Underspace News

February is here once again, starchaser. Be sure to kiss your wife goodbye and give her a big thing of chocolate hearts. In the meantime, you’ve got storms to face.

But first, a little announcement: We’ve begun to open up private testing applications! The good news is that testers get full access to the full, current build of the game, and anyone can apply.



The bad news? You’ll have to do this through our Discord. We need a way to easily communicate with testers, and that’s currently our best option (since forums went extinct in the great media wars of 2010). But, you’re free to apply and learn more on our Discord. And as always, you can check out the free public demo we have out.

Now, onto progress! There’s lots of that this month. Not even a thirty-six hour stay in the hospital can slow me down; Death himself fears me. As always, this is a paraphrasing of the main article, which you can read here.



The biggest announcement this past month is the first draft of ALL sidequests have been finished. That’s some 425 pages over some 60 sidequests, not a small feat by any means. Luckily, writing them takes FAR longer than implementing them, and plenty of them have now been added to the game (and we’ve gone back over existing ones to make them work, have more dialogue, and generally be improved).

Sundered stars, dead kings, ancient pirate ghosts, and much much more feature in various storylines and plots throughout the galaxy. We’ve also been improving some of the background scripting system, to save space and time on our end.
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The campaign itself also got a few improvements. Enemies have been rebalanced for the early game, the tutorial system got an overhaul, and the first bits of voice acting tech (tying sound to animations) has been implemented. Check it out.

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Expect more quests, in fact, expect mostly quests from now on as we edge closer to release. It’s where the majority of the game’s content comes from, after all!



Players can now join various starchasing chapters throughout the galaxy. These subgroups (some created by our Kickstarter backers) have their own subgoals and specialties they specialize in. Players can complete tasks, kill enemies, or run missions for them and in return gain rank and payouts.


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You can swap between chapters at any data center, which also lets you now track storms in regions. Conveniently paying a fee to these data centers will allow you to view incoming storms (IE, spawn them in a region of your choice) as well as switch chapters and claim rewards (don’t worry, you can’t lose progress in chapters).


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More of these will also be implemented as time goes on, so be sure to always check your local data centers in various star systems.



In between overcoming various writer’s blocks for sidequests, I spent the month implementing and refining a few new QoL stuff, mostly related to UI and management of such.

The player can now for example, have a clear indicator of nearby garages, and can freely swap between ships at any shipyard. I thought about restricting this, but then I realized “wait, why?”


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Certain bits of the UI are more informative now too. Scanners show the proper ranges and distances of their upgraded software, and classed weaponry now shows the class of the actual hardpoint it’s mounted on. Scanners also now, of course, can emit damaging pulses: a desperate but often useful AoE attack.

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And as mentioned, the tutorial tip system has been upgraded to apply in more situations.





And finally, assetwork. I’ve redone wrecked ship textures to be based off textures directly, instead of shaders. Why? This allows me to layer those textures AND THEN have shaders as well, while more tightly controlling certain aspects of wrecked ships visually.



And we’ve got a few… assets being worked on. Like everyone’s favorite religious mushroom zombies: the Us! It’s okay, they’re nice guys, really.



Or various drafts of ancient, long dead races. But hey, even the dead leave behind corpses, just ask the Us. It’s okay, they’re nice guys, really.



That’s all for this month, check back next month as we ramp up more content production and whatnot. Again, if you’re interested in testing the game, check out our Discord, as well as our demo!

Happy New Year starchasers. I’d give some big speech about peace and love and the brotherhood of mankind, but you’re busy. So let’s move onto the REAL stuff.

First off, demo 1.95 is now out! This is a smaller update that contains a smattering (that’s a real word) of bugfixes, along with some new immersion features and more. Check out the changelog and give it a whirl!



Starting soon, we’ll be opening up the rest of the galaxy to our playtesters, hand-selected via advanced machine learning techniques on our Discord. You can check there for more information in the coming month. Now, let’s get into everything.

As always, this is a paraphrasing of the main article, which you can read here.



I’ll start by saying the most important thing: the plan now is for Underspace to be released in 2022. We’re at the stage now where so much of the game and its content is far enough along that I can give at least that vague release date with something resembling a kind of confidence.



