Hello, here a small update with improvement/fixes mainly for undo redo behavior.



Currently working on mesh deformation for the next main update.
Mesh can be auto generated. Like basic plan with the choice of subdivisions.





Or complex shape. (the colors used are only for debugging)





Still a lot of work to do but should be available soon.




ːsteamthumbsupː Available features but could be improved.


ːsteamthisː New available features added with this version.



If you see bugs or want to propose features, you can do it at the community, thank you !

Hey everybody!

This is a hotfix to solve the problems that some users are experimenting with the 1.0.0 version.

- Fixed a bug that showed a black screen when killing Archon Nhir.
- Fixed a bug with some corruptions that break the game forcing to reload it.
- Fixed a display problem with the emote hotkeys (letters A and S were swapped).
- Fixed a display bug in the lobby.

We will keep monitoring the status of the game!

As always, thanks to all of you for your support, feedback and understanding.

The Storm Update brings new content, requested features, balance changes and bug fixes, but not without a few growing pains.

If you haven't already heard, I'll be moving (back) to California after an extended stay away, and The Storm Update is my way to packing as much new content into the game as possible for all of you while I take the time to settle in. But it was perhaps a bit too much.

Ultimately, I had to roll back a few pieces of content that were causing all manner of game breaking bugs, so that I could ensure I got this update out, with time to make adjustments before I begin my travels.

That means, the new zone, The Lepi Sector won't feel as full of brave new ideas as I had hoped (YET), but over the coming days I hope to add those back in. The new boss is my most ambitious yet, and that remains, but several enemy types had to be taken out for now, and replaced with enemies from previous zones. It also means the Symbionic upgrades were pushed back, though I expect 1-2 of the planned 3 to make it back in before I move.

Oh, and many of you have mentioned the music gets a bit repetitive after a while, and I've heard you. My musician is not only updating the current work in progress tracks to be more polished, varied, and longer, but he's also working on act variations to bring fresh sounds to the fight after each boss battle.

With all that said, let's get in to what actually IS in this update. It's a lot!:

Major Features

• The Lepi Sector
  
• New Boss: The Monarch
  
• 4 new enemy types
  
• New music track (work in progress)
  
• Updated music for the Rachni Belt (work in progress)
  
• Pause Inventory
  
• New Player Tutorial selectable on Apoid (work in progress)
  
• 2 New Pilots: Tempest, Ace
  
• 3 New Unlockable Ship skins: The Hawk, The Cobra, The Mantis
  
• 3 New Weapons
  
• 5 New Utilities
  
• 3 New Augments (2 pilot-specific)
  
• 10 New Achievements
  
• Community Item Drops Enabled
  - 7 trading cards
  - 5 badge ranks
  - 4 profile backgrounds
  - 5 emotes
  - 4 point-shop-exclusive animated avatars

New Features

• New Player Tutorial: Selectable from the deploy menu on the Apoid Colony, pop ups will explain the very basics to plays as they progress. More tips and some overlays for using the upgrade menus are coming. Let me know if there's something that's hard to understand that should be included.
  
• Upgrade Inventory: You can now pause the game and select the inventory to take a look at what upgrades you have, their types, synergies, and read a level-agnostic description of what they do.

New Zone

• The Lepi Sector: Work in progress. Features 4 new enemy types, an ambitious new boss (wait for it...), a new music track, and 1 new background. Expect regular updates to the content and polish of this zone. There is still a lot to do, from new enemies and combat events, to visual and sound polish. It's also the HARDEST zone yet.

New Pilots

• Tempest: An electric new pilot, with a penchant for shocking behavior.
  - Weapon: Buzz Beacons
  - Augment: Shock Collar
  
• Ace: For those of you wanting a silly challenge. Ace picks all of his upgrades at random, and you can borrow one of three augments from another pilot. He can start with some strange weapon choices, and push you to get a little creative.

New Weapons

• The Dronerang: A boomerang style drone launches out in 1 of 5 directions before returning. Dealing damage both directions.
  
• Buzz Beacons: Swirling, electric beacons rotate around your ship, damaging and stunning enemies they collide with.
  
• Static Surge: A new "powerup" type weapon, that turns you into a ball of electric energy, allowing you to crash through enemies, damaging and stunning them as you go. Beware! You overload your own systems briefly, so make sure you end in a safe space.

New Utilities

• Crystal Drone: A drone made of crystalline gems floats down the screen. Damaging it causes it to shoot beams out at nearby enemies.
  
• Voltarget: Your lock on weapons can now deal electric damage and stun enemies
  
• Amplifryer: Electric weapons deal more damage and stun enemies longer
  
• Recycler: Charges from collecting powerups. Spawns a mini powerup omewhere on the battlefield. Works with Hot Streak and Static Surge, as another new "powerup" type of upgrade.
  
• Drone Cloner: Creates a temporary copy of a random drone that you have equipped. The more drones you have equipped, the shorter the cooldown.

New Ships: "Smol Ship" variations have not yet been implemented, but will be coming soon

• The Hawk: Unlocked with the Aces Hive achievement
  
• The Cobra: Unlocked with the Stingking Hard achievement
  
• The Mantis: Unlocked with the Moth-R-Load achievement

Balance: Major updates to a number of older weapons and utilities are also in the works

• Sideline: Levels 1,3,4,5 all have had the beam width increased.
  
• Hail Mary: Distance based damage has been removed. Now does full damage at any range. A major rework to both the Hail and Heal Marys is in progress.
  
• Unstable Core: Does 75 damage up from 50
  
• Jumper Cables: Now charge faster, and triggers as soon as it's full
  - 96,000 -> 7000 charge
  - Grants 2 shields
  - Now deals 10 damage to enemies around you and stuns them for 0.5 seconds
  
• Space Net: Chance increased to 50%
  
• Power Converter: Now only gains 1 max HP for mini powerups
  
• Electric effects can only stun enemies once every 3 seconds
  
• EMP effects now remove powerups
  
• Kinetic upgrades no longer charge while you are EMP'd

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue with the Light Rail that caused its impact effects to get stuck in memory despite not being visible to the player
  
• Further adjustments to prevent the Sting King from soft locking the game by becoming invincible and refusing to play (this may not be entirely fixed yet, but it will be in a near future patch)
  
• High Roller achievement will no longer improperly trigger.

• Adjusted hit box height and size
  
• Added Goomba stomp (a fall from great heights will be their demise)
  
• You can now stand on other player's heads (try it, it's not broken at all I promise)

-KK

- Custom tracks have a much smaller track.json file
- In the world editor, the set piece list on the right can be scrolled with the mouse wheel
- Fixed a bug where the target bar would disappear before the track ended.
- Fixed a bug where the player's combo would disappear before the track ended.

Development is going ahead at full warp. I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to keep you all updated on what I’ve been doing. I’m going to try to post more regular updates with a quick snapshot on what I’ve been up to, as well as some more details on particular aspects of the game.

The game has been through 2 small rounds of closed betas at this point and the feedback I’ve been getting is very positive. I’m aiming to do a larger beta once the next batch of features and content are polished to my satisfaction, probably around the first week of September (fingers crossed).

In the past month, I’ve worked on:

• Started working with the composer, Moritz, on music for the game
  
• Crew UI work, started working with the portrait artist on crew character portraits
  
• Implementing player controls for secondary weapons
  
• Missile and beam improvements and technologies
  
• Heat dissipation and simulation
  
• Shipbuilding updates
  
• Lots more minor tasks and features

I mentioned in the announcement that the shipbuilding system has undergone a significant overhaul, so I thought I’d give a little more detail on that.

In Starcom: Nexus ships were built on a hexagonal grid with module prefabs. In the game logic, a ship consisted of a hex coordinates and the corresponding module. Each module only occupied a single hex in the ship layout data, but some modules had special logic to “fake” being larger than a hex.

For the sequel, I had a few changes that I wanted to try to implement: modules of different sizes and shapes, support for module rotations, and a unified set of modules for both player and NPCs with faction coloring being handled in the shader, rather than each faction needing their own set of module prefabs with their own materials.

The first step was to produce a prototype of the new module layout logic, shown below:



Getting this working was a bit harder than I envisioned: modules needed to define both the hexes they occupied, as well as the edges that were valid connectors. With these definitions, the ship-building logic needed to transform both the occupied hexes and their edges by their rotation, as well as handle “reflection” for asymmetric modules. It also needed to maintain a map of connections so that if a module was removed (or destroyed in the case of NPCs) any modules that no longer had a path to the bridge would also be removed.

Once I got the prototype working, the next step was to find out how it would look with actual 3D models. In Starcom: Nexus, I made all the modules myself in Blender. They came out “okay” but it was obvious I think that they weren’t made by an artist. And it took me a ridiculous amount of time to make them.

For Starcom: Unknown Space I was able to work with a concept artist and 3D modeler to produce much better models in much less time.

It took a lot of work upfront to figure out what kind of module shapes and designs “worked” with this system, and how to create a shader that could make them a) look good, b) distinctive, and c) not overload the GPU.

The very simplified workflow was I described what modules I needed along with a very bad sketch and some reference art, Ruslan (the concept artist) would come up with some more detailed sketches and then Povilas (the modeler) would use these as a guide for creating the final model:



Here is a small ship being built in the shipyard with some of the new modules:



The modules use a custom shader which has a number of color multipliers for the various layers (plating, detail and underlying). I can modify these for the different factions (and players with Chromaplating tech can customize their own colors).



