Welcome to November starchasers! Feel that warm winter air and hot, blazing winter sun. Ain’t it grand?



A bit of a preemptive apology, I was ill and bedridden for much of the month so a lot of progress that should have been made didn’t get made. Nevertheless, I powered through the first fever I’ve had in some twenty or so years to release our next demo: Alpha 2.05!



This will be the last demo release of the year, and mostly focuses on quality of life features and bugfixes. But man, there sure are a lot of those suckers. You can check out the full changelog and demo download here.

In the meantime, read on below to see some of the work done this month. And as always, feel free to join our Discord and check out the full article here!


The biggest thing this month was the main campaign. Illness kind of hampered a bit of my ability but we’re sitting at 15/16 missions playable to completion, and the entirety of all dialogue having been added and scripted in.






There’s also been new tech added for things like followers that follow the player at their pace, coloring overrides in nebula zones, and much more.




We’re hoping to finish up the first draft of the singleplayer campaign in the following weeks, and then going for a deep dive on the multiplayer campaign.


Lots of combat bits too! I’ve been getting into lots of fights and making sure the areas for those flow correctly and can be just fine.




Missiles, mines, and all those things that go “kaboom” have had a total overhaul (as not many people used most of them). Missiles track better, can bypass shields, disrupt highengines, and more. Mines can leave behind damaging fields after a wide area, and both of them can have variable ammunition counts.






Missions can now have much more advanced overrides, and are able to parse text tags for much more in-depth descriptions.




Finally, we’re working hard on getting the last few minibosses added to the list of monsters and worse that can appear in storms.





You do strange things when you’re working off a fever. There’s been all kinds of new UI stuff. The tutorial UI now has subcategories and is video based, while there’s some subtle new UI elements, such as a charging animation for highengines and a notification for gaining or losing money.




Finally you can now skip the opening cutscene from the menu, and objectives in quests and campaign missions can offer hints.





And lots of lots of assetwork this month! We finally implemented things like space farms and sleeper ships around the galaxy, explaining lore questions like “What do these people living on these entire fertile planets even EAT man???”.





More cockpits were also modeled out and many of the demo ones were implemented into the game properly.




And finally there’s more non-mechanical assets being worked on. Bosses and characters and the like.





And that’s all for this month. Check in next month for a very important end-of-the-year update!

Alright starchasers. Another month has passed, so pull up a chair, get yourself a strong alcoholic drink, and let’s get this over with so we can go back to dressing up as skeletons and demanding strangers give us candy.
So: we’re aiming to have a new demo out soon. This Demo, 2.05, will largely be bugfixes and a few gameplay shifts. Its main purpose is to coincide with a major testing release for our full game testers.


Now, this devlog’s probably gonna be one of our shortest. I’ve been traveling much of this month, so opportunities for progress have been limited. Still, work’s been done where it’s been done. Let’s get to it, shall we? As always, you can check out the current demo and join our Discord for more moment-to-moment updates, and you can read the full devlog here.

Oh and just a heads up, things might get a bit spoilery from here on out.



The big thing this month? Campaign missions. 7/16 of them sit as playable to completion, while a smattering of others are in a mostly to semi-playable state. There’s also new enemies and new effect technology to really make certain scenes. It’s all very nice.





Campaign stuff is the big blocker right now, so expect to see even more of this coming up.



There’s also been lots of UI stuff added in. Chapter and syndicate ranks can be accessed via your information menu, the in-game codex is more organized, messaging system’s more verbose, and even the cockpit now has UI elements!









There’s been a lot of smaller changes too. In addition to a ton of bugfixes, we’ve got some special stuff like the targeting reticle finally being accurate, storage boxes able to use broken items and be expanded via space lobster capitalist magic, new effects for scanning scannable items, as well as gameplay changes liking docking code being more aggressive in how it positions you and armor changing thrust drain rate rather than turn rate.










