Stellar Warfare has been in development for three years by a very small but very dedicated team. After almost a year of play testing and implementing feedback from patrons, I am finally content to let the game go into Early Access.
Players will be thrown into the aftermath of a galaxy spanning conflict between the humanity and the zealous followers of The Light. Events have taken place which has thrown the galaxy into chaos. It is up to the player to find answers and safeguard his people.
The player can choose to build up their fleet slowly, but can also start raiding right away. Hour-long buildups are not required for those who desire instant action. Killing enemy units allows you to find blueprints which you can then use in between games to modify your units. There are currently well over a million possible ship configurations you can choose from.
After Early Acces + current situation:
So there you have it. On August 4 this game will be released into Early Access. Once that is done I will collect feedback from you guys and implement some of your ideas. You can read more about that in the Early Access section of the Stellar Warfare steam store page.
I will keep you guys up to date of what I'm working on like I have been doing for the last 10 weeks or so on a weekly-ish basis. That way you guys can always keep track on whats happening with the project. Speaking of which, this is the update for this week:
added the Hunter andd Speeder (light ships)
added the Starangel and Delta destroyer(heavy ships)
working on the 4k scaling of menus
disabled the 'loading...' text in the main menu. It wasnt styled. Will re-enable once its styled
ship editor now properly scaled for 4k screens
changed the damaged blueprint tooltip to 'The recovered blueprint was damaged beyond recovery. By the looks of it we already have this blueprint anyway. Lets hope the next one we find is in better shape. ' to make it more clear in any case
fixed scaling for the Credits screen
fixed scaling for the The Light screen
halfway through ingame menu rework + updated dreadship, light frigate and mastodon stats
fixed logo on steam store after Brackmans suggestion
unlocking ships now works in the new menu
styled the new menu
moved unlocking of support, artillery and esalation buildings to the new menu
building menu data is now retrieved correctly as well
you can now buy buildings with the new menu
powerplant costs in build menu are now updated automatically again
added all economy buildings to new menu
added all Escalation buildings to the new build menu
added all defensive structures to the build menu
added all artillery structures to the new build menu
added warp jumps and constructionb oost to the new menu
added shipyard upgrades to the new menu
fixed a potential bug of not being able to buy shipyard upgrades after restarting a game
updated steam tags
all the buttons are in the new menu, but im still fixing things here and there. And it still doesnt look great, but i will look into that too (thanks @Algor (GMT+3) )
updated icon
commented out a lot of functionality of the old build menu. Need to double check a bunch of things there such as unlocks though
fixed double menu through eachother
everything after the dash for building names is now removed for better readability
the new GUI now has a progress bar for ships and buildings
Fixed bug which required building buttons in the new build menu to be clicked twice (took me 40 minutes to find)
moved top menu resource display code to a new area
added bleeps to build ships buttons
added bleeps to build building buttons
restyled tab backgrounds
when you press ship build buttons they now have an overlay making clicks more clear (have not done this for buildings yet, not sure if should)
new ship icons now retrieve the correct names + they display the amount in queue
new menu now uses the correct shipyard upgrade costs
artillery, escalation and support structures tab is now red and disabled if you have not unlocked that tech yet
tested hyperspace with the new menu
fixed but with artillery unlock having the wrong cost
shipyard flak now has an effect when bought
shipyard weapon upgrades are no longer exclusive, but they are currently all placed at the top of the shipyard
you can now press tabs again in order to hide them
hyperspacebutton is now hidden if there is no jump structure yet
buildbars are now more individual
fixed overlap of building and ship progress bars over the buttons and restyled colors
it should look exactly the same (but the 4k resolution is twice as high, obviously)
removed a bunch of commented out lines from the old GUI script
set the minimap zoom properly for the new scale
minimap restored, but the functionality still doesnt scale properly with 4k
only took me 3.5 hours but the minimap now scales to 4k mostly properly
tweaked Fish stats slightly
fixed pause button messing up the rotation of ships
I've written a press release for the Early Access (with LaOchs help) and I've contacted someone who helped me with the first press release since I can't remember where I'm supposed to submit those press releases (there was a website that allowed you do submit them, but i'm not sure which one it is)
fixed adma engines
updated blueprint looks
fixed blueprint bugs
reworked blueprint tooltip display so that you see different visuals for weapons, modules and ship frames
new blueprints
new layout for ship drops
new module drop visual
new weapons blueprint visual
wrote press release for early access on august 4
press release is online
added the new tensegames logo to
You can help!
