Starward Rogue
First 5 Updates To The Game!
First of all, thanks for your support of the game. It's really a good feeling to see all those positive steam reviews, I have to say. :D
Secondly, we've been doing a laundry list of small updates and tweaks to the game based on feedback from the new, expanded group of players for the game. As you know, even having 100ish testers isn't going to catch everything, so again we appreciate your patience while we sort through the things that the larger group of players is now inevitably finding.
Most of that stuff isn't too serious, but a few have been, and we've been trying to focus on the most serious stuff first. THAT said, we have a variety of staff with different talents, so you'll notice some less-serious stuff being fixed prior to more-serious stuff in some cases. That's not because we're ignoring the serious thing! It's just two people with different talents working on different things.
Also! It's not "bugfixes and balance all the way down." :) We've got some new stuff for you, too. A new boss called "Backfire," and a new music track, have both been added.
More stuff is coming soon on both the "more free stuff" front, and the polish-and-wax front.
This game definitely has come out of nowhere, so that is something we are very much fighting right now. The response from players has been really positive, but our overall visibility is a bit frighteningly low compared to some of our past releases. So our sales numbers really aren't where we want them to be right now, even though things like our conversion rates and so forth are some of the highest we've ever had.
I really want to keep building on this game, and I hope you want to see that also, so be sure and spread the word if this is something you like! We really appreciate it. We'll be back later today with another update for you. :)
Official forum thread on this post.
Version 1.0 is now live!
We had a very tight timeline, so as far as the rest of the world is concerned this game is coming out of nowhere. After months of crunch-mode development we're still finding it hard to stop playing after each run, so hopefully you enjoy it as well as we do!
There's a whole lot of new things we want to do with this game, even though it's already gargantuan. If you want to help that happen and you enjoy this type of game -- then tell other people who enjoy this type of game! That sort of word of mouth is what helped us make such huge additions to AI War: Fleet Command over so many years (tons of free updates as well as paid expansions).
Anyway, I'm getting way ahead of myself there. At the moment there is more than enough to enjoy -- dozens and dozens of hours at minimum. I think I'm sitting at like 88 hours myself and I really have not mastered everything yet, not remotely. Nor seen all the content outside of unit-testing it. (Others on staff have, though, don't worry! Not to mention the legion of awesome community testers we have had).
I also really want to thank all the community testers we've had over the last two and a half months. You guys were invaluable, both in terms of finding bugs and helping us shave off all the rough edges you could find. Not only that, but a number of you actually made content for the game using the modding support, which other players can now see embedded in the full game itself (no need to download anything extra).
If you're just coming to the game now (which makes sense, given it just launched), then you're still free to send us things that you make! If you make enemies or whatnot, we'll wire up art for it, vet it, and add it into the game if it makes sense within the larger scope of the game. Or it can stay just an unofficial mod that you made if we don't feel like it quite fits the overall game experience that we want everyone to have. Same deal for item design, room design, and so on.
If you like that sort of thing, enjoy the wiki: https://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Starward_Rogue:Main#XML_Documentation
Try not to get too bogged down in the hugeness of it; the entire game's content was built using the same tools that you see there, so you can look at any existing content and make variants, deconstruct what we did, and so on.
Anyway, enough about modding: the vanilla game is big and huge and fun and I hope you love it. I got started at an early age (in the early 90s) as a modder and level design enthusiast, so I get happy about modding tools, is all. We'll be doing videos of us playing the game, and can answer tips on specific bosses, weapons, or otherwise.
More story and voice acting is coming soon, too, as well as more content drops. Thank you very much for your support of our team -- we couldn't do it without you!