The reason for that is that, as this month opens, the game is very much in a playable state. Indeed, it has more content and features than certain… other games it may have been inspired by. There’s a huge amount of things that can be seen, done, fought, and more.



Every star system is in, every station and equipment sold on that station is in. Of the 20 ambient bosses, 15 have their first drafts finished (as in, playable to completion but lacking polish), and of the game’s some 75 vignettes/points of interest, every single one has its first draft finished.



The first draft of the main campaign has been written and scripted, but not fully implemented. In general, quest and storyline work is one of the three big blockers that still remains. Many of these have their first drafts done, and around 20% are implemented to some capacity.



However there are well over 50 quests in the game, some of which can get quite extensive. The irony is that writing these takes far more time than actually putting them in game however. You can see more on what’s been done there in the questwork section.



The next big blocker is station/planet interiors. There’s no functional difference between the two, but we’re talking some 150 small levels that need to be detailed with plants, furniture. Jars of vegemite. Whatever people put in their homes. Jars of vegemite, right? Anyway this is one of the biggest blockers, but luckily we have extra level designers working day and night on it, leaving me free to do other things.




The final big blocker is multiplayer. That includes making sure singleplayer mechanics work, allowing for server hosting, and the massive amounts of bugtesting. This is my white whale right here. There’s not actually a whole lot to be implemented in fact. But implementation and smooth implementation when it comes to multiplayer are two different beasts.



Then there’s a smattering of your usual polishing, texturing, assetwork, etc, etc. Expect always to see this in between updates on new quests and space dungeons.



And that’s what has to be done. So, onto what has been done.



As mentioned, I spent this last month writing the first drafts of as many quests as I possibly can. It’s not an easy task, as altogether you’re talking about six hundred or so pages of dialogue. Happily, that number has been majorly chipped away at, and of Underspace’s 58 or so sidequests, 18 remain.



Quests mean dialogue, so I’ve also spent the end of last month adding new camera controls to on-foot dialogue, allowing names, focused characters, and the camera to change on the fly. Good for sorta-cutscenes and multi-man conversations.

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NPCs have lots of new things to say out in the stellar now too. Service ships can now repair and restock your ship, for a fee of course. Meanwhile Us traders (those green zombie ships) now carry and offer, if you can afford it, extremely expensive and rare items for the discerning starchaser.

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And pirates now will shake you down for money, valuables, and your worldly possessions while raiding lanelines.

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All these new features are in the new demo, so check it out!


I’ve gone and done a great deal of work on pathfinding. Again. The results are good though, no more NPCs flying through things. Hopefully.

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Furthermore, you can now properly enter formation with ships and follow them at a good pace, I’ve even added dialogue controls to detect WHAT you’re in formation with.

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Speaking of following, NPC followers are better about avoiding colliding with you. They’re a little more careful now.

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Large ship colliders got a refactor. They’re far more accurate, but in addition can now specify weak points on a ship (where they take extra damage).

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Some asteroid models got a rework to bring them up to the graphical standards of their fellow asteroids. Low poly asteroids on pirate bases and similar were also reworked into new models, because why not?

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Your UI also now gives detailed information when it updates about WHAT it updated. A useful tool.

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And finally, we’ve added booster rings. After all, there is racing in this game. What would a space race be without a booster ring?

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Finally, there’s the usual modelings of bosses (not all of them though, we’re keeping a few things secret), alongside tilesets for big space dungeons. Because I know, deep down, you’ve wanted to fly through a space cathedral.


That’s all for this month, ideally next month I’ll have all quests written up, along with more content-related progress to share. Check back then!

Happy holidays starchasers! It’s the Wintery times, when the red liquid in the thermometer that mommy says you shouldn’t drink drops to a pinprick of nothingness and ninety tons of white pain descends from the sky to ruin your plans to wash your car and freeze your knuckles until they bleed.

In other words, it’s the perfect time to sit inside, mope about, and get a HUGE amount of progress done! Actual work. You know, content and stuff. I could talk about all the things that got done and the current state of all those things here, but I’d rather cover them in each individual section. Let’s get to it!

