[BUGFIX] Resetting while having a spawned spike on a square starting position no longer destroy them on reset making the level impossible to solve.

[NEW] Some additional controls were added:
- Level selection and confirmation is now possible with Space
- Menus can now be exited with Escape

Today we wanted to share a little more about what we've got in the works at the moment.

Many players voiced their opinion that they would like to see multibiome islands, Thea: The Awakening-style.

So the Pangea update will allow you to select between the regular single-biome-island-style land generation and the new one, where multiple biomes can be found on a single, larger landmass. We're hoping to give you a totally new gameplay experience, both in single player and co-op.





When will you be able to try it out? We're aiming to release the patch within a couple weeks. It should hit the alpha branch first for testing and if all goes smoothly, the main branch shortly after.

Greetings Pilots!

This weekend, we’re continuing our tradition of Drone Strike Force Happy Hours where you can earn double XP and credits for each game you play! Here’s the play schedule:

Saturday & Sunday: 7PM - 9PM CET / 6PM - 8PM GMT / 2PM - 4PM EDT / 11AM - 1PM PDT

Weekend Happy Hours help to concentrate the Early Access community during peak hours for quick matches, high competition, and extra fun. Bring your friends, unlock new drones and perks quicker, and enjoy!

-The DSF Team

Stay tuned for tomorrow for an exciting update where we overhaul literally every part of the game!

Hey everyone!

Thank you all very much for playing the game. I really enjoy hearing your thoughts and suggestions. I have kept a list of possible improvements that will one day become reality, so please do not hesitate to continue voicing your thoughts!

This summer I have been busy recording a developer playthrough of the game, providing both solutions to all the puzzles and commentary at the same time. Should you find yourself stuck at the game, these can be used as a quick way to access the solution.
All these videos can be found here.
I hope you will find these videos helpful.

Do you want a more classic YouTube experience, or compare your experiences with those of someone who also plays the game for the first time? The YouTuber Nock has a(n almost) complete Let'sPlay of the game available on his channel!
You can find all the videos here.
Huge thanks to Nock for making these fantastic videos!

That is all for now. I don't know yet when the next update for the game rolls around, but I will let you know once it happens. Lastly, the base price for the game will slightly drop soon to honour its first year of being released on steam. How a year can fly by...

Kind regards,
Mike Daas

Update v1.1

-Added options menu (Press ESC when you spawn)
-Added brightness, master volume, mouse sensitivity, and film grain toggle in options
-Fixed some typos in Japanese translation

Good day to you ladies and gents. Although our initial plan was to push the next small patch on Tuesday, we figured you shouldn't have to wait that long for some of these things. This is especially important for those of you who have been experiencing crashes.

CHANGES

• Fixed a major problem that would cause the game to crash in some instances, frequently on the second main mission, but it could happen at other instances as well.
  
• Exit game is no longer the default option when entering the main menu. This will especially help those of you who play with the gamepad.
  
• Bartender job waypoint is now of different color (purple) for easier recongition.
  
• Random encounters can no longer spawn while you're busy doing bartender jobs. They won't interfere any more.
  
• Skill point distribution is no passed on into a new game. It's not of great importance at the moment since skills aren't implemented yet, but a bug is a bug is a bug
  
• Tweaked lock-on to make it easier to lock onto a target. Especially important for gamepads.
  
• Tweaked gamepad auto-aim. Made it a bit smoother.
  
• Added a few extra script checks to prevent encounters from bubbling up into an incoherent mess involving an ever-increasing number of ships, ultimately annihilating the universe... you know... the little things...

The next update is planned for Tuesday. As always, we'll keep everyone up-to-date.

P.S. Win7 users: we haven't forgotten you, don't worry. We're working on it and hope to have the issue resolved in the next update.

Safe travels captains!

Today has been very interesting for me. I learned a few major things that will help immensely with recreating & fixing crash logs I receive.

Fair warning; this might get long & pretty technical!

I spent about 10 hours straight today working out a way to fix this "crash to desktop" error with no error log.

This was tricky because 90% of players were completely unaffected by it, but for the 10% it did affect, the game was basically unplayable. There was no error log & I had nothing to go by because it didn't happen on my PC. With help from a user, I figured out it was related to invalid accessing of grids.
Learning that helped, but not too much because the game uses dozens of grids that are accessed every second.

