Happy March starchasers! I’ve been doing this for so long that I’m starting to run out of jokes and intros, so let’s keep it simple this time around.

You’ll notice again that this month’s devlog is rather short compared to the old ones. This is more the nature of things as we get closer to release. There’s less content or features to implement, and it’ll be more about polishing and finishing up what’s there to get it ready.

Without further ado, let’s get into it! As always, check out our demo and join our Discord for more moment-to-moment updates. And you can check out the full article here.



As we move closer to release, I’ve created a huge tracking sheet for testers to keep track of and more easily report bugs on all the content in the game.



And of course, that content is being finalized. The player can now fully gamble, and race in starship races (after getting sponsors) or become a gladiator in a combat arena (along with the appropriate questlines for each section. There’s even new UI widgets to help with that.






We’ve also been adding various other improvements, such as the ability to see train travel routes, some basic voice acting in key demo parts, and some improvements to NPC AI along with randomization of their loadouts and abilities.





For that last bit it means by default it’ll do things like give some more random equipment to various NPCs (so expect to see more mines and missiles), but you can also expect to see cases where, for example, doing a quest that accidentally ends with a shipment of ancient weapons being set loose on a galaxy means you’ll start seeing smugglers and pirates carry those weapons sometimes.



Shadows! I talked about this last month but they’re now implemented completely into the game, and will filter in color and intensity based on what nebulas you’re in, if you’re in them.




A lot of older models or things got redone and improved. The normal jumpgate mesh was the first model I ever made, period. It was time for an update, along with updates to its wrecked variants and its active effects.







Furthermore, flickering logic has been separated from ship corpse logic, so now you can get ancient flickering ruins, like the remains of this aeons old whaling ship.




Fauna can also die now. I won’t tell if you won’t.



Finally, we’re redoing a lot of textures here and there to have some space saved in anticipation for all the new space station and space interior models. Finally, no more floating grey cubes in the void.







And that’s all for this month! Check back next month, we’ll be doing station stuff. Lots and lots of station stuff.

February! Welcome back starchasers. It feels like this month has lasted forever, at least on my end. Probably my fault, time passes slower for me than it does other creatures. The game’s received some pretty major coverage recently, and dealing with all the subsequent attention has taken up a lot of time.



I believe I’ve previously stated that new demo versions are going to be largely less of a priority now as we focus on finishing up the game. Our next demo, 2.2, will be bringing in some actual interior models and textures, along with ambient NPCs. But I don’t have a release date set for that yet.

Anyway, onto progress. As always you can check out our current demo and check moment-to-moment stuff in the Discord, and you can read the full article here.


Sure combat and questing is fun, but sometimes you want to relax and do something else. There’s lots of new side activities added to the game (and soon to be in a final state). You can race out in the Ballden Solar States, become a gladiator at the arena, and gamble your life savings away at the Peerless Casino.





We’ve also added a unique traveling merchant, whose outrageous prices are worth it for his wholly unique and strange guns.



We’ve been expanding our roster of bugtesters, which means a lot of feedback has come in. Lots of background fixes and polish have been going on, including new console commands and lots of rebalances on weapons and equipment.










Tutorials are also more robust, and piggyback off the game’s music heuristic system to better show the player what to do.

Not too much work in the way of assets. Mostly preparing furniture and fixtures for interiors. But we did add a little something special. We’ve added dynamic shadows to the game!



I’d say it looks pretty good, and it’s going to be applied to a lot more places in the coming months.


That’s all for this month. Progress next month may be a little slow (I’ve got some prior obligations that need obligating), but rest assured: things will get done!

Welcome to the new year Starchasers! Hopefully your holidays have been filled with lego trains and fat cats. Mine was. Now, since this is the start of a new year and we could sit around twiddling our thumbs and pretending to look busy, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover (since it’s the new year) so buckle up.

First thing’s first, a new year means a new demo version! Demo 2.10 is now out for all platforms! This features… well a lot of new things, but primarily it offers lots of new opportunities for pirate players, including a safe port of call, and battleships being able to annihilate your pirate butt out of the skies.



Like any major release, be sure to check out the changelog. It’ll be a fair amount before a new demo version, as I want to start adding actual interiors to stations, voice acting, and more finalized stuff.

Now, onto… everything. As always, check out our Discord and the aforementioned demo. And as always, you can read the full article here.


So. Last year around this time I said I was committed to getting Underspace out by 2022. That… didn’t happen. Why? Well, my life has kind of changed. Long story short, I’ve got a lady and a cat relying on me to stay alive. Staying up to 2AM working on the game is no longer something I can do, especially as I get older and the steam-and-gearwork patchwork that makes up my homunculus body starts to decay and negatively impacts my health. I can’t kill myself working on the game anymore, as much as I joke about it.



And that’s the long and short of it. The good news is in 2022 a massive amount of actual work got done on the game. We finished the first draft of every sidequest, every boss, every point of interest, the main campaign, and half of the multiplayer campaign.



So… you can fly to every system, fight every boss, join every faction, do every quest, get every piece of equipment, complete the main quest, explore every space dungeon, and fly every ship. Storms are also more or less complete, you can chase them in every system, encounter every hazard they have, and get assisted by almost every starchaser. There’s a HUGE amount of the game done, with easily over a hundred hours of content in the game as it currently stands.