Last but not least: you can help the project if you want. We have a very small team and everything is self funded, so our marketing budget is non-existent.
Tell your friends, share in your discord/facebook/reddit/twitter community groups and you can have a serious impact on how well known this project becomes.
The plan for this week was to get the steam page approved. Once that is approved I will announce the official release date for that date + 1 month. The extra month is needed to give the press the time to write articles.
Unfortunately the logo on the header image was not fully readable causing the review to fail. I have fixed that and re-submitted it. It should be approved in 2-3 business days now. Once that has happened I will announce the early access date for that date +1 month. Assuming that's Wednesday the store page will be approved I will put the official final early access release date on roughly 11th of August.
Apart from that I did the following this week:
Changed some weapon colors based on projectile type
Temporarily increased Bubble Size of nano repair hubs. If you guys try it out and it works well as some form of 'overshield', then i'm keeping it in
The shield for The Brick is now Brick-shaped. If it looks too ugly ingame I will remove it again, but i thought it would be nice to have some extra distinction between ships
Changed weapon model textures based on projectile type for 60% of the weapons
Disabled all isTrigger on mesh colliders to fix the dodge bug (should be fixed now)
Made The Brick shield square
Fixed Flaktracer and FlakTrippler models
Tweaked Flaktracer and FlakTrippler missile speeds and lifetime
100% sure i found the issue with the emperor now. one of the rays it casts was inside the ship
Added a new raycast for dodge behavior for ships. This one is in front of the ship to make sure that if something is right in front and the other rays cant reach it that it still dodges properly
Set screen height limit from 1080 to 2160 because I will be working on the scaling soon. Got a 4k screen to test it now (even though i cant really afford it i can afford to release the game without proper screen support even less xD)
Reworked Corisant a bit and its engines too
Added The Adma ship frame
Reduced power and metal income from 200 to 150 per minute. Before this week it was 100, but I increased it. Yesterday I noticed it was far too much
Has habitat-mining ring that generates 10 metal per minute
No longer true because that caused a bug. Instead i just gave it some more health
Changed the damage values of the Heavy Galactor, Blaster and Plasma Barreler based on Algor, Brackman and LaOch's suggestion ( #the-council )
Added campainette to the correct menu, disabled the button though
Did several blueprint visualisation tests
Changed the near-raycast checks for the following ships from 1 to:
Frigate 1.5 / 3
Hammer 1.5
Heavy corvette 1.3
Heavy frigate 1.5
Lanver 1.6
Longback 5
Lunaria 3, but needs vertical recenter and retest
Mammoth 3
Mastadon 1.6
Megalodon 2
Orbital cruiser 1.5
Repair cruiser 2
Sconca 3.2
Stareater 3.4
Sunfish 1.5 , but needs vertical recenter and retest
Taibe 2.5
Taibera, 1.5 but needs vertical recenter and retest
I'm a bit short on time this week, but here is what has been done this week:
Weapon booster now has the proper icons
Fixed objects position in tutorial
Added a crossfade to the combat music. The combat music now starts/stops more gradually
Disabled power and metal income indicators until it becomes smooth/reliable enough
Fixed Terroriser 2nd weapon slot @Algor (GMT+3)
Fixed auto brawler angle
Forced smartlasers to hide, just in case
Fixed scorescreen scaling
Fixed score screen scaling and options screen scaling (at least mostly)
Also improved the looks/readability/replacing as much of the ugly old GUI as i can
Increased artillery ranges
Increased artillery range, changed minimap and toggle buttons
Removed build-lines temporarily (with the exception of buff buildings)
Disabled combat music for now because the check to see if you are in combat is messy
Cursor now flashes red when targeting enemies
Updated our todo list and project board to prioritise what we should do next better and make sure we dont forget anything for early access
Simplified all 53 ship mesh colliders to increase performance
Checked if new colliders work in MP (they do)
Redid mesh colliders on 30 buildings
You now have to press N to enable FPS
Removed flagship label in regular lobby
I think i fixed teams
Removed Hostname on transport tooltip
Removed unneeded column inside lobby
Fixed transport icons in BR
Next week I will be on a holiday with my mother and brother. As soon as I get back I want to make sure 1 thing works well and then announce the official Early Access release date. Although I think steam also has to approve something before then.