Models were made, pacts were formed, contracts were signed in blood. Typical monthly assetwork stuff. For this, we created various new doors for the eventual interior visual overhaul, along with new cockpit interiors for the final version of those.



And finally, we’ve made various head-based accessories for characters: earpieces and eyepieces and hairpieces and other pieces.


That’s all for this month. Things are a bit calmer for me in the coming weeks, so expect lots and lots of progress for next month’s devlog, hopefully.

Welcome to September starchasers! We’re out of the frying pan now, and now it’s time for Father Winter’s cold grip to freeze everything solid. Other metaphors and silly lines would be appropriate here, but I’d rather simply move to all our major announcements!

For those unaware, we now have a new demo out! Alpha 2.0 is another step closer to a release candidate, and brings a lot of new features and fixes into the game. Check out the full devlog here!


What’s more, we have a new teaser trailer out showcasing tons of the work these past few months, check it out!


Now those are two big things for sure, but we’ve got lots of other tidbits of progress for you this month. So, onward! And as always, be sure to check out Discord in addition to the aforementioned demo, as well as the full devlog here.


As I teased last month, this month saw the first act (out of four total) of the main campaign be completed, at least the first draft. It’s playable to completion, but that requires a lot of new tech as it turns out. From advanced camera controls to adding in support for video playback on TVs and billboards, which also are able to accept video files via multiplayer!








Robots! Did you know we’ve got AI companions available in this game. We do. And they needed a few bits of them redone. So, we got some across the board improvements for drone companions. Mining drones have improved movement capabilities and physically mine the lucrative rocks they’re after, while defense drones now fire and attack your current target in combat.




What’s more, many drones now have new textures, check out the assetwork section below for more on that!

And because I had the time to do it, we’ve got lots of new UI improvements and elements. There’s typewriter text for dialogue, an EXP bar, an audio option for ship engine sounds, and campaign objective displays for that particular UI window.




We also integrated feedback from users based on our last demo into various UI stuff. Asteroid fields and nebulas display if they’re lucrative or radioactive, and you can disable the background effects on the navmap.




Multiplayer UIs are also improved, as are other aspects of multiplayer. Player-to-player trading has been re-implemented, and server hosts can now specify a variety of server options, including server type, description, death penalties, players joining factions, and more.



And we’ve got tons of non-UI, non-drone, non-campaign work done too. Every single shipwreck had their loot tables filled out, and every single fast travel train station point was implemented, along with UI support for train travel.



There’s just more everything overall too. Factions got their loot tables redone and filled out, and Kickstarter backer names were implemented for every race, ghost, and alien. For better or worse.


Legendary/Ace enemies have updated effects too, to better indicate that they’re doing things like buffing their party members.


There’s probably even more stuff than that, but so much work has been done this month that I’ve kind of forgotten a lot of it

Finally, assets! We’ve got new textures for drones and automated, some basic blockers for ships, and tons of models for interior, on foot sections. Including flying cars. Also some other things, but I won’t acknowledge those if you won’t.









And that’s all for this month! It’s a spooky spooky month next month, so ideally we’ll have something appropriately spooky for you that time!

Welcome back Starchasers! Things are still hot and humid this summer, and they’ll be like that until suddenly they aren’t. So while you’re dealing with the hell-weather, why not retreat from all that by checking out the latest progress we’ve made on our game about hell-weather in space.

I can’t remember if I’ve said this before, but we don’t have a current time frame on the next demo release. Since the demo is largely content complete now, our goal is working on getting out the updated drafts of station and cockpit interiors before we do a new release.

As always though, you can check out our current demo release, and join the Discord for more moment-to-moment updates! You can also read the full article here.


The biggest news this month, and the biggest portion of progress, is the first draft of every sidequest has been finished and implemented. That means over 55 quests are playable to completion! And as usual, they’re full of twists, turns, and lots of craziness.













