Underspace News

Welcome starchasers! I’ve got good news, bad news, and news! So the bad news is that this month’s progress was… less than it could have been. I had a lot of pressing and wonderfully warm obligations to fulfill, which doesn’t mean progress wasn’t done, just like I said, less than it could have been.

The good news? The end is in sight. The bad news (again?). The end is still pretty far off. Effectively, we know every remaining task that has to be done now, but that task list is still pretty gargantuan. Could we release the game now in its current state and have a pretty swell space game? For sure. Are we going to go the extra ten miles instead? You know it bro.

And finally, another sad tidbit, but our next demo (demo 1.9) will have to be delayed. The game’s gotten large enough now that uploading has become a problem and Unity (which can’t support resource files bigger than 4gb when packed, for some reason) is introducing texture errors into current builds. Fixing this will take a few days, though it doesn’t stop other bits of
progress.

Phew! That’s a lot to take in, so let’s move on to everything that was done this month, eh? As always, this is a paraphrasing of the main article, which you can read here. Be sure to check out our demo and join our Discord for more moment-to-moment updates!


I’ve been writing up many of the game’s sidequests, and we’re close to about 50% done for their first draft. There’s still more to go, and many of course simply aren’t implemented, but have a preview of what you can expect.


Quests require bits of tech and can always be improved of course. I noticed a lot of them revolved arounding activating objects in your inventory, so I added a quickslot to let you quickly activate objects that are able to be activated.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I also redid events a bit, and added assassins that get sent after you, should you manage to make the wrong kinds of people mad.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I also added proximity script triggers. Which are overengineered to heck and back. But these objects, when you go near them, can charge up, play effects, and when finished, execute scripts. There’s situations where these are really fun (for example a quest where you use them to download data into a computer-virus-shooting-gun to take some computers offline).
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Storms are beginning to get in a final state. Hazards for them are still a WIP, but each region now has its own unique storm type, with lots of pretty weathery colors.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


I’ve also created some more exterior effects for storms. Any nebula that has a storm going on will flash and spark from the outside. Good for realizing where you should be going at a glance!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


You’ll recall that the galaxy is littered with enormous derelicts and starship corpses. It’s been my vision since this game was in its infancy that these derelicts are filled with all manner of traps and hazards. This month, I started off by giving all of them names and backstories.


I also recoded their many mimics to be able to attack in packs, and if one wakes up, be careful! They can wake up their nearby friends as well.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Battleship wrecks might accidentally dump out their unexploded missiles and mines. Be careful, unexploded doesn’t mean inactive!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And everyone knows some errant laser and power conduits might create hazardous beams that the player will very much want to avoid. I’ve refactored these to work much better and be more accurate.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And what dead cruiser would be complete without lovely pockets of deadly radiation? Hope your ship is lead-lined (it isn’t).
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

All these hazards and more can be detected with scanner upgrades, which now point out various traps and secrets, with stronger ones even able to detect hateful intent in cargo containers.


Placement of these hazards is still ongoing, but they’re very versatile and can be used in a lot of situations. Particularly those proximity explosives. Modders should have a lot of fun with them.


Last month I promised a space mountain. And I keep my promises. Mostly.


I’ve also added a space mirror. It’s said to show your true desires, but model trains are still overpriced when I look at it, so that’s probably just a myth.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I had to code up some custom shader tech to get the parallax effects working on it, so if you’re a Unity developer, you’re free to try it out!

We also modeled out a few bosses. Ever wanted to get trapped in a televised ancient alien arena gameshow and have to be forced to fight your way out? Wow, me too!


And finally this thing. What is it? Well you’ll find out, eventually.


And that’s all for this month! I’m hoping next month to get you some concrete stuff involving the main campaign, along with sidequests, of course.

Happy continued summer Starchasers! Heat stroke is no laughing matter, so make sure you stay cool this morning. It’s very cold in the loveless vacuum of space I hear, so that may be an option.
Fun fact, while working on all this a tornado tried to destroy everything. It seems rather appropriate, or perhaps eerily prophetic, that a game about space storms would have a storm come to prevent its inevitable release and success. Or maybe it’s just nature and stuff, who knows. Either way, god hasn’t been able to kill me in the thousands of years I’ve been alive, he’s not gonna succeed now! Onto progress!
As always this is just a paraphrasing of the main article, which you can read here. You can also check out our demo and join our Discord for more moment to moment updates!



Piracy was the major focus of this month’s progress. But, it’s hard to roleplay a highwayman if there are no NPCs spawning on highways. We fixed that, and improved piracy so that you can disrupt and threaten NPCs for loot and money.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Making piracy work meant going back over dialogue mechanics. NPC ships can get really mad if you decide to screw around with them, and NPCs will give full directions if you’re friendly with them. NPCs also construct backstories as to why they’re doing the job they’re doing.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


But piracy carries consequences. Commit enough bad… law… things, and the military might send a battleship after you if one is available.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And of course, what’s a good pirate without proper destruction states and animations on larger starships?

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


We also spent the month reworking a few implemented, but lacking, bosses. The Hellmouth Prince for example, got his attacks reworked.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Meanwhile, the Haywire Hulk had fully implemented animations, attacks, and summons. He’s a lot of fun, probably my favorite boss so far.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

A few boss weapons were neglected in the past, but have been fully implemented now. From beacons that call in bosses to do fly-by attacks, to a void that grapples and tethers nearby enemies.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

A few other bosses got minor scripting implementation, but we’re not QUITE ready to reveal them just yet.



A lot of the game’s various sidequests are written up now, but implementation lags behind a bit. The major one implemented this month was a small early game questline where you’re able to get drinks with your lawyer (and only friend), Karbelle.


The game now has a fast travel system in the form of ride-sharing, where you can hitch rides on trains and transports at certain stations, for a fee.


Guns also have restricted firing angles now. Lining up your targets is much more important than before.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And there can now be restrictions when trying to undock from a station.


I also added a few UI improvements too. Storms now recolor (if the option is enabled) your UI when you enter them, while the station UI gained a few new little animations to help it pop some more.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]




With all those new scrap models available, we went back over some scrap-related vignettes and redid them to have those aforementioned models, upping their fidelity by quite a bit.


That’s all for this month! It’ll mostly be writing and questwork for next month’s progress, but I’ll see if I can’t give you a space mountain or two as well.

Happy summer starchasers! Enjoy the insane humidity, the endless bugs, and the blistering heat, because in two weeks it’ll go back to snowing. At least, if you’re in Wisconsin it will.
Anyway, this month was spent mostly on vignettes, which, good news, turns out are a LOT further along than I thought they were.



Considering that’s a huge slice of the game’s content right there, that also means the entire game is a lot further along than I thought it was. Does that mean a release date is in sight?
Well… no. Vignettes are merely one portion of the game’s content, which includes quests and bosses. And those are in a much… less complete state.

Anyway, onto progress! As always this is a paraphrasing of the main article, which you can read here. And also as always, you can join our Discord to keep up with more moment-to-moment updates, and check out our demo to get an idea of what’s in store.



As mentioned, we found that a great number of points of interest were already implemented, and this month was spent writing up and implementing many of the few that were STILL remaining. Great fields of rainbow crystals, ancient graveyards of mining rigs and windmills long past, even a field of legally distinct plastic building bricks. The size of moons.



Not only that, every point of interest that can be scanned can now, in fact, be scanned, and we’ve written up the lore and flavor text for all of them. You can see this flavor text by selling you scanned data to any data center, which has had some UI improvements, with new animations and graphics.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


These aren’t all the points of interest of course, bosses and wrecks and still to come. But they’re a HUGE chunk of it. Exploration is finally a viable source of income!



Good games run at good framerates. Therefore, being a good game, we’ve got to run at a good framerate. I went back over main regional systems, which usually have the highest concentration of *stuff* and optimized all those structures, asteroid bits, windmills, etc. In some places, particularly heavy traffic areas, we saw around almost a 20 FPS increase. Not bad, honestly.


[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

More optimization work will be on the way of course, this is more a preparation for the eventual release.



And there’s the host of bugfixes and little tweaks that represent my sleepless sense of perfectionism. Most of that stuff was related to UI stuff. Components and equipment misreporting, or not reporting, stats, and map icons needing a visibility rework.



And of course the usual level of bugfixes and such. A lot of these were, as always, reported by users and testers in our community, so a big thanks there.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]



As for assets, we’ve lots of things coming. Do you like giant space squid? No? Too bad. Do you like alien ruins that are REDONE alien ruins? Yes? Well that’s good then. We’ve also got new bottles and new materials and textures for various places and… things.



That’s all for this month! If you check back next time, we’ll have more to do with lots of new mechanics, piracy, maybe even a new demo release!

Happy summer Starchasers! I know someone’s gonna be like “NO trainwiz it’s not summer yet summer is specifically three days in June when the cicada armada forms into the shape of Jimmy Carter’s left nipple bluh bluh” or something but I don’t care. It’s summer, the sun is warm against my pasty dying skin, and that means I feel energized and ready for TONS of progress.
In other news, our next release is Demo 1.9, which will have more of a piractical focus. As in piracy. For pirates. But that’s a bit of a ways out.


For now, onto progress! Be sure to check out our demo and official Discord. As always this just a paraphrasing of the main article, which you read here.



In the five main regions of the galaxy you can find five main regional bosses. While they vary in strength, each one tests an aspect of gameplay and your skills in it. You can find the first regional boss, Sparkplatform, in the demo already. This past month we made the other four, for a total of 7 current hidden ambient bosses in the game (out of 18).


In the Ijunic regions, you can face down a dangerous stormcloud monster with a crown made of lasers. Which frankly is just pretty dang cool.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


The Macrovari tell tales of a mad naval captain, who welds his victims’ ships to his own to help it from breaking into pieces as he runs it out of control.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Deep within the Union capital, there’s legends of the ManyShip, a powerful stormwight that tests worthy starchasers by shifting forms and abilities at a whim.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


And finally the Ballden are doing their hardest to suppress news of Cahgurine, a former brilliant sculptor now turned insane hivemind, wielding far too many lightning field generators.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


There’s a lot of underlying systems that were added to make these boys work, but the good news is that such work only has to be done once, and like most trailblazing bosswork only gets faster and faster from here on out.




We’ve also done more with quests, mostly focusing on non-demo quests, which can start to get fairly in-depth, with many colorful characters and often unique mechanics and endings.

A few of these new quests are still being worked on, but a few are in the finished stages. If you ever wanted to participate in a murderhobo death tournament, have we got news for you!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


The campaign isn’t safe from our questing fingers either, demo feedback often asked for a way to track where to go for the next campaign mission, so we’ve added simple quests to help track that.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And, for even more help, if you try to leave the initial starting area without going through the tutorial, it will warn you of that. You can still leave, it’s just that if you smack into a planet, it’s no longer our fault.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]




Storms also had more done to them this month. First, unstable jumpholes, which shoot the player to completely random systems, were placed all throughout the galaxy and had special graphics created and tweaked.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Speaking of graphics, Distant Horrible Objects (yes that is their full and proper name) had full models added, along with better, more color appropriate effects in matching storms.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The final storm thing we added were ghost ships! These minibosses guard various storm rifts, and can be the reanimated wreckage of ships you’ve previously killed. Just be careful: They’re not happy that you killed them.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]





We’ve been doing some small QoL improvements here and there after the big demo release, mostly based on user feedback. Freeflight has a few changes to its controls, and docking is smart about where it tries to aim you initially.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We’re also working on yet another flippin’ refactor of spawning code, this time to allow forced overrides of where NPCs can spawn.


Also we worked on some new gun sounds, based on user feedback.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Also, the entire galaxy has cargoboxes around big wrecks now. Watch out for mimics though!





And not too much in terms of assets this time around. We’ve got some plates and dishware, and also I’ve been wrecking a few fixtures here and there for the sake of vignettes. Also I’m working on particle effects for flak cannons, and new background effects for the Shipstar system.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


That’s all for this month, our next month’s progress bits will probably be less impressive than this, but still, check back for more!

Hello starchasers! It’s a sunny springy May this month, so I’ll keep the intro short as we get into the REAL meat and spring potatoes of this month’s progress! There’s not much, but it is significant!

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


The biggest news, in case you’ve missed it, is that demo 1.8 is now available on all platforms (that is, PC, Linux, and Macronash)!

1.8 is one of the largest updates we’ve done overall, bringing forth a LOT of new content. It includes the first two (out of the demo’s eventual four) missions of the main campaign, several redone quests, the tentative addition of squadmates, stormchasing and the rewards for such, and much much much more! You can check it out on itch.io and indieDB, along with the changelogs for such.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

In addition: we’ve finally launched an official Underspace discord! Get real time updates, talk to the devs, provide feedback and get help with problems. You can join up here!


One of the things we needed in the new demo was to improve or polish the various bosses and minibosses found within. Giving them new attacks, redoing some of their behavior, you know the deal. We also added simpler, single-purpose mimics hiding amongst the ruins of old battleships. We DID warn you those were coming!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]



Polishing up the campaign meant hooking up or improving elements. Opening cutscenes in missions now have full holograms that play alongside them, new character models are being made for various unique characters, and the in-game codex now works and updates fully (with different entries based on whether or not you’re playing multiplayer or singleplayer).
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


From fixing up UI elements that didn’t work, adding in new storm hazards for lower level storms, writing up a new tutorial that plays during the initial campaign missions, and doing things like fully adding in the basics of the game’s cockbits, or bugfixing soooo many pre-demo bugs. There’s a lot to cover there, so just have some screenshots.




And as always, there’s the usual host of assets. We’ve got big communal plates and dishware for the religious Ballden, along with an illusion generating eyeball boss.

That’s all for this month, check back next month where things will move away from demowork and more towards… nondemo work.