As always, this is just a paraphrasing of the main article, which you can read here. And of course, as always, be sure to check out our demo and Discord.




Last month I talked briefly about adding detail to star systems. Not points of interest, bosses, or quests, but the little things that add that much needed quality that Skyrim modders sometimes call “immersion”. This month, EVERY single star system has reached its goal for detailing! That’s right, EVERY single one. But what does that mean?



It means hazards around the wreck of every large ship (and mechanics for them). Asteroid miners and big asteroids in asteroid fields. Ships in every shipyard and billboards along most every highway. Subtle rotational effects on planets!


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I’ve also been going back over systems and changing lighting, placements of planets and spawning bubbles to help traffic flow better, or make the lighting from stars less intense.


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These redoes will be a thing constantly being done during development as places seem to flow or don’t look quite right. It’s one of those ongoing processes.



Another massive milestone this month was that every single point of interest had its first draft finished! Some are missing textures or the mechanics aren’t quite where they need to be, but you can now see and view every single one in game.

For example, this time traveling spaceship. Loot its innards for bigtime loot, but don’t get caught in the various warps!

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Or the famed Curshian Death Cube. What secrets lie beyond its deadly six sides? We can only wonder.

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But we can’t forget about those naturally occurring vignettes too. Hidden coral forests, lost groves of space amber, huge snaking rock spires, and mushroom forests. Who doesn’t like space mushrooms really?
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And much much more!


So, rejoice starchasers. This is a major milestone for the game, and just an example of how much closer we’ve finally gotten to releasing the game.


For this month’s campaign work, I blocked out and added a lot of content to the non-unique, non-campaign systems. Those moments, areas, and setpieces that involve them, you know? Be warned, there’s spoilers ahead here!
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Quests got a lot of mechanical work done to them. I adjusted how shields work for certain quests, allowed text to parse itself and display data about stats and global variables, and moved around a few old demo quests to new locations, rewriting them appropriately.

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Expect to see more work done on quests in the coming months!



Of course, lots of other things are happening as well. You can now customize your character and buy clothes for them, for example. Just be wary, because NPCs and other station interactables can now have restrictions set on them!
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Combat lines have been improved, you won’t see chatter as frequently anymore, and it’s been separated out into defensive and offensive lines respectively.
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And finally, I’ve made sure to fix up and improve the effects of legendary ships found in stormed areas. For example, this overloaded fighter, whose ship becomes a ticking time bomb that will rip open a rift if not destroyed fast enough (and offers excellent loot to those who manage to do so).

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Not too much to say about assets this month. Mostly it was about finishing up the models for various vignettes, or wrecking pre-existing assets for areas where pre-existing assets needed wrecked variants. But we also have a space train! A TRUE space train, in fact.



That’s all for this month folks, Happy Holidays, and check back next month for our yearly overview.

Welcome to November, starchasers! Normally I’d preface this with lots of words about turkey and people freaking out because there’s a friday where you can buy overpriced TVs for a dollar less, but I’d rather get straight to the big announcements!



If you missed it, demo 1.9 is now out! It’s our first demo in quite some time, and has a lot of new features, particularly relating to piracy and world interactions. Furthermore, it begins to scale back the file size and scope bloat that was plaguing our demos, taking things down to a much more reasonable size.



While our official demo releases are still going to be fairly spaced out, as we’re now getting closer to release, we’ll be offering more immediate releases for testers. The basic summary is this: we’ll be soon accepting applicants on our official Discord (and sending out instructions to our higher tier backers). Accepted applicants will receive more frequent builds (about once every month) of the full game for testing and feedback.

And that’s the long and short of it! For now, onto progress! As always, this is just a paraphrasing of the main article, which you can read here.



Star systems are more than just quests, stations, and vignettes. They have lots of little details in them to really bring the entire sector to life. This month was spent doing just that: detailing systems all the more. To start, we’ve added shipwrecks to every star system. Not those huge derelict capitalships mind you, but the smaller freighters and fighters.



They all have placement, names, and descriptions now, and can be scanned and looted for all sorts of treasures.