A few bits of questwork also required some new script commands and tech: Docking and undocking at different locations for a single station, forward cannons on battleships. You get the idea.






Now all of this only covers sidequests. Minigames like the racetrack and the arena, and of course the main campaign and main multiplayer campaign, are still to be done. For this month’s progress… Who knows? Maybe. Maybe…


Now quests take a LOT of time to make and stuff, but because I don’t sleep and my mental health is constantly on the precipice of total breakdown, I always have time to do a few extra things.

For starters: Mods! Users can finally FINALLY truly create mods that can override and recombine game and item data, then package them and send them to other users. This means you can now do stuff to create things like, most commonly, mods that change the highengine setting to be SUPER fast. The next demo version will have full support for these kinds of mods.



NPCs on stations now have icons above them showing the services they offer, or if they’ve got a quest available. This makes navigation when docked a lot easier.





Finally, while this isn’t quite assetwork, we’ve taken the old snake movement and reanimated it, alongside reworking how trains move and adding some new space snakes as well. To put it simply: they don’t suck anymore.







And the Us, those lovable mushroom zombie scamps, have their own icons and hooked-up models now.



And that’s all for this month’s devlog. It’s fairly short, so check in next month for hopefully even more as we edge closer to release!

Happy continued summer starchasers! Grandiose thunderstorms are streaking across the sky here in Wisconsin, and we had a whole tornado warning right in the middle of all this game progress. My wife didn’t appreciate getting dragged down to the basement and interrupting her playing videogames, but there’s something appropriate about all these storms rolling in for this month’s progress!

By the way our next demo release is 2.0! With that, we hope to have actual interiors in stations, as well as full graphics for cockpits. Doesn’t sound like much of course, which makes sense given that we’re getting closer and closer to release. Now, onto progress! As always, feel free to check out our current demo, and join the Discord for more moment-to-moment gameplay! You can also read the full article this was paraphrased from here.

Bosses! This month was all about implementing every ambient (that means non-quest related) boss into the game! Over 20 bosses now have full mechanics, rewards, and more, though being the first drafts, many are missing smaller non-mechanic based attacks, voice acting for taunts, etc. Either way, have a sample!











Another big blocker of content that was hammered out this month was storm hazards: Those anomalies, monsters, and other spooky things you encounter in storms. From a greatly expanded pool of possible ghost ships, hellbeams from deep below, nests of strange stellar beasts, exploding rifts, etc, there’s a lot to go around here.


Regions can also control the color of hazards inside them, which saves me having to make a billion variations of each of them.


Also storm logic has been sped up. I wasn’t happy with the rate that storms spawned, surged, and moved across the galaxy. That’s all been greatly increased!

And of course, I always have time for some QoL and background work. You can view maps on star systems via clicking jumpgates, and capships now leave behind debris.



Train stations and train travel have a small graphic and cutscene for when you travel on them, and can have random events happen: For example waking up aboard a train with the entire crew dead and the ship stuck in warp.



Finally, a bit of asset stuff. Cockpits are getting their final models ready for texture and implementation, possibly even… working monitors that actively reflect your ship’s stats? Possibly. Possibly friend.


Interior work is also a thing now, as things like light fixtures and similar are being done to help detail those coming models.


And that’s all for this month. Not the longest update we’ve ever done for sure, but still a lot of stuff implemented and in. Check back at the end of the month for what will be a month of quests and more. But, mostly quests.

Summer is here once more starchasers! Rev up those grills, grill up those revs, and kick your feet back and eat a strawberry, as you enjoy a fabulous two weeks of humid overcast skies, before nature’s middle finger that we call winter rolls back in.

I don’t have much else to put here, testing on the game is going well and we’re making huge strides on everything, so… onto progress!

As always, you can join our Discord and check out the demo for all the latest cool stuff! You can also check the full article that this was paraphrased from.


