Underspace News

Happy holidays starchasers! It’s the Christmasty season, and while the shadow government of the world is hard at work making sure Santa Claus doesn’t emerge from slumber once more, we’ve been hard at work working on the game to make sure it works. Mostly. Long story short: I have a cat now and it’s hard to develop things sometimes when a fuzzy little asshole is constantly meowing at you to be pet.



But he’s a good boy most of the time, so we’ve got lots of progress to show off this month. Ready? Here we go. As always, be sure to check out our latest demo, and join the Discord! And of course, read the full article here.




Last month I talked about how the main campaign was almost done. And this month guess what? It’s done! The entirety of the singleplayer main campaign can now be played to completion, complete with epilogue and all.

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This is just a first draft, later drafts (which are being worked on now) will add additional effects, like systems for distant battles and constant fighter spawns.

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Meanwhile on the multiplayer campaign, about half of all the missions there are playable to completion! And the entire thing has all its dialogue triggers and scripts put in. There’s a lot more emphasis on raids and boss fights in this campaign, but there’s some fun moments. Hope your engines are strong enough to outrun THE FIELD.

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This month also saw lots of new storm minibosses put in. One can control the storm better via console commands, and there’s tons of new bosses. Ever wanted to have tea with an ancient spaceship ghost? Or how about fight multiple types of space snakes during a raging thunderstorm?
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Needless to say, we’ve got you covered. For the sake of letting the player experience storms easier, the storm growths and surges in the demo are going to be far more aggressive.




For a while now I wanted to redo the game’s radio and custom AI voice… talky… thing. To do that, I had to refactor the radio system, and to do that, I had to refactor the game’s music system and to do that I had to refactor the game’s option menu. Phew, that’s a lot to say. Let’s go down the list.



The options menu is more concise and data-driven, so modders can easily expand upon it. The music system is even better and works by analyzing what the player’s actively doing, which also means that the radio system has been expanded and can have custom playlists for things like combat, being in an asteroid field, and more.

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Finally, we’re adding an AI that alerts you when certain things are happening, with a calm, cool voice telling you if you’re taking radiation damage, incoming missiles, etc. Best of all? You can create your own custom voice packs and override some, or all, of the lines, or just turn off the AI voice entirely.




Not too much going on here: We’re reworking some of the jump effects on ships to be better, that is, the jump out effects for large capital ships.
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And some concept art for some higher tier bosses.


And that’s all for December. Check in next month and next year for a special announcement and our yearly recap, it’ll be a big important one.

Welcome to November starchasers! Feel that warm winter air and hot, blazing winter sun. Ain’t it grand?



A bit of a preemptive apology, I was ill and bedridden for much of the month so a lot of progress that should have been made didn’t get made. Nevertheless, I powered through the first fever I’ve had in some twenty or so years to release our next demo: Alpha 2.05!



This will be the last demo release of the year, and mostly focuses on quality of life features and bugfixes. But man, there sure are a lot of those suckers. You can check out the full changelog and demo download here.

In the meantime, read on below to see some of the work done this month. And as always, feel free to join our Discord and check out the full article here!



The biggest thing this month was the main campaign. Illness kind of hampered a bit of my ability but we’re sitting at 15/16 missions playable to completion, and the entirety of all dialogue having been added and scripted in.

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There’s also been new tech added for things like followers that follow the player at their pace, coloring overrides in nebula zones, and much more.

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We’re hoping to finish up the first draft of the singleplayer campaign in the following weeks, and then going for a deep dive on the multiplayer campaign.



Lots of combat bits too! I’ve been getting into lots of fights and making sure the areas for those flow correctly and can be just fine.

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Missiles, mines, and all those things that go “kaboom” have had a total overhaul (as not many people used most of them). Missiles track better, can bypass shields, disrupt highengines, and more. Mines can leave behind damaging fields after a wide area, and both of them can have variable ammunition counts.

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Missions can now have much more advanced overrides, and are able to parse text tags for much more in-depth descriptions.

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Finally, we’re working hard on getting the last few minibosses added to the list of monsters and worse that can appear in storms.

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You do strange things when you’re working off a fever. There’s been all kinds of new UI stuff. The tutorial UI now has subcategories and is video based, while there’s some subtle new UI elements, such as a charging animation for highengines and a notification for gaining or losing money.

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Finally you can now skip the opening cutscene from the menu, and objectives in quests and campaign missions can offer hints.

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And lots of lots of assetwork this month! We finally implemented things like space farms and sleeper ships around the galaxy, explaining lore questions like “What do these people living on these entire fertile planets even EAT man???”.

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More cockpits were also modeled out and many of the demo ones were implemented into the game properly.

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And finally there’s more non-mechanical assets being worked on. Bosses and characters and the like.




And that’s all for this month. Check in next month for a very important end-of-the-year update!

Alright starchasers. Another month has passed, so pull up a chair, get yourself a strong alcoholic drink, and let’s get this over with so we can go back to dressing up as skeletons and demanding strangers give us candy.
So: we’re aiming to have a new demo out soon. This Demo, 2.05, will largely be bugfixes and a few gameplay shifts. Its main purpose is to coincide with a major testing release for our full game testers.


Now, this devlog’s probably gonna be one of our shortest. I’ve been traveling much of this month, so opportunities for progress have been limited. Still, work’s been done where it’s been done. Let’s get to it, shall we? As always, you can check out the current demo and join our Discord for more moment-to-moment updates, and you can read the full devlog here.

Oh and just a heads up, things might get a bit spoilery from here on out.




The big thing this month? Campaign missions. 7/16 of them sit as playable to completion, while a smattering of others are in a mostly to semi-playable state. There’s also new enemies and new effect technology to really make certain scenes. It’s all very nice.
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Campaign stuff is the big blocker right now, so expect to see even more of this coming up.