After about 4 more hours of a painstaking process of elimination I figured out the main cause of this crash was something very simple:

When a member or premium member use a piece of equipment, they gain a bonus to their mood if they are in a member exclusive area. If they aren't in a member area, it reports back that they are in zone number -1, which is a problem because the zone list ranges from 0-12.

When small things like this happen, most PCs ignore the issue and the game continues as normal. But for some, it instantly crashes the game.

This isn't exclusive to this grid bug however.

I've noticed that some users can play for 8 hours straight and never experience a crash, while others get unique crashes every half an hour.

I believe this issue is related to which Windows Redistributables the user has.
You can learn about what these are here.

Certain programming functions require certain redistributables to work correctly.

I've been unable to recreate most of the bug reports I receive because I have all the necessary Redistributables.

Lucky for me, Steam has functions built in to choose which of these are necessary to run the game. So I've ticked a few common ones that should fix many issues people are having!

Steam should automatically install these for the user.

Hopefully now the game will feel much more stable for many users!

It was a long journey that happened in a flash! In this Devlog, we reminisce about our road to release and what we have achieved since the game went into Early Access.

With our official launch, a new journey begins.

https://youtu.be/JtahM0PSpEw

Hello, together,

finally it's time. We present you the new victory conditions menu.
So it finally makes sense to play Summer Islands :)
At least you've got a clear goal you can work towards or get yourself compared to.

It was very stressful last weeks. Not because of Summer Islands. But you always have in mind that you have to create a new Summer Islands update.
No, the stress came more from a partition error. Which destroyed a few days of programming. Also the important programming laptop had been sent in because of a hardware defect. So you had to set everything up again and that costs time with the little free time you have in the evening. I don't want to complain too much. Everyone has his problems :D

But for you it means now: Set victory conditions at the start of the game:



As you can see in the picture you can currently set 4 different victory conditions. For each goal the player gets a star. Additionally you can set how many stars a player needs to win.
The current 4 categories are:

• Time (this category is always activated)
  
• Money
  
• Number of tourists
  
• Shareholders' equity (sum of all construction costs of existing buildings)

You can set these 4 categories as targets and change them.
When you have started the game you will see a new button with a star icon in the bottom left corner.



If you click on it you will get to the MatchMenu. This shows you some details about the current match via the tabs. At the very beginning you can see the stars. Here you can see who already got how many stars. In the tab game settings you get an overview of the created match and the victory conditions. This helps you to bring the goals back into consciousness.



When you give it 110% and it comes to an end. So a player who has reached the required stars, you will see the winner window with the facts about the match. Who wins based on the total score or the money or stars. This can all be seen at a glance.



We will try to integrate such statistics into Steam in the future so that you can see how your friends have performed with similar game conditions. Or a big chart with all points at what time what happened. For this we have implemented the basic architecture with version 0.1.7.

A disadvantage of version 0.1.7 is: The old savegames don't work anymore, for now. In the future we will try to integrate a more complex savegame correction system so that old savegames will continue to work and will be corrected when loaded. But until then I have released version 0.1.6 as beta for every player out there. Just right click on Summer Islands > Properties. Then select the version 0.1.6 in the dropdown menu under the tab Betas and have fun with the old savegames. :D

On request we have also integrated a switch in the start menu to switch off the catastrophes. For everyone who doesn't want to be restricted by nature. ;)

Furthermore we could fix the bugs that occurred on bigger screens (bigger than 1080p). It is now possible to use the whole screen. There is only one limitation. The zoom function with mouse wheel does not work here unfortunately. But we already have that in mind and take care of it. Give us some more patience and we'll be able to fix it. :)

In the next weeks we try not to implement such big changes but to improve the gameplay and atmosphere. We were thinking about improvements to the SoundFX or maybe music or or or or. There is still a lot to do and the roadmap looks promising that we won't get bored. :D

If you like Summer Islands and you think the two/three weekly updates are great, give us a positive review. We read every review and write the improvements into the roadmap and we don't want to be satisfied with a balanced one. So thumbs up! ;)

https://trello.com/b/FbC1a19w/devboard-summer-islands