Underspace News

A new year, full of new promises to fill and deadlines to watch go zooming past us.
But I think the question everyone is asking is: what’s the current state of the game?
As mentioned, a huge amount of work was done across the board.

Our base races, battleships, equipment, and stations were all fully built and implemented, and systems and stations had their data filled out, encounters refined, and more.


Tons of vignettes, quests, and side-stories were filled out. Missions and trading on stations were properly implemented, as were storms, bosses, etc.


So, to summarize a huge amount of work is done and a huge amount of the game is complete, but there’s still work to be done. The biggest blocks of content in our way are quests, the campaigns, and station interiors. That sounds like a lot, but it’s even more because of all the background tech and modeling behind that. During this year, you’ll start to see updates shift more towards that kind of thing.

Our next big milestone is demo 1.8, which will bring a substantial amount of content into it, including the first two campaign missions, storms (and the mechanics for such), and party members. As well as the usual host of improvements, optimizations, fixes, etc.

This month’s overall progress wasn’t as extensive and broad as previous months mind you. Read on below and you’ll find out why.

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



Finally, after so much time promising and setting up, campaign missions are finally starting to become a thing! This last month saw us implement the first two of fifteen campaign missions, as well as the massive amount of background work needed to drive them.

Mission #1 will have the players getting jumped by pirates, witness a shipyard getting bombed, and have a jumphole collapse right on top of them. Typical first-day-on-the-job stuff, you know?


Meanwhile mission #2 is much more dialogue heavy, and starts diving into the meat and potatoes of the story as you pose as a smuggler in order to shoot down another smuggler and take his place!


As mentioned there’s a lot of background work that had to go into these, including quite a few features I think modders will enjoy taking advantage of, like tons of scripting commands, campaign failure trigger zones, etc.

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


Working on the campaign highlighted a few issues and things I wanted changing. For starters, you can turn off the fancy UI graphics to just see the game running normally.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Docking autopilot will try and steer you through proper docking points much earlier and much better. AI following has been redone too. They’ll follow you through lanes, jumpgates, via highengines and thrust, etc.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

You can also hail things that, normally, can’t be hailed! Ever want to talk to a sun and have it shill its social media at you? Now you can!


Rooms can have their lights dimmed now too. Very convenient for slideshows!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And finally, unstable jumpholes (which form in storms) have their own custom graphics now.




And last but not least, assets! Ever wanted nine foot tall pollution spewing… things to charge you toll road fees? Meet our last race, the Veilers! They’re quite popular.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

That’s all for this month. We’ve got some exciting upcoming stuff (sadly unrelated to the campaign) next month, so check back in then!

Hello Starchasers! God this year went by fast. Too fast. It seems like only last month that we were in what, March? Yeah last month was March. Anyway, as Santa slides down the Chimney at the end of the month just remember: it’s your sworn duty, as is mine, to make sure he doesn’t escape to assume his final form. To help you in the unfortunate trial you’ve untaken, I’ve prepared for you a series of updates detailing all the progress we’ve made in the past month. Check it out.

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


The first real, tangible bits of the campaign are now in. Some of this month was spent working out another (this is what, our third?) scripting system, which has a lot of robust options for spawning and managing things in the game.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

There’s also situations where multiple characters need to have a conversation. To that end we made it so that the comm UI can easily switch between multiple people at once.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Missions now have additional kinds of things, such as being able to override or offer unique rewards. There won’t be too many examples of this in the normal game, but modders could do things like add missions that only appear in storms that award unique weapons, for example.

Finally, we’ve been adding and implementing more capital-class ships, mostly as encounters during the main campaign. For example, this here pirate gunboat, which often serves as an early game miniboss.



Storms received a huge mechanical overhaul, because the old system had a lot of issues (limited saturation and spread, localized itself to only a few systems). Plus, most of the underlying mechanics weren’t hooked up.


Storms now are based on a regional growth and intensity system. They spawn in a specific node, then slowly spread or intensify as time goes on. A storm that’s too powerful might be destroyed by another starchaser, or warp into a very dangerous and deadly hyperstrom. You can also claim a storm, which will stop other starchasers from going after it.


When in a system hit by a storm, there are many various effects. The ships that spawn will go up several levels (dependent on the intensity), and prices in a system for buying AND selling go up by 50%. In place of normal legendaries and ace pilots, strange ships with strange abilities spawn. And finally, jumpholes (but not gates) become unstable, and can sling you across to random systems.


When in storms, things get freaky. Various hazards spawn, lightning flashes light up distant objects, and everything is chaotic as you try to make your way to the central rift (which will let you destroy the storm). Don’t worry though, you’ll often encounter other unique starchasers that might help you out!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]




And as always, there’s the usual batch of fixes, tweaks, and features.

Docking’s gotten some improvements; manual docking will display where it wants you to go, while we’ve tried, once again, to rectify autopilot docking spinouts.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

There’s lots of new UI feedback elements too. Ace pilots have icons, repair items report how much they repair, and more.


You can also fast forward through cutscenes!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Finally, if you don’t want to interact with station UIs, things like the job board, news board, and ship services now have physical objects in the world that can be activated to do the same thing.



Finally, there’s the usual crop of assets. This month we implemented animations and texture variants for everyone’s favorite screaming swear crystals: the Ast.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

That’s all for this month, check back next time for more campaign work and party member stuff!

November! It’s here and it started snowing before Halloween because we couldn’t even make it the end of god damn October before Jack Frost decided to just crap all over the state. Oh well, that’s Wisconsin for you, can’t have any sunshine.
Anyway let’s get into all the new goodies!


Starting off, we’ve got a new demo out! Demo 1.75 isn’t a full big time release (hence why it’s only gone up by 0.05 points), but has a lot of bugfixes, solves a HUGE memory leak, incorporates a lot of feedback, and has some new features for missions and news stories that I’m sure you’ll appreciate. Check it out!


I’m aiming for our next big demo release to be in December or January, which will bring ideally the first and possibly even the second campaign mission in. For now, enjoy all the new progress we’ve made!

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


Want to get caught inside a space fairy circle? Face down a planet carver. We’ve got that. I’m quite certain we do. There’s been not as much content made this month, but take a look!


We’ve also added nav buoys, which highlight certain routes in less civilized systems.



Previously we showed off battleship AI for patrolling, jumping, and moving. This month, work was done to make more of those controlled able to be controlled by the cinematic system, making ships jump in and out on whims.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We also worked on combat AI, so that capship turrets can track, target, and fire huge beam cannons at each other and other things. Imagine about ten of these in a battle, and it can get pretty hectic.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Lots of improvements have been done to missions. We gave all them some much needed variety, so that things like the military will offer military appropriate missions and such. Hostile fighters will defend big targets (which now have a greater variety), deaddrop contraband will be scanned for by police and others, and helpful fighters can often spawn during missions to, well, help you.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We’ve also started adding news stories to stations. There’s about 100 written so far, which is about one sixth of all planned news stories. Do they do anything? Heck no, but they give the world some much needed flavor.


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


As mentioned in the changelog of this month’s demo release, there’s been a lot of memory optimization done. Probably the most major was the tracking down and violent quashing of a HUGE memory leak, which could find some players using a whopping THIRTEEN gigabytes of memory during longer player sessions. That’s fixed, and many incoming memory optimizations are coming, though this entire thing is a pretty big endeavor to begin with.

We’ve also incorporated lots of feedback from players, all of which is in the latest demo. This includes things like timestamps on saves, DPS displays on guns, the ability to input values directly into the options menu.

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

Remember, we do appreciate demo feedback, and many of these minor features are the result of that.


And finally, assets! The Ballden have had their variants made up and implemented in game, while work continues on the first of the non-playable races and everyone’s favorite angry screaming swear crystals: the Ast!


That’s all for this month, check back next month to see the various things we have in store. Because we have a lot of those things. In store.

Happy October starchasers! It’s the spooky month, and what’s spookier than a heaping dollop of progress. But we’ve got more than that. It’s Halloween, which means Christmas has come early, and we’re proud to present our first demo release in over half a year!

Demo 1.7 represents quite a bit of work on the part of pretty much all the team, and contains a lot of major improvements across the board. It’s not a 100% completed version mind you, and while we’d certainly appreciate feedback please please keep in mind the known issues section. But other than that, check it out!

Now obviously the majority of this month was spent preparing for this new version, but fear not, we’ve had plenty of progress to still show off, so take a look!

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


I’ve mentioned previously that I wanted to give NPCs more variety with the occasional beefed up, unique enemy spawning amongst its lesser peers. That system is now implemented, and now whenever you encounter fighters or freighters there’s a chance (with higher chances the longer you go without seeing one and higher chances during missions) to encounter these so-named “ace” pilots, who come with special abilities and faction-specific titles.


You might encounter NPCs that can fire off EMP blasts, heal their squadmates, or violently explode upon death. But if you manage to defeat these enemies they can drop rare, special loot!


Way back when the game was first in development individual hardpoints on ships were given individual health pools. The eventual goal was that these hardpoints could be blown up and individual components non-functional, but the feature was put on the backburner. This month I had a few hours to spare so that system was re-implented.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

This also extends to big transports, which will carry around cargo that you can break open for the juicy succulent meat inside it.



Because so much of the time spent this month was on the demo, a lot of work got done just debugging and optimizing the hell out of a ton of background systems.


A lot of common freezes and memory leaks were patched up, and on the more visual side of things we redid the visuals for many projectiles.



I’ve also been redoing how chatter channels work. What was previously a resource-intensive system that let NPCs talk over each other and was generally chaos has been refined, with global channels limiting and tracking how NPCs talk. This system is still being tweaked, mind you, but it runs and works much better for anyone’s purposes, especially our own.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


We’ve also implemented fully the last two playable races. Last month you were shown a brief preview of the very smart and very tiny Macrovari, now take a look at the full animation sets for both them and everyone’s favorite religious hiveminds: the Ballden!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


That’s all for this month, as always check back next month for more progress. As a final note we’re looking to make demo releases more frequent, ideally with each one advancing the main campaign in some way.

Extreme weather batters away at my wrongly-installed sliding screen doors, an ambiance most appropriate for making a game about fighting space storms I feel.
With the weather taking a turn towards the garbage and quarantine further emphasizing that fact, there’s been a lot of time for me in the past month to really get a lot of content done.

On that note, I’m happy to announce that we edge quite close to the release of the next demo version (and you’ll soon see why)! There’ll be lots of new content in this one, mainly the opening cutscene, tons of fixes, optimizations, etc etc. It’ll be a big update for sure, and I hope to have it out fairly soon, ideally this month or the next.

With that in mind, let’s show off all the things that have been workulated into existence these past few weeks!

As always this is just a paraphrasing of the full Kickstarter update, which you can read here.


Space eggs, space skeletons, space starfactories, redone giant spaceships whose power cores serve as the sun for an entire star system! I’ll keep this spoiler free but take a look at the various content that’s been committed into existence these past few weeks.



As promised, we’ve gotten off to a great start on the campaign. There’s been a LOT of background tech to make this all work, but we’ve gotten that all up and running. Take a first look at the rough draft for the opening cutscene. Sound, lighting, movement, and Todd Howard are all obviously not final.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

After that action packed opening, you’ll be treated to something even more exciting: an elevator ride and talking with your lawyer about legal issues!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

It’s not just talking and cutscenes, we’ve also been working on the unique enemies of the campaign, and the encounters for such.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]



Outside of the campaign a lot of work went into audio and dialogue stuff. NPC conversation variation was greatly expanded; stations informing you if the docking queue is full, ships talking about activating lanelines, mission control telling you of your objective over comms. That sort of thing.


Some of this was linked up to game systems. Smuggling now works off the in-game dialogue rather than its own independent thing, and works fully now.


We’ve also added some new custom, modular audio pieces for your ship’s onboard computer’s voice. These aren’t fully hooked up yet, so ideally next month you might see more progress here.



I didn’t forget all the little QoL and tweaks that make up the bulk of game development of course. Let’s cover that next. To start with manual docking is now available on stations.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Explosive mines got a rework, both in terms of optimization, bugfixes, and damage variety. Generally we’ve done a lot of under the hood optimization, gaining some serious frames in heavy-traffic areas. There’s been some color tweaking as well: ship trails are brighter and nebula lightning more color appropriate.


Factions and pirates got an upgrade too. Pirates will actively scan for cargo they want, and you’ll encounter smugglers and guards around their bases. Meanwhile faction tables were totally filled out so now inter-regional factions will react appropriately to one-another.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]




We didn’t forget models of course. From the microbiological Macrovari to the coffinesque Ballden, the last few character models and animations for our four main races are almost in.


These are, like their previous lobstery and balloony friends, fully customizable and playable (in multiplayer at least).
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Wew! That’s all for this month. When you check back next time ideally we’ll have more stuff. Campaign, audio, maybe even MORE space eggs, who knows?