All in all a fairly light week, but I'm excited for early access!
This week I've improved on the cinematic camera behavior, added new projectile visuals and worked on the audio mix. There has also been some balancing I've also done the following:
FIXED DOUBLE CLICKING ON ICONS (only took my tired brain about 5 hours in total)
Worked on audio mix
Set audio default volumes
Lowered Smartlaser volume
Removed destroyer MK2 and other weapon testers from the scene
Researching early access release requirements on steam
Learned some stuff about game release. Implementing into plans now.
Compressed 4 soundtracks and added them to the game
Modified more sound volumes for background tracks
Changed fire sound of the wrecker because it stood out too much
Changed damage multipliers for weapon/armor types. This is used to determine how much damage a weapon does against a certain armor type. The less suitable it is for the role the less the damage modifier is.
Re-imported 9 tracks and compressed them all in Audacity because the volumes were still off/incorrect. Removed old audio files from the project to decrease project folder size
When in combat you now get a combat track. not really crossfaded though but yeah
Modified damage modifiers based on suggestions
All friendly units should now die when you've lost
When you're dead your power and metal value will become 0
Might have fixed both jump bugs + move bug (at the cost of possibly some optimization)
After unlocking medium or heavy ships you now cant build ships for .3 seconds, fixing the 'click once buy twice' bug
Increased shipyard base health from 2500 to 3500 )
Custom weapons fire sound overrides now also use the position of the object thats firing to indicate if it should be audible or not
Fixed missile rotation
Modified missile particles
Updated flak
Added long blue, long orange, orange trail and blue trail projectile visuals
Cinematic camera prioritizes ships that are in combat over ships that are not in combat. This did not work in multiplayer, now it does
Cinematic camera will now pick both enemy and friendly units as a target if there is no combat going on
Thats it for this week. Trying to prioritize early access so that I can release it for you guys asap. Also might have to start working an extra job again or start a kickstarter or something since I'm almost out of money. Either way the early access should be on steam in a month. I want to announce the official date hopefully next week!
This week I've worked mostly on different types of levels for the player in Skirmish, Battle Royale and Wave Defense modes. I've also fixed a few dozen bugs and added some new weapons and effects.
Changed build grid visualisation
Reworked asteroid spawning. There are now three presets; rocky, nebulea and deep space. In rocky you have no zabu mines but more asteroids. In nebulea you have more zabu complex. In nebulea you have more zabu power.
Added spread to weapon stats in ship editor
Map is now randomised for singleplayer wavedef and skirmish
Map is now randomised for multiplayer battle royale
Added planets
Added nebulea
Added planetary bodies
Added 3 level presets
Tweaked asteroid spawn to be more mirrored (still random, but the same amount will randomly spawn on your side of the map)
In Rocky map preset in multiplayer you now get no zabu mines but more medium asteroids
In DeepSpace map preset there are some extra zabu generators
In Nebulea preset there are more zabu plants
Removed test ships
Changed color of sun based on map
Removed difficulty modifier x10 and instead just made the slider go from 1 to 100
Fixed wave boss bug (the game would restart in a certain wave because the wavecounter did not reset in between games)
Score screen for wavedef
Disabled healthbar on mouse hover when cinematic camera is on
Disabled radar ping when cinematic camera is on or GUI is off
Disabled extra weapons spawn for waveboss
Fixed waveboss devastator visual
Changed gauss visuals
Changed wavedefboss text in top of screen when winning/losing
Changed variable type of difficulty variables from doubles to floats
Reworked both flak and plasma flak to not use 1 long animation but regular explosions in a timed fashion
Added passwords to multiplayer rooms
Made it so that the password input box dissappears when no password is set,
Added field to enter password to host options,
Re-aligned visible options in lobby
Fixed 'bug' of players making a room without password because they forgot it, then leaving, then rehosting the room with password and the password not showing up because of that
Limited passwords to 4 characters
Styled input boxes
Fixed repair rate
Fixed formation near repair buildings
Increased repair range from 60 to 80
Repositioned top turret on The Jaap, decreased Medium Cannon volley interval
Switched ship slot 9 and 10 in the ship editor (they were inverted)
Fixed transport move bug battle royale
Fixed skybox not changing correctly in battle roayle
Increased resources mined per trip from 30/35/40 to 50/60/70
Tweaked skybox
Changed healthbar based on suggestions of
Fixed SP wave def no win condition
Fixed BR ships set as mine
Removed some photoshop files from the project folder, reducing the project size
Next week I will go over the checklist for the Early Access and see how far we get ^^
Added "Double Cannon" which is intended vs heavies
General:
You can now see how many weapon and module slots a ship has in the editor
Fixed duplicate weapons being shown in tooltip
Added almost accurate costs for buildings to be used for the AI
'Unit' icon overlap bug was actually as intended. However it did mix up the ally and friendly colors, so i have added checks for that
Added radar ping to loot being dropped
Re-enabled missile trails
Reverted projectile render space to local instead of world (rounder projectiles)
Force cursor visible in score screen
Manually checked the impact points and collision boxes of 37 ships and removed the extra team row in the multiplayer lobby
Improved alignment in multiplayer lobby and removed 'duplicate' team field
Added labels to multiplayer lobby + removed 'duplicate' team display
Added campaign button to main menu, made a campaign select screen, saving completed campaigns on disk, hiding campaign mission start buttons that are not unlocked yet, enabling relevant campaign scripts during gameplay, tested saving of missions, tested button clicks, tested victories saving the mission as completed
Disabled singleplayer campaign button in main menu until release of EA
Reduced distance at which audio is played from 250 to 200
Missiles now make sound when impacting on objects
Changed audio volume limiter to not go above .99f
Ship editor now displays weapons and module slots
Reduced size of explosions of missiles that 'miss' their target (end of life)
Left click + V in on the minimap OR middle mouse click on the minimap now shows a radar ping to allies
Radar pings visible for allies
Added an additional check that won't let you win or lose a game in battle royale mode until after all players have been spawned (thus preventing the instant lose/win that has been reported)
Instead of 'delete confirmation' upon deleting units I have added buildigns to the 'currently selected' list to the left of the screen so that you can see what you are going to delete, even if it is a building
Harvesters no longer go into asteroids that often & stop beforehand. They also use cutter beams now
Cinematic camera now goes to friendly units first, then to enemy units. It will also look at the target it is shooting at in 25% of the cases, all the other times it looks at the ship thats firing because that one is more important to the player (their own ship)
It will now also prioritise friendly units over enemy units (it wont inspect enemy units unless it cant find friendly units with targets)
This week I have worked on adding new weapons and fixing bugs, since the campaign is pretty much done. I just have to have the voice lines recorded and implemented.
There are now 48 ships, 47 weapons, 23 modules. Ship module slots range from 1 to 5 per ship, and weapon slots from 1 to 5 per ship. Someone can probably use that data to calculate all possible configurations
Weapons, modules & ships
Fixed weapons not firing
Fixed Lasershield
Nerfed Gauss Cannon
Nerfed Gauss Repeater
Reduced harvester cost
Nerfed refinery costs
Made several defense buildings cheaper
Fixed fish moving weirdly
Added Gauss Shotcannon
Added Plasma Shotcannon
Reduced camera lag
Changed Corvette tooltip
Made Emperor ship cheaper
Made Longback ship cheaper
Added a Heavy Corvette
Made the Heavy Frigate tankier
Added the Dageria heavy ship (fast, cheap, fragile)
Added light frigate
Added Heat Sinks module
Added Weapon Booster module
Added the MissileDef cannon
Bugfixes
Removed stealth icon bug
Improved wave defense boss weaponry
When you win or lose you will no longer automatically leave the game. Instead you will get a leave button.
After win/lose your HUD / GUI will dissapear apart from the minimap
5 seconds after win/lose your win/lose message will dissapear and the Leave button will move to the bottom left
Cinematic camera can now be used after losing
All other options apart from building new things will stay available after losing
All of the above basically boils down to that you can keep watching after losing
Made weapon tester into a neutral building + camera smoothness is now different for cinematic cam and follow cam, and regular camera smoothness is more instant
I've moved the check to see what units can jump elsewhere (excludes buildings and AI units). Then checks if the selected unit is a friendly or not. It makes a new list from this then uses that list to jump. That should exclude any errors caused by 'wrong units' being selected for jumps. This seems to have solved the jump issue.
Transports now spawn more randomly
Rewards for killing transports is now between 250 and 350 per destroyed transport in multiplayer and between 250 and 750 of each resource in singleplayer
In BR now 3 transports spawn at random positions instead of 1, making it easier for players to get them
Made transports easier to target
Zabu beacons in multiplayer are now spread out more
Battle royale jump cooldown is now 1/3 of regular jump time. I have also set the jump cooldown very low temporarily to test it
Added check that unit must have more than 0 health before being allowed to jump
Added an extra check that won't even send the network command to jump a unit if its health is lower than 0
Made all blue and green projectiles less bright by setting the transperancy from 255 to 70. Also changed projectiles visual
Tweaked recoil
Fixed neutral transports needing to be dead to win in BR
Testing neutral transports needing to be dead to win in BR fix (success)
Added a check to see if unit references were still set when seeing if player should lose in br
Noticed that when you win the win in br the win screen almost instantly dissapears. Just checked it, same goes for the lose screen. Has to do with screen sizes, fixing now.
Increased time that the victory or lose message stays to 10 seconds
Improved leavegame positioning
transports in BR now give between 150 and 300 of each resource
Repair stations in BR work again
Decreased jump delay by 1 second (will take 3-4 seconds to jump now instead of 4-5)
Fixed Reinforcement beacon (+ build speed increaser) from applying benefits to allies
Removed 'music playing double' until it can be reproduced
Might have fixed the population bug. Can't really test, almost impossible to reproduce. But I suspect its because the owner of the units of the ally that died were counted as friendly units, reducing your own population below 0. I've added an extra check that checks if those objects are owned by the local player to hopefully fix this issue
Added the same check to populationCap
Increased loot drop chance in all singleplayer game modes by 30%
Added some checks that if selected units are null that they get removed from the selected units list in the formation helper. Might fix move issues
Cleaned up shipyard death
Repositioned leave button
Increased height indicator display distance while placing buildings
Changed height from "xx Meters" to "Height: xx"
Thats it for this week. Next week I will probably do more similar fixes. I've also fixed most game breaking bugs so far, so thats good :)
This week I've mostly worked on campaign mission 7 and 8. I had to:
Flesh out the script
Write all voice over lines
Time all the events
Check win conditions
Check lose conditions
Analyse the gameplay aspect
Make sure the whole lore is consistent enough
Test if all objectives could be achieved and the missions could be completed
Apart from that we've also worked on Fighters and Bombers. Those are not an absolute requirement for game release, but it would be very cool to have!
Each week I also play at least two games with patrons. One is a multiplayer game and the other is a battle royale game. Patrons on https://patreon.com/TenseGames also get to design ships based on which tier they choose and their name will be included on a transport ship. Without people supporting me via patreon I would have had to quit this project a long time ago, so I'm forever thankful for those who continue to help me with it.
Added objective 1, 2, 3, 4,5 for campaign mission 4
Written the text for the voice over
Photoshopped radar ping
Animated radar ping
Implemented radar ping system
Added objective radar pings to mission 2
Added objective radar pings to mission 4
Completed campaign mission 4
Increased time until first objective trigger in campaign mission 4 + changed the tooltip
Refined campaign story, currently 8 missions planned and 4 of them done
I also implemented this for the campaign, but I won't tell you what it is:
We also did a bunch of performance tests. If we don't use any of those new techniques right now then at least we'll have them ready for later versions of the game.
And finally the Brachio and Destroyer MKII in action: