Release notes here.
I’m slightly sick and very tired, so the release notes will mostly speak for themselves, I think. But there’s a lot of amazing stuff in there from Weapon Master, helpfully integrated by Badger and Puffin, along with a long list of things that they also put together. The Dark Spire are getting increasingly cool, and the AI is more active in a variety of ways, and tractor beams are a lot more of a thing.
My contributions to this release are pretty well nil, but I have been working away on the next great thing, don’t worry. Basically I’m writing up a document that explains my design for some substantial changes — please hold your pitchforks — that I think will address most of the complaints people have about control groups, fleet management, fleetballing, the docks ui, and maybe even scouting. That last bit I hadn’t expected to tackle, but as I’ve been going through things in a comprehensive fashion I realized that it’s actually just as much related as the rest of it.
I think it’s only a couple of days of work for me once I finish writing it up, so the design and writeup process is longer than the actual implementation time if I’m correct on that. But this has been a bugbear set of issues for me for over a year, and I’d rather measure twice and cut once on it.
It’s also a short enough amount of work once it is done that I’m planning on inflicting it on everybody AS I give you the explanation document, rather than giving you the document first. 😉 My rationale for that is that we can all nitpick the theory of it forever, but it’s hard for anyone to see exactly what I have in my head from a document and not just react to parts of it. Much easier to have the full thing out and then react to that, and the document then serves the purpose of illustrating if there’s some place where the actual implementation deviates from intent, or where further refinements or rework is needed to keep to the spirit of the intent.
I have a couple of other irons in the fire at the moment as well, one of which is looking into a replacement ui framework that might make things vastly easier on all of us that want to do any UI work. So depending on how much those other things take up time-wise, it could in theory be as late as the end of next week before I have the big new set of changes out, but a big part of me would like to have those out this week if possible. Probably not feasible, but it would be nice.
Assuming that the big changes go over well with folks, then that’s the last big design hurdle remaining for the game, prior to 1.0 at least. The new plan for multiplayer, detailed two releases back, will still need to be implemented, and the ui will need to be majorly updated in one fashion or another, but everything else is just a matter of content and getting individual slices of work done, versus something that is a larger design question. So that’s very good! It was important for me to start nailing the really tough stuff as soon as I got back to work, since I really didn’t want that hanging over me.
As noted recently, I am fully back at work now. If you were wondering what was up, I recently put together a video explanation of what happened. I don’t go into a lot of detail, for privacy reasons, but there’s enough there to get the important pieces across. I’m increasingly happy, for a variety of reasons, and that’s a real relief. Life is still a work in progress, and finances even more so, but there’s a path forward.
Continual thanks to Badger, Puffin, and Quinn for having held down the fort while I was away.
Problem With The Latest Build?
If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you’ll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it’s a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.
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