One new feature I’ve been working on in the past week is thermal dissipation. In Starcom: Nexus, players got a small boost to their weapon fire rates for every empty space they were next to. I’m now experimenting with high-energy modules like plasma and lasers generating heat as they fire. This heat flows to cooler modules and into space. When modules are too hot, they suffer an efficiency penalty. This creates a trade-off between compact well-protected layouts and layouts that can sustain intense
energy use.



There’s more new features and changes to shipbuilding, but I’ll leave off for now. Thanks for reading!

Don’t forget to wishlist and follow on Steam so you don’t miss any important announcements!

- Level 46 movement bug fix

Note: This update is for the Steam Deck Stable channel, and includes all the changes that have been tested in the Beta channel. You can opt into this in Settings > System > Steam Update Channel.

We're continuing to look at making the user experience of playing games without an Internet connection a better, more intuitive experience.

• Fixed issue where rebooting while in Steam Offline Mode would cause games to fail to launch
  
• Fixed the Cloud Sync error notification popping up when offline
  
• Disabled Steam Offline Mode button when not connected to the internet, as trying to do this currently gets Steam Deck into a bad state.
  
  • This change disables this button but does not in any way affect your ability to play games without an active Internet connection.

• Fixed styling for CJK keyboard glyphs so everything appears centered correctly on keys
  
• Fixed Recommended Layout not always showing up for the author of controller configuration
  
• Fixed CJK font issues in SteamOS updater when running on Steam Deck
  
• Fixed focus issue when tapping the show/hide password button
  
• Removed the gap between keys on the virtual keyboard for improved typing

• Temporarily disabling hot / cold temperature notifications while we address issues with false positives

Thank you so much for your great support! It means so much to me as a solo developer working on my first public video-game. As on writing this article with your help I have reached:

• Twitter 100 followers,
  
• 81 people Wished listed the game
  
• Thanks to the Discord community for your constant active support and interactions.

This game was originally going to be a 'Free' game, however due to the length this has taken me by a miscalculation of my own ability, Its taken me longer to learn some specific things with the game engine I am using.

I am in need to get a return on the investment so I can continue with making the game other games!

This also means I will be upgrading this game more than originally planned since you are the paying customer I want you to benefit from doing so. Updates will include adding in content, adding achievements (release may not contain achievements but eventually I will add them in after) Adding cards, adding other languages and improving the game overall and more. I will also lengthen the game naturally to suit the price so you can play longer for the paid product without it feeling forced.

Q. Will I start a "Early Access" ?
A. I currently don't want to but this could change, however I wish to sell the game as originally completed and then add additional content later on as I improve the game while looking at your feed back.

Q. How much will this game now cost?
A. The game price range I am thinking is from £6 to £8 so we can all benefit from the pricing.

Q. Will price increase when you add new things?
A. Only if the changes are big enough to take that type of time from me, but the types of updates I loosely mentioned won't be big enough to increase to price so there it is most likely a No as I would like to provide you a new game over increasing a price for the game you already bought and possibly recommending friends to try out.

Q. Is there a release date yet?
A. No, the reason is because I currently work full time out of game developing this game and all of my spare time I have to plan when I work on this game vs gaming myself vs spending time with family. I do not want to make a promise and not meet that promise, I prefer being truthful to you as the potential customer, I want to earn your respect and fix the confidence towards indie gamers on steam that has been broken by other steam indie developers that broke their promises hindering your confidence within our indie dev community.

Q. Where can I keep up to date with your progression and when do you update progression?
A. The best place is twitter @FunSizeIndieDev I only post progression when there is something to report, if there no progression or much of a progression to report on that is different than the previous tweets then I won't post, If I go on holiday or take a break from developing I will mention it there so you know what is happening and that I haven't "abandon" the game.

Q. Will this affect the 'full story' game that you've mentioned before?
A. No, the game will still be separate but cannon between the two and set up as sequel, so If I end up doing a sale deal I could be selling both together in sale but the prices between the two will most likely be different but the theme is the same and storyline will be different with the same protagonist.

Thank you so much for your interest in my first public game, this means so much to me and highly motivates me to improve the game as I build it without you it would be harder to be motivated after work and my days off so thank you so much!

Hello alchemists!

As always we're prioritizing bugfixes and balancing on our way to the game's full release, and on this latest update we're bringing the following changes:

• Balanced the Plantora and Morhk Savage encounters.
  
• Fixed a bug where the game could freeze after attempting to discover a recipe with 7 or more reagents.
  
• Improved handling save files - This is a critical issue. We don't want anyone losing progress over this, so if it happens to you please warn us.
  
• Fixed a few tooltips appearing when they shouldn't - We think we've got them all this time, but if any are still appearing let us know.
  
• Fixed damage dealt by burning reagents.
  
• Improvements on the Knowledge Administration screen - Some players didn't immediately recognize the sliders and were stuck on this screen without knowing how to proceed, hopefully the slider's new visuals will resolve this.

Those are the most important changes for now, but as always any problem with the game you can reach us here or on our Discord server!