We also reworked startrawlers, those mobile garbage collectors you might have seen around the demo systems. They’re now much more efficient, there’s a lot more of them, and they have new effects and textures. With them now in a finalized state, I’ve placed them around the galaxy.





Ships can also be found in shipyards, where you’d expect to find ships.



I’ve reworked advertising billboards a bunch too. They read much better out in space, and can have requirements attached to them. Think wanted posters of your character, or a mad AI taking over all advertising and tracking you down.





This is just the first bits of system detailing, and things like more asteroid miners, more billboards, and more Things are soon to follow in the months to come.


There’s lot of work done on a variety of things this month, but none big enough to be in their own category. To start, UIs on things like stations and star system name readouts can be overridden completely, allowing for custom names and a greater degree of uniqueness in individual areas.

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The navmap UI’s been reworked to be a bit more optimized and efficient too. In general we’ll be reworking things to be more efficient in the UI to prevent slowdowns.

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Party members are getting more dialogue, and properly will fight your hated enemies for you too.



Finally, in terms of new content we’ve added instant-travel, instant-damage, high energy mining lasers. They’re fairly rare, and perfect for many situations. Provided you can find them, of course.

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Shields have also been redone! They’re shader based now, and have special animations, and are far more performant across the board.

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And here’s this months new assets being made. I’ve mostly been working on bosses, both hidden ambient ones, backer-based bosses, and ones you’ll encounter out in the storm.



That’s all for this month, as always, check back next time for more progress, more system detailing, and so on. You can always check out our Twitter and Discord for more moment-to-moment progress, and updates on closed alpha and beta tests!

It’s October! That month where the Spirit Halloweens finally finish their years long gestation and pulsate into proper and temporary storefronts. But you know what’s REALLY scary?
Prions?
Yeah I suppose they’re pretty terrifying. But I meant space. Space is so terrifying, who knows what you’re going to find out in space. Like giant space squids, ancient cosmic lodestones, the ghosts of all those balloons you let drift out of the atmosphere as a child.
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Luckily, we’ve made lots of progress on space, so even if it’s horrific, it’s at least a little closer to release. Check it out! And as always this is just a paraphrasing of the main article, which you can read here. And as always, check out our demo and our Discord!



The biggest news this month? The first draft of the main campaign’s script is complete! It’s 4 acts with 16 missions, full of twists, turns, and thrilling moments.


Dialogue in the draft is subject to change, but those moments and setpieces aren’t, which means I’m able to fully start building everything out. Here’s a little preview of what’s to come.
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You’ll find out when the game releases just what the heck’s actually going on there.



Lots of work on quests and quest technology (fun stuff for modders) is now up and working. Scanned items can activate script code, line connectors can be dragged around and tethered by the player, and activators can warp the player wherever. All useful for a variety of situations.
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I also redid a lot of background technology to let the player be cloned as an NPC. After all, you never know when you’ll be fighting your evil twin.
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I also went back over some vignettes and optimized them a bit more.


And finally, because sometimes these things can only be looted or encountered once, I expanded the game’s persistence system to be able to be used on pretty much anything.




A lot of UI stuff got overhauled this month, as a lot of UI stuff wasn’t in the best shape it could be.


For example, you could equip vanity items, but actually buying them was another matter. I refactored a bunch of merchant and item code, allowing you to visit clothiers and outfitters and buy all sorts of things for yourself.
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I’ve also dived back into multiplayer UIs, they’re still a work in progress on a lot of aspects now, but you can once again group, trade, whisper, and do all that multiplayer stuff you like to do with other players. I’m working on additional functionality as well, like being able to host public groups that you can join, or additional server settings.
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There’ll be more on this as time goes on of course.


Finally, we’ve got lots of assets to show. We’ve got some SQUID. Official squid. Very fresh.


And I’ve also learned to rig and use substance painter to help with the nonorganic assets. Some of which have even been made. For example, there’s a few campaign models here, as well as the Ballden eyes, which have be rigged to animate and deform like proper glowing eyeballs.
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That’s all for this month, a lot of my focus over the next few weeks is going to be a deep dive in fixing some problems in the game (while also prepping it for mods), check back next to see how that spectacularly fails!