![]() ![]() You don't need to be a professional streamer: I just want to observe some candid first-time player experiences. 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 and I'll get you access. I haven't done any conventions for Starcom: Unknown Space, so I'm lacking data in this area. 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. Observing a player experience the game for the first time visually can sometimes identify issues that analytics data and feedback submissions can't. Also, there's another opportunity for playtesters: If you don't get an invite, don't worry, there will be more rounds before the game enters Early Access. One person reported the invite being flagged as spam, so double-check your spam folder. 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. So far, I've already received a lot of valuable feedback. By Wednesday I had a release candidate and have now started to send out batches of invites. I spent most of the last week testing and fixing bugs in preparation for the next round of Closed Betas. 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: 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. I was able to work with a concept artist and 3D modeler to produce much better models in much less time. And it took me a ridiculous amount of time to make them. They came out “okay” but it was obvious I think that they weren’t made by an artist. , I made all the modules myself in Blender. Once I got the prototype working, the next step was to find out how it would look with actual 3D models. 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. 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. 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. The first step was to produce a prototype of the new module layout logic, shown below: ![]() 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.įor 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. In the game logic, a ship consisted of a hex coordinates and the corresponding module. Ships were built on a hexagonal grid with module prefabs. 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. Missile and beam improvements and technologies.Implementing player controls for secondary weapons.Crew UI work, started working with the portrait artist on crew character portraits.Started working with the composer, Moritz, on music for the game.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). 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 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. ![]() I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to keep you all updated on what I’ve been doing. Progress update and the shipbuilding systemĭevelopment is going ahead at full warp. ![]()
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