Underspace News

Welcome to August starchasers! Summer draws to a close here in Wisconsin, and we enjoyed our whole two days of sunshine, but now it’s starting to get back to that lovely lovely constant snow. How enjoyable. But hey, nobody leaves their house anymore, so that means lots of things are up and working, check it out!
As always this is just a paraphrasing of the full article, which you can check out here.


Last month we showed off the basics of battleshipping. This month, we added battleships to every system that has them, improved their effects, and worked on a sexy sexy world persistent system. This means battleships can die and stay dead, though it could be applied to several other aspects as well.... One thing at a time though.


[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We also had a lot of content this month, with a particularly organic bent to it. I’ll leave these spoiler free.



As the campaign’s script nears its finished state I had a look-back through it to see if there was any tech that needed to be drafted up to support it. There was by the way. We needed a system, first off, for the player to be able to talk back during conversations, which we added.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The second thing was a way for Unity’s Timeline system to control cutscenes by calling arbitrary code. That took a bit of doing (as Unity’s Timeline is kind of sucky) but we managed to get it to work!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

If you use Unity’s Timeline system, you can try this tech out for yourself here.


We gave the UI some background textures, to make it easier to read under some circumstances.


And eagle-eyed players might have noticed that the atmospheres on planets had some rendering issues, which are fixed.


More relevantly we’ve been doing another pass on system lighting, during which we experimented with lights on engines. These looked so good we spent an hour adding them to every player ship.



Cockpits are starting to come along. When I first began work on them I was debating whether or not to have screens on it, then realized that I could just easily make it so you, the players, could remove or put in those screens in your cockpits.


Speaking of new features, we added an in-game radio and music player. You can place sound files in a folder (or multiple folders for multiple channel), and listen to your own tunes.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Also when your inventory/journal updates there’ll be a small icon next to it.



Lobsters! Lobster variations! Hairstyles, wrecked transports, and a certain spoilery ship from the campaign. Those are the assets we’ve put out this for your viewing pleasure.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


That’s all for this month. What will September bring? Knowing where I live probably snow, but maybe other stuff too! Check back next time!

It’s July! Another month of summer, which would probably be more exciting if we weren’t all being responsible and staying inside to prevent the plague-borne death of civilization. Right?
So how has your summer been going? Still setting off fireworks long before and long after the holiday that’s meant for setting off fireworks has passed? Well stop doing that, nobody is going to give you attention. Give us attention instead, because we’ve got a lot of big things to show you. Emphasis on big, since there’s a lot of capships. Come check it out!

And as always, you can read the full update on Kickstarter here.


I’m happy to report that not only all the big bad capitalships of the game graphic’d and implemented, but we’ve set up a system for these juggernauts to patrol and chase after you in civilized systems. If you’re a pirate that’s drawn too much attention to themselves, you might find a huge ship chasing after you. Hope you can run blockades!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Luckily most of these enormous ships can’t follow or detect you in asteroid fields and nebula. You could always try taking them down, but battleships are complicated and have many subsystems involved in protecting them, like shield generators.



Ever wanted to track down a ghost train, buy moonshine from a weird guy in a junkyard, or explore an ancient lighthouse? Now, have you ever wanted to do all that but in space? Well now you can! We’ve got plenty of new content and vignettes set up, as well as the tech for them. I’ll try and keep this spoiler free though.



The initial first bits of the campaign, mostly the prologue, are up and running. Most of the work here was plotting out the basic rooms and effects, as well as allowing dialogue to control the campaign’s state. There’s still more to be done before this is ready for release mind you.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]




And finally where would we be without the requisite lobsters and starships? Nowhere. We’d be nowhere.


That’s all for this month, check back next time for more content, cockpits, and wreckage.

Hello starchasers, and welcome to the lovely month of June. Summer has rolled in, pushing winter back for the next three days before it starts up once again, and that means humidity, blazing heat, sudden freak lightning storms, and bugs larger than your car flying about. Good thing we don’t leave our houses anymore, right?
We’re approaching our first anniversary of our Kickstarter, and at this point I’d like to thank everyone who donated for their help and their bullion. It’s thanks to you guys that we’re able to make the game that much better.
Now come see the fruits of that funding!
As always this is just a paraphrasing of the main Kickstarter update, which you can read here.



Is there anything more important to a game than content? I mean could you imagine a space game that’s just completely empty and has nothing to actually do? Sounds pretty horrifying to me. Luckily, we’ve spent the past month adding tons of content. I’ll keep this all spoiler free, but take a look!




As always there’s a smattering of bugfixes and improvements across the board on things. For starters, the spawning placement code for NPCs had a lot of issues. It was too slow, it often placed NPCs in planets or outside of the range, and I couldn’t do some effects I wanted (like having NPCs that were warping in play a little effect). I spent a few hours totally redoing that system, and now it does everything I want it to. Including the little warp-in effect.


In multiplayer we worked on world synchronization, things like tracking the docking states of gates, stations, etc. It was quite a bit of work to get it… working, but everything you see in this video is managed by the server and sent back to the player.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


We also did work on cockpits, starting to give them support for proper models, but also support for vanity items on your dashboard. If you’ve ever wanted to hang a picture of what you love most up in your ship’s cockpit, now’s your chance.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Speaking of vanity, what game is complete without character customization? The system for character parts was overhauled, allowing for things like enable/disable states and material swaps. Take a look.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And of course, there’s always bugfixes, optimizations, and tweaks in the background.



