It's been ages since I wrote a proper dev update, and as we enter into 2023 I think it's a good time to take stock of the past year and have a look at what we've managed to achieve over the past 12 months.
In terms of game updates, we pushed 24 release builds to Steam, in addition to 252 development builds. If you average it out that's actually 2 release builds per month, which is a pretty decent release cadence.
We also opened up our first fully public playtest, which was downloaded by over 3,500 people and garnered "Overwhelmingly Positive" reviews on Steam. This perhaps helped with our other big achievement, which was coming third place in IndieDB's "Best Upcoming Indie 2022"!
Content-wise the game has evolved a lot in 12 months. By far the biggest addition was the new galaxy system, which enabled truly game-changing features such as;
• A true 1:1 scale galaxy, based on real astrophysics and featuring real galactic regions. • A galactic navigation and coordinate system. • Seamless real-time travel around the whole galaxy with no loading screens or transitions. • Stars moving in real time outside of the ship. • Real-time labels for stars and planets in 3D space. • The addition of our first batch of real-world stars from the Hipparcos catalogue.
We also made the galaxy a more interesting place to explore;
• All new planetary surface shaders with upgraded details and more variety. • A new system for planetary rings, with textured surfaces and dynamic planet shadows. • New VFX for stars, including active coronas and mass ejections. • Added multi-lightyear scale volumetric nebulae. • Added procedural black holes. • Added Sagittarius A* at the centre of the galaxy.
The interior of the ship also saw a lot of new additions;
• All new Bridge design • New Helm console with support for keyboard flight controls. • New 3D Orrery Map which tracks the ship's location in real time. • All new A Deck interiors. • New VIP Lounge • Interactive Door Panel Controls, including a lock system and various operation modes. • Interactive Window Controls, supporting polarization and projected nature scenes. • Interactive Room Lighting Controls, supporting brightness and colour temperature. • Added a detailed Ship Customisation system. • Added ability to sit in chairs, some of which can be wheeled around. • Added a new prop system that supports thousands of props at once.
As well as the player character, which was sorely in need of an update;
• Switched to Character Creator 4 and made all new male and female models. • Designed new crew uniforms, including dynamic name tags, country flags, and a mission patch. • Added a new character customisation system.
And then finally a few other miscellaneous items that are worthy of mention;
• Migrated the project to Unreal Engine 5.0. • Implemented significant lighting optimisations. • Built a whole new front-end and menu system for the game. • Built a new website for the game. • Added a multiplayer chat system. • Updated all major systems to work properly in multiplayer. • Added an automated save game system. • Fixed hundreds of bugs.
This definitely wasn't everything I wanted to achieve for the game in 2022, but looking back I think we made solid progress towards something resembling a viable Early Access release.
As we now look forward to the next 12 months, my new year's resolution is to make an effort to produce more social media content to help generate more buzz around the game. It's been literally a year since I made a YouTube video, so that will be the first on my list. I will also try to incorporate proper live streams into my schedule, and also write more regular dev diaries.
ːsteamhappyː Happy New Year everyone! ːsteamhappyː
Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/eDSQvpgdUX
3rd
🥳🥉 We came third in the 'Players Choice: Best Upcoming Indies of 2022' over on IndieDB
Thank you so, so much to everyone who voted for us! Out of so many amazing games and with our very early alpha! It means the world to us here at Fleetyard 🥰 👉IndieDB Post Link
Starship Simulator has made it to the top 100 of 'Indie of The Year 2022!'
Starship Simulator has made it to the top 100 of 'Indie of The Year 2022!'. Wooooooo! Please, go and vote to help us win 🥳❤ We're in the Realistic Sim category (Upcoming Games) 🤞
Customise your ship in more detail, and seek out elusive Open Clusters by searching for nebulae in the distance.
Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/eDSQvpgdUX
Tech Demo now available!
Head to the store page now to request access to our October Tech Demo!
What To Expect From This Tech Demo
The purpose of this Tech Demo is to give players the opportunity to explore the technology we've developed for the game so far, along with giving a small glimpse of what we've got planned for the game in the long term. Hopefully, you'll agree that there's a wealth of potential to unlock.
In this demo, you can freely explore the entirety of the Milky Way galaxy, either by scanning local targets of interest or by simply firing up the FTL engines and picking a random direction in space. Star classes O through M are currently included, in addition to black holes and various types of rocky and gas planets. Moons and multi-star systems are planned for a future update, along with rogue planets and other stellar phenomenon.
All 7 decks of the Magellan Class starship can be explored, with A Deck and Engineering on F Deck being the most fleshed out. The rest of the ship is currently under construction, so be sure to hit T to enable the torch while investigating unfinished areas. On the Bridge you can use the Sensors station to survey stars and planets in the local area, the Helm station to navigate the ship, and the Command console to set the alert condition throughout the ship. Be sure to press any buttons you come across because nothing on the ship is mere surface detail. Every single button has a function associated with it.
Above all, thank you for trying out the demo! We hope you have fun with it.
Livestream at 22:00 BST Monday Oct 3rd
Join Dan in-game to chat about the future of Starship Simulator.
Join us over on Discord for chats about Starsim, science and scifi! https://discord.gg/eDSQvpgdUX
Developer Livestream & AMA
Join us here during the Steam Next Fest, on Oct 3rd at 10 PM to chat with Dan, the creator of Starsim. He'll be live streaming the tech demo, which you can also join and play alongside him! He will be available to answer any questions you have and will be talking about the future of Starship Simulator!
We might schedule another live stream later in the week, so collect your questions!
Join us over on Discord to chat about everything space, scifi, and Starship Simulator!
https://discord.gg/eDSQvpgdUX
Playtest fixes and updates
We've been hard at work polishing everything for the demo on Oct 3rd. Lots of bug fixing ( thank you playtest community!), new office lighting, control panels, in-game text chat, sittable chairs, and single/multiplayer save games!
Still lots more to come!
T-49 Days
I've been splitting myself 50/50 these past few days, between writing about the galaxy generation on the website, and working in-engine to progress the next build.
If you're interested in how the galaxy generation works in Starsim, along with what we have planned for filling it with content, then I'd highly recommend checking out our new "Building A Galaxy" page:
https://starshipsimulator.co.uk/?page_id=251
In the game itself, I've been working on getting the prop interaction system working in UE5. Rather than trying to work around the UE5 problems I just wrote the system again from scratch, and to be honest, I'm glad I did because it's a lot more tactile now. An object's orientation now properly reflects where you've grabbed it, and you can press F to lob the item around. I was having far too much fun messing about with it, so I recorded a quick video to share the joy
I've also made the character inputs context-sensitive, so the "Use" (LMB) and "Action" (F) keys for example will perform different functions depending on either what you're currently looking at, or what you're holding. This helps keep the keybinds under control, and also makes controller support easier because the same button does multiple things;
• Pressing F whilst holding an object will throw it. • Pressing F whilst looking at a UI panel will bring up the mouse cursor. • Pressing F whilst looking at a chair will make you sit in it.
This also allows for other useful quality of life improvements, like allowing you to press LMB to use a UI panel while also having a weapon equipped. The weapon will not fire, because the game knows you are using a UI panel at that precise moment.
And speaking of chairs, that's next on my list so I'll get right on it :)
T-62 Days
I can't believe we're a week into the countdown already! Today I've been polishing and refining the random colour palette generation for the planet-gen, and largely just making sure that it doesn't spit out absurd-looking planets. When you give it free rein to roll the dice as it sees fit, you end up with some truly awful results like this:
The best solution I've found so far is to define a number of colour schemes that work well, and then randomly tweak the numbers on those specific themes within set boundaries. For example, here are a few random results from the "Dark mountains with white plains" colour scheme:
As you can see, you can still generate a lot of random variation despite working within some value restraints. I'll probably make about a dozen colour schemes to begin with, but really we can just keep adding as many as we want over time for ever-increasing planet variation.
Hopefully, I'll be able to get those done within a reasonable amount of time tonight because the clock is ticking away rapidly and I've got an entire demo to finish :)