The biggest thing this month is that all points of interest and vignettes are now in their final, ready to launch or near-ready-to-launch state. That’s over 70 or so custom hand-made activities that all are fully implemented and ready-to-nearly-ready for release. And there’s a LOT of stuff for them, from space races, our previously showcased dungeons, tracking giant leviathans, dodging security systems in lost star factories, exploring radioactive caves, restoring ancient machines, figuring out combination locks to lost ancient gates, taking down forcefields, dueling tiny angry planets, avoiding lost superweapons, and much much much much more.











It’s a huge step forward for the game, so rejoice, as we’ve inched a big inch closer to release.


Big ships now have death effects: Explosions, catching fire, crewmen begging you to stop because they have families. You know how it is.




Don’t worry, they DO have debris. But that’s not done yet. For now, because big things can do big explosions, I’ve reworked a few bosses to die properly, while ALSO having some new mechanics, like Cahgurine here.



I’ve done a few improvements to UIs based on watching people play through the demo. Some tutorial alerts are more obvious, and I’ve added keycode shortcuts for UI controls. For example, being able to deactivate guns via keys or go through dialogue on stations using keys.



Ship visuals have gotten an overhaul, featuring new effects for cloaking, buffs, self destruct, etc. Self destruct also does massive damage in multiplayer: Kill yourself for the sake of your friends, finally!



Cargo collection has a bunch of new stuff now. I restored some of the effects for it, you can tractor in just a single item, and you can run into cargo to collect it now.




And on that topic of redoing some fundamental mechanics, scanning pulses are much more readable now, and can have custom icons instead of just a normal pulse. I’m using these mostly for quests, to allow more specific pulses and instructions about said pulses to be given.


Not too much assetwork was done this month. I’ve been prepping a lot of accessories, hats, armor, etc, for character models, but I also found the time to redo the graphics on some big forward capitalship guns.


As well as redoing and remaking ambient sounds in places, like space dungeons. I’m also working on animating a few things for… reasons.



That’s all for this month. Ideally next month we’ve got more quests and more bosses to show off. Welcome to the age of content, starchasers!

Hello starchasers and happy sunny May! For the first time since the start of these devlogs, we’ve missed a posting date! Shocking, I know, but yesterday, the 8th, was Mother’s Day and thus I had to make my cosmic journey to the edge of the universe to pay tribute to the infinite quasar that birthed me. We had brunch, she’s doing well.

Of course, in case you missed it, our latest demo is finally out! Demo 1.100 brings a host of graphical upgrades and behind-the-scene optimizations, as well as new mechanics which we’ll be talking about below.




You can download the demo for PC, Linux, and Mac at our itch.io page, check it out! Also consider, if you haven’t already, joining our Discord for more immediate updates. Now, onto progress. As always, this is a paraphrasing of the main article, which you can read here.


The biggest thing this year? Space Dungeons. Vast interiors and structures completely explorable out in space and filled with traps, enemies, treasure, and bosses galore. They’re got fully animated doors, removable hazards, everything.















Of course, while working on the tilesets for these we also went back over existing places and improved the models and tilesets there.






Hooking up all these space dungeons and going through all these vignettes will be this month’s focus!


I have to apologize to you all, as I violated my core axiom of “no feature creep” and spent two hours adding in a dodging mechanic and hooking it up to thrusters. But damn, if it don't look good.




Lots of across-the-board improvements now too. Saves now display if they’re overwritten, the decal
system has returned with a vengeance, and the navmap is easier to work with.





Higher tier equipment now costs stomeyes to purchase. Hope you’re ready to fight storms and bosses alike.



And of course, lots of new assets about. We’ve modeled, textured, and animated new gates for various ancient races.



We’ve also animated robots! Good old robots, you can’t go wrong with those.




Finally, we’re doing lots of interior work: retexturing customization hangars and hammering out models for things like planetside cars, trams, trucks, and trains.







That’s all for this month. Check back next month for another big dose of progress, mostly likely more quests, vignettes, and such. And of course, check out the new demo!