The first steps of the campaign have been taken. It’s fairly barebones right now, but a big new feature is the campaign journal. Think of it like a codex, or an appendix. It shows in-character thoughts on events, people, places, things, etc.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]



Do you like capitalist space lobsters? I do. Have some capitalist space lobsters, and of course the required amount of big old battleships.



That’s all for this month, check back next month, we’ll probably have some more content, more lobsters, and more battleships to show off.

Welcome to May! Sure it’s spring but that infernal goblin-man, Mr. Worldwide Pandemic, has crept its ugly fingers into our lives. Juggling development of a game and its assets alongside the constant looming threat of viral death tends to slow things down. Rest assured, we’re safe and sound and have plenty of toilet paper and… I don’t know, facial cream? Are people buying a bunch of facial cream? It feels like they would. Well whatever they’re running out of we have plenty of, don’t worry.
The main point I’m trying to make is that things have slowed up a bit as we all struggle to adjust to this new normal. Not as much progress on… anything really, has been made as I’d like it to have been made.
The current goal right now is of course, demo 1.7, which involves the first initial bits of character modeling and the campaign. The initial and essential resources for that have just arrived, but it’ll be some time before they’re set up and ready. I’d like to give a tentative release date of “Summer” for 1.7, but given how this year is going I’d fully expect a meteor to strike Earth before that time.
Onto less morbid topics, let’s see what’s been done this month. As always, this is a paraphrasing of the full devlog, which you can read here.



Last month I talked about adding racial elements for the Ballden and Macrovari. This month the final main race, the Ijuni, get their own racialized treatment, in the form of massive space cliffs, glowing cacti, and of course the ever-popular space windmills.


And of course a detailing pass means going back over existing skyboxes and redoing those to an appropriate state, to be more readable or match the lighting or theme of that system.


And finally, lots and lots of vignettes. Want battles frozen in time? We got em. Want four-dimensional spacemines? We got em. Want space cathedrals. Well dude, guess what?



Players who have played a playthrough of demo 1.6 will notice that our options and save menu was lacking the same flair as the rest of the UI. We’ve fixed that, and added some new functionality to menus, like more detailed save information and the ability to sort by date or name. We’ve also added some missing keybinds, and split it up by category.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

In terms of unrelated UI stuff, we redid the server browser’s UI and added better support for non-widescreen and ultra-wide resolutions, you won’t experience the server browser in the demo at any point (the demo will never have multiplayer), but our multi-monitor users will definitely appreciate bigger monitor support.


Lots of little bits of progress done over the month as well! Some of these were requested features, like a navmap search function, others were things that annoyed me that I wanted to change.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

For example, I’ve redone a bit of the UI for ship-trades to make it clear if you’re going to lose money or not, while also fixing station prices and some bugs with trading.


I’ve been doing a lot of salvaging lately, which made me realize that bullets should curve towards wrecks (similar to how they’re handled for mineable asteroids), and that cargo boxes should have indicators on them, similar to ships.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Leading pips now show up on ANY hostile ship, not just ships you’re in a committed relationship with!


Speaking of relationships, if you form up with convoys now, you’ll be able to dock with the lanes and gates they dock with. Spiffy.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And of course, a programmer’s work is never done. We’ve fixed plenty of dialogue bugs, issues where freighters couldn’t be customized, some asteroid issues, and much much more.


And finally, lot and lots of assets. We got capital ships, we got wrecked ships, we got rusty wrecked capitalships from the days of old, and we got fixed textures on our stations! We also have the first bits of animation for our character models, take a look!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
That’s all for this month, ideally next month we’ll have some more content and the first bits of the campaign to show off!

Ahhh April. Spring is here, the perfect time to go outside and enjoy nature and maintain your social obligations. Of course you’re responsible and don’t do that because that would be really really really REALLY stupid when there’s that whole pandemic thing going on. Me on the other hand? Well I never leave my house in the first place so it’s not like anything has changed. I’d say it’s the perfect time to bunker down and make tons of progress, but tons of progress is always getting made.

So let’s take a look at all of that, shall we?

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


Probably the majority of this month was spent on content! A game can have a good base sure, but what’s the point if there’s nothing in that game to do? This month most of my efforts were focused on adding in content to the game, be it in the form of racial elements or new vignette stuff.

Two of the remaining three main races had their racial details put in. These mostly serve as set dressing, to make each region feel more unique (beyond just colors and factions).

The Macrovari have great powerline systems that pump ambient energy throughout their territories and help power their many, many work projects.


While the Ballden construct giant aqueducts and archways, which have both religious significance to them, but also let them show off their megaconstruction skills.


Lots of other content was also added, from vastly improved space forests, mobile blackholes, strange ruins made of scrap, planets caught in time loops, giant ice crystals, as well as color and texture passes on skyboxes and nebula.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]



With lots of people playing the demo, ourselves included, we’ve had a lot of feedback on lots of things that needed fixing or changing. While the obvious bugfixes and such are there, I’ve also been adding a lot of little quality of life features to make things easier or clearer or generally have life be less of a hassle for folks.

Probably the biggest and the one I’m most proud of is ship optimizations. You may have noticed that NPCs caused a massive slowdown when spawned, due to how Unity handles physics. We’ve corrected that and some areas have seen a 30 FPS gain, especially in heavy traffic areas.



And of course lots of other quality of life stuff. Nebula clearings have shell models, the UI will show available services on stations, the garage UI has been redone, you can cancel active missions and see active factions during those missions, there’s a transfer-all button when trading in your ship, and the navmap now has a toggelable grid.

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





And finally as always, we’ve lots and lots of assets in the pipeline, from character models to capital ