only occupied a single hex in the ship layout data, but some modules had special logic to “fake” being larger than a hex.
For the sequel, I had a few changes that I wanted to try to implement: modules of different sizes and shapes, support for module rotations, and a unified set of modules for both player and NPCs with faction coloring being handled in the shader, rather than each faction needing their own set of module prefabs with their own materials.
The first step was to produce a prototype of the new module layout logic, shown below:
Getting this working was a bit harder than I envisioned: modules needed to define both the hexes they occupied, as well as the edges that were valid connectors. With these definitions, the ship-building logic needed to transform both the occupied hexes and their edges by their rotation, as well as handle “reflection” for asymmetric modules. It also needed to maintain a map of connections so that if a module was removed (or destroyed in the case of NPCs) any modules that no longer had a path to the bridge would also be removed.
Once I got the prototype working, the next step was to find out how it would look with actual 3D models. In Starcom: Nexus, I made all the modules myself in Blender. They came out “okay” but it was obvious I think that they weren’t made by an artist. And it took me a ridiculous amount of time to make them.
For Starcom: Unknown Space I was able to work with a concept artist and 3D modeler to produce much better models in much less time.
It took a lot of work upfront to figure out what kind of module shapes and designs “worked” with this system, and how to create a shader that could make them a) look good, b) distinctive, and c) not overload the GPU.
The very simplified workflow was I described what modules I needed along with a very bad sketch and some reference art, Ruslan (the concept artist) would come up with some more detailed sketches and then Povilas (the modeler) would use these as a guide for creating the final model:
Here is a small ship being built in the shipyard with some of the new modules:
The modules use a custom shader which has a number of color multipliers for the various layers (plating, detail and underlying). I can modify these for the different factions (and players with Chromaplating tech can customize their own colors).
One new feature I’ve been working on in the past week is thermal dissipation. In Starcom: Nexus, players got a small boost to their weapon fire rates for every empty space they were next to. I’m now experimenting with high-energy modules like plasma and lasers generating heat as they fire. This heat flows to cooler modules and into space. When modules are too hot, they suffer an efficiency penalty. This creates a trade-off between compact well-protected layouts and layouts that can sustain intense energy use.
There’s more new features and changes to shipbuilding, but I’ll leave off for now. Thanks for reading!
Don’t forget to wishlist and follow on Steam so you don’t miss any important announcements!
Build 8702
Fixed issue where anomaly interaction doesn't start if showing duplicate hint
Removed a duplicate anomaly
Build 8700
New content, fixes and changes from previous playtest rounds.