Welcome to April starchasers! Hopefully you survived April Fools intact, and if not, there’s always superglue.

Meanwhile, we’ve been chugging away at getting the game done. We’ve chosen our first round of testers and handed out the alpha build of the game to them, and a huge amount of progress was done this month.


Before we get into that, I’m announcing a small delay in the release of our next demo. 1.10 has some bugs to work out, and notably the Linux and Mac builds are both lagging behind due to some texture packing errors. The good news is when it releases, it should have a lot more features (including the new painting system among other things).

Now, onto progress! As always this is just a paraphrasing of the main article, which you can read here! You can also check out our demo and check out our Discord!



While not the focus this month, plenty more quests were added, and we’re closing in on a respectable 40/60 completed. A lot of the more complicated quests are being completed now, and those occasionally need new tech and extensions of the scripting system.










More of course, will get implemented later on.


Our first testing build was given out to testers, and with it, a whooole buncha bugs have been found. In between fixing those, I’ve taken the time to do some additional QoL and reworks of things.
The UI has been improved, with the hazard readouts reporting radiation damage per second, storm level, and the number of missiles or mines currently targeting you. Bandit holdups also now display the time until their generous offer expires.





Testers really loved the fact that you could enter formation with a hostile ship and use that to chase them. Except that was a bug, not a feature. So instead, I made it a feature.


I refactored how large ship AI worked, allowing it to fire a variety of projectiles and choose targets far more efficiently.



Painting is also getting a rework. Ships will now have three color channels while decals are far more efficient and work a lot close to how I want them to.



I’ve also just been passing over and polishing, redoing, and reorganizing systems in places to fit better.







Finally, things like gunboats, large drones, and more are getting proper explosion fuses worked out.




Last month as you recall, I promised to texture and model out every boss. Unlike SOME people, I keep my promises.





And while I was on that texturing binge, I textured a lot of assets that were missing said textures: missiles, NPC enemies, drones, and more.


Robotic characters, including both characters themselves and portraits for Hal-9000 AIs have gotten modeled out and textured (though they’re yet to be animated).





I’ve also been largely unsatisfied with how the game’s girder scrap models were. They used an alpha shader to simulate detail, but you couldn’t fly through so that means they’re bad. So I redid them to be properly detailed via geometry.




And that’s all for this month. Check back next month, for more updates, more content, and possibly even some… space dungeons? We’ll see.

Top of the morning to you, starchasers! Welcome to March, the month that hopefully sees the end of a long and mildly annoying winter and the start of the exact same winter. Wisconsin is fun like that.

Our next demo, demo 1.10, is scheduled to be out soon. This will also coincide with our first round of testers being chosen and the first beta testing build being released to those testers.

As always, you can check out and apply for testing in our Discord, and you can check out the current version of the demo here! Now, onto progress!

And of course, this is just a paraphrasing of the main article, which you can read here!

Last month I talked about how we were finally ready to implement the some 60 sidequests that make up Underspace’s content. This month, around half of those were added and are currently in a playable state. They lack polish and often voice acting, but they’re there and playable. There’s a great variety of quests too, from starship heists to facing down ancient monsters.
















A lot of background technology for quests got improved, and I think modders will have a fun time with the scripting system we’ve implemented (since it’s pretty easy to work with).

Stations got some improvements as well. NPCs can have conversations with one another, while you can use taxi services during some quests to get where you need to go.




Points of interest also got an improvement. All those ancient jumpgates, lost superstructures, and more all have custom textures. Surprisingly, thanks to the magic of actually properly compressing your assets (remember that AAA studios? Remember that???) the total file size of the game has actually gone down.











Next up for getting proper textures are bosses, that’ll be fun!


In an effort to preserve my sanity, I also spent the time doing some non-quest related things. Station descriptions now properly display things with COLORS, like what ships you’re able to afford. Certain station UIs now have animations too.