There’s also been lots of UI stuff added in. Chapter and syndicate ranks can be accessed via your information menu, the in-game codex is more organized, messaging system’s more verbose, and even the cockpit now has UI elements!
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There’s been a lot of smaller changes too. In addition to a ton of bugfixes, we’ve got some special stuff like the targeting reticle finally being accurate, storage boxes able to use broken items and be expanded via space lobster capitalist magic, new effects for scanning scannable items, as well as gameplay changes liking docking code being more aggressive in how it positions you and armor changing thrust drain rate rather than turn rate.
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Models were made, pacts were formed, contracts were signed in blood. Typical monthly assetwork stuff. For this, we created various new doors for the eventual interior visual overhaul, along with new cockpit interiors for the final version of those.


And finally, we’ve made various head-based accessories for characters: earpieces and eyepieces and hairpieces and other pieces.


That’s all for this month. Things are a bit calmer for me in the coming weeks, so expect lots and lots of progress for next month’s devlog, hopefully.

Welcome to September starchasers! We’re out of the frying pan now, and now it’s time for Father Winter’s cold grip to freeze everything solid. Other metaphors and silly lines would be appropriate here, but I’d rather simply move to all our major announcements!

For those unaware, we now have a new demo out! Alpha 2.0 is another step closer to a release candidate, and brings a lot of new features and fixes into the game. Check out the full devlog here!


What’s more, we have a new teaser trailer out showcasing tons of the work these past few months, check it out!
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Now those are two big things for sure, but we’ve got lots of other tidbits of progress for you this month. So, onward! And as always, be sure to check out Discord in addition to the aforementioned demo, as well as the full devlog here.



As I teased last month, this month saw the first act (out of four total) of the main campaign be completed, at least the first draft. It’s playable to completion, but that requires a lot of new tech as it turns out. From advanced camera controls to adding in support for video playback on TVs and billboards, which also are able to accept video files via multiplayer!
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Robots! Did you know we’ve got AI companions available in this game. We do. And they needed a few bits of them redone. So, we got some across the board improvements for drone companions. Mining drones have improved movement capabilities and physically mine the lucrative rocks they’re after, while defense drones now fire and attack your current target in combat.

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What’s more, many drones now have new textures, check out the assetwork section below for more on that!


And because I had the time to do it, we’ve got lots of new UI improvements and elements. There’s typewriter text for dialogue, an EXP bar, an audio option for ship engine sounds, and campaign objective displays for that particular UI window.
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We also integrated feedback from users based on our last demo into various UI stuff. Asteroid fields and nebulas display if they’re lucrative or radioactive, and you can disable the background effects on the navmap.
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Multiplayer UIs are also improved, as are other aspects of multiplayer. Player-to-player trading has been re-implemented, and server hosts can now specify a variety of server options, including server type, description, death penalties, players joining factions, and more.
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And we’ve got tons of non-UI, non-drone, non-campaign work done too. Every single shipwreck had their loot tables filled out, and every single fast travel train station point was implemented, along with UI support for train travel.
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There’s just more everything overall too. Factions got their loot tables redone and filled out, and Kickstarter backer names were implemented for every race, ghost, and alien. For better or worse.


Legendary/Ace enemies have updated effects too, to better indicate that they’re doing things like buffing their party members.
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There’s probably even more stuff than that, but so much work has been done this month that I’ve kind of forgotten a lot of it


Finally, assets! We’ve got new textures for drones and automated, some basic blockers for ships, and tons of models for interior, on foot sections. Including flying cars. Also some other things, but I won’t acknowledge those if you won’t.
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And that’s all for this month! It’s a spooky spooky month next month, so ideally we’ll have something appropriately spooky for you that time!

Welcome back Starchasers! Things are still hot and humid this summer, and they’ll be like that until suddenly they aren’t. So while you’re dealing with the hell-weather, why not retreat from all that by checking out the latest progress we’ve made on our game about hell-weather in space.

I can’t remember if I’ve said this before, but we don’t have a current time frame on the next demo release. Since the demo is largely content complete now, our goal is working on getting out the updated drafts of station and cockpit interiors before we do a new release.

As always though, you can check out our current demo release, and join the Discord for more moment-to-moment updates! You can also read the full article here.



The biggest news this month, and the biggest portion of progress, is the first draft of every sidequest has been finished and implemented. That means over 55 quests are playable to completion! And as usual, they’re full of twists, turns, and lots of craziness.

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A few bits of questwork also required some new script commands and tech: Docking and undocking at different locations for a single station, forward cannons on battleships. You get the idea.

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Now all of this only covers sidequests. Minigames like the racetrack and the arena, and of course the main campaign and main multiplayer campaign, are still to be done. For this month’s progress… Who knows? Maybe. Maybe…



Now quests take a LOT of time to make and stuff, but because I don’t sleep and my mental health is constantly on the precipice of total breakdown, I always have time to do a few extra things.

For starters: Mods! Users can finally FINALLY truly create mods that can override and recombine game and item data, then package them and send them to other users. This means you can now do stuff to create things like, most commonly, mods that change the highengine setting to be SUPER fast. The next demo version will have full support for these kinds of mods.

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NPCs on stations now have icons above them showing the services they offer, or if they’ve got a quest available. This makes navigation when docked a lot easier.


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Finally, while this isn’t quite assetwork, we’ve taken the old snake movement and reanimated it, alongside reworking how trains move and adding some new space snakes as well. To put it simply: they don’t suck anymore.


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And the Us, those lovable mushroom zombie scamps, have their own icons and hooked-up models now.



And that’s all for this month’s devlog. It’s fairly short, so check in next month for hopefully even more as we edge closer to release!