So, what still remains? There are three major blockers outstanding, not counting things like bugfixing and balance passes. The first is station and planet interiors. There’s around 150 stations in game that need proper interiors, people in those interiors, and dialogue for most of those people. Despite the high number of stations, this isn’t nearly as big an effort as it sounds. We’ll be having additional level designers help out, and most stations tend to pull from common tilesets and templates (remember: On-station stuff is NOT the focus of the game).



The next one is the multiplayer campaign. This is of course, halfway done, but multiplayer boss fights take a fair amount of effort to code. Ideally this’ll be another month to finish at least the first draft on it, as dialogue triggers and the like are already in.




Finally there’s that bigass folder labeled “misc”. This is things like the racing and arena sidequests, mission types for all factions, dialogue for all the party members. This is where the majority of the work is. It’s smaller stuff, but without it this game will feel significantly less without them.



So, as you can see, the light at the end of the tunnel’s visible, but we’ve still got a bit to go. A 2023 release date is what seems most likely. So, onto progress!



It didn’t seem fair to me that everything else in the game uses the scripting system, but randomly generated missions fell behind. Especially when there’s a lot I want to do there.
Missions now use the rest of the game’s scripting system, giving them a total overhaul and all kinds of potential variations.




Think of something where you get a mission to retrieve cargo from a smuggler only to find him jumped by police or finding that he hid it in a minefield in a secret stash, or trying to take down an enemy base only for your support squadron to be replaced with an incoming miniboss, or trying to deliver supplies to a base only to get a new objective to raid a nearby cargo depot for them instead. There’s possibilities, and you can see a few of them in the latest demo itself.


Each major region of the game has had smuggler circles added. These run-down bases are a safe port for any player, and offer ways to adjust your reputation, take low-level jobs for pirate syndicates, or even talk to other smugglers and get advice on how to avoid Space Johnny Law.





You can find the first of these bases, Kaisus Circle, in the demo proper. If you’ve ever wanted to get arrested for being a smut smuggler, now’s your chance!


All big things in the game now have proper loadouts. That means every big battleship, boss, and more, all have missile arrays, beam cannons, and more to take you out. We’ve also fully outfitted weapons platforms: Large immobile sentries bristling with weapons.










Big ships can also come with forward cannons, dangerous superweapons that you want to stay well clear of.





Finally, starchasers are all (mostly, minus party members and backer-created ones) implemented. You can find these fellow stormchasers/monsterhunters out in storms, and there’s over 30 of them, all with their own unique loadouts and lines. The AI for them was also improved, with them attacking what you attack and avoiding firing directly at you, just in case.





And that’s it for this month! As always, check out the demo, check back next month, and don’t eat any plastic bricks. Please.

Happy holidays starchasers! It’s the Christmasty season, and while the shadow government of the world is hard at work making sure Santa Claus doesn’t emerge from slumber once more, we’ve been hard at work working on the game to make sure it works. Mostly. Long story short: I have a cat now and it’s hard to develop things sometimes when a fuzzy little asshole is constantly meowing at you to be pet.



But he’s a good boy most of the time, so we’ve got lots of progress to show off this month. Ready? Here we go. As always, be sure to check out our latest demo, and join the Discord! And of course, read the full article here.



Last month I talked about how the main campaign was almost done. And this month guess what? It’s done! The entirety of the singleplayer main campaign can now be played to completion, complete with epilogue and all.



This is just a first draft, later drafts (which are being worked on now) will add additional effects, like systems for distant battles and constant fighter spawns.





Meanwhile on the multiplayer campaign, about half of all the missions there are playable to completion! And the entire thing has all its dialogue triggers and scripts put in. There’s a lot more emphasis on raids and boss fights in this campaign, but there’s some fun moments. Hope your engines are strong enough to outrun THE FIELD.









This month also saw lots of new storm minibosses put in. One can control the storm better via console commands, and there’s tons of new bosses. Ever wanted to have tea with an ancient spaceship ghost? Or how about fight multiple types of space snakes during a raging thunderstorm?












Needless to say, we’ve got you covered. For the sake of letting the player experience storms easier, the storm growths and surges in the demo are going to be far more aggressive.



For a while now I wanted to redo the game’s radio and custom AI voice… talky… thing. To do that, I had to refactor the radio system, and to do that, I had to refactor the game’s music system and to do that I had to refactor the game’s option menu. Phew, that’s a lot to say. Let’s go down the list.



The options menu is more concise and data-driven, so modders can easily expand upon it. The music system is even better and works by analyzing what the player’s actively doing, which also means that the radio system has been expanded and can have custom playlists for things like combat, being in an asteroid field, and more.





Finally, we’re adding an AI that alerts you when certain things are happening, with a calm, cool voice telling you if you’re taking radiation damage, incoming missiles, etc. Best of all? You can create your own custom voice packs and override some, or all, of the lines, or just turn off the AI voice entirely.



Not too much going on here: We’re reworking some of the jump effects on ships to be better, that is, the jump out effects for large capital ships.


And some concept art for some higher tier bosses.


And that’s all for December. Check in next month and next year for a special announcement and our yearly recap, it’ll be a big important one.

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!