Release notes here.
The title of this release is only partly sarcastic. The old galaxy map was one of the chief complaints that people had about actually playing this game; it was something I’d put off dealing with for quite some time, because I wasn’t sure how to deal with some of the challenges presented by it. This release goes through literally everything I was hoping to do with it, and the results are better than I’d hoped.
That’s not to say there isn’t still room for improvement — I’m sure it will be refined for quite some time, and expanded from here. But at this point, it’s something that can be visually parsed and understood, and there is a lot of cross-compatibility with the tabs on the sidebar and the notifications up on top. I really wanted to avoid having a bunch of search functions and markers. Instead, just by hovering over existing elements on the GUI, I wanted those things to automatically act as filters on their own. I’m happy to report that is functional and does the job well. It’s crazy superior to the first game’s search function in terms of how quickly you can use it to do something like find all the scouts, or all the planets with some sort of capturable on them.
Especially if you hold Shift to hide the tooltips while you just want the hover effect to work — knowing that you can hold shift to hide tooltips is actually kind of critical now, and probably something we should put in the tutorial. Basically you can really make use of the sidebar as either a set of filters OR as a way to see tooltips, and shift is the toggle between those functional modes, unless you want to try to dodge around tooltips to see the middle of the screen.
You can also see what sort of defenses versus mobile forces you have at planets, and in general seeing what you vs the AI have is far better now. It’s just a whole different experience. I literally couldn’t tell where players even owned planets half the time when they sent in savegames for me to find a bug in, and that’s… wow that was a problem, you know? Now I can instantly see what’s going on, and I hope you’ll find it equally easy.
Assuming things are in the ballpark of correct here, and there aren’t any egregious things that annoy people on the galaxy map anymore, I’m going to move onto the sidebar and lobby for now.
There were some other major improvements in this build, too: icons in the header notifications now are distinct and actually tell you what is happening properly. The guards get properly aggro’d when you shoot any one of them at a post. Several nullref exception fixes. MAJOR command station rebalance, to make more than just the Military ones useful. Hacking has been reworked heavily under the hood and is so much easier to tune now. Three more AI types implemented. And more!
More to come soon, too.
Reminder: RocketAssistedPuffin has stepped into a volunteer balancer role, and he is not only looking for feedback, but he’s actively integrating lots of things that other people are suggesting on our forums and Discord, as well as things that he’s finding and coming up with himself. The more feedback the better, for sure.
The Usual Reminders
Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you’ll be notified about any game releases we do.
Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn’t have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that’s how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.
Enjoy!
Chris