Storms have lots of improvements now too. Ones that spawn bosses will automatically shift your target to said boss, and approaching a storm now plays appropriate music, and treats it like the battle it is.


There’s also new hazards. I hope you always make sure to avoid the giant ancient space train!



And last but not least, a few assets. We’ve got a lot of various new characters and monsters. You’ve heard of chest mimics, but how about… space station mimics?




Also, space taxis and new models for things like say, computers and such.




That’s all for this month. Check back next month, we’ll have more quests, textured bosses, a new demo, and more!

February is here once again, starchaser. Be sure to kiss your wife goodbye and give her a big thing of chocolate hearts. In the meantime, you’ve got storms to face.

But first, a little announcement: We’ve begun to open up private testing applications! The good news is that testers get full access to the full, current build of the game, and anyone can apply.



The bad news? You’ll have to do this through our Discord. We need a way to easily communicate with testers, and that’s currently our best option (since forums went extinct in the great media wars of 2010). But, you’re free to apply and learn more on our Discord. And as always, you can check out the free public demo we have out.

Now, onto progress! There’s lots of that this month. Not even a thirty-six hour stay in the hospital can slow me down; Death himself fears me. As always, this is a paraphrasing of the main article, which you can read here.


The biggest announcement this past month is the first draft of ALL sidequests have been finished. That’s some 425 pages over some 60 sidequests, not a small feat by any means. Luckily, writing them takes FAR longer than implementing them, and plenty of them have now been added to the game (and we’ve gone back over existing ones to make them work, have more dialogue, and generally be improved).

Sundered stars, dead kings, ancient pirate ghosts, and much much more feature in various storylines and plots throughout the galaxy. We’ve also been improving some of the background scripting system, to save space and time on our end.













The campaign itself also got a few improvements. Enemies have been rebalanced for the early game, the tutorial system got an overhaul, and the first bits of voice acting tech (tying sound to animations) has been implemented. Check it out.




Expect more quests, in fact, expect mostly quests from now on as we edge closer to release. It’s where the majority of the game’s content comes from, after all!


Players can now join various starchasing chapters throughout the galaxy. These subgroups (some created by our Kickstarter backers) have their own subgoals and specialties they specialize in. Players can complete tasks, kill enemies, or run missions for them and in return gain rank and payouts.




You can swap between chapters at any data center, which also lets you now track storms in regions. Conveniently paying a fee to these data centers will allow you to view incoming storms (IE, spawn them in a region of your choice) as well as switch chapters and claim rewards (don’t worry, you can’t lose progress in chapters).




More of these will also be implemented as time goes on, so be sure to always check your local data centers in various star systems.


In between overcoming various writer’s blocks for sidequests, I spent the month implementing and refining a few new QoL stuff, mostly related to UI and management of such.

The player can now for example, have a clear indicator of nearby garages, and can freely swap between ships at any shipyard. I thought about restricting this, but then I realized “wait, why?”





Certain bits of the UI are more informative now too. Scanners show the proper ranges and distances of their upgraded software, and classed weaponry now shows the class of the actual hardpoint it’s mounted on. Scanners also now, of course, can emit damaging pulses: a desperate but often useful AoE attack.






And as mentioned, the tutorial tip system has been upgraded to apply in more situations.





And finally, assetwork. I’ve redone wrecked ship textures to be based off textures directly, instead of shaders. Why? This allows me to layer those textures AND THEN have shaders as well, while more tightly controlling certain aspects of wrecked ships visually.






And we’ve got a few… assets being worked on. Like everyone’s favorite religious mushroom zombies: the Us! It’s okay, they’re nice guys, really.



Or various drafts of ancient, long dead races. But hey, even the dead leave behind corpses, just ask the Us. It’s okay, they’re nice guys, really.




That’s all for this month, check back next month as we ramp up more content production and whatnot. Again, if you’re interested in testing the game, check out our Discord, as well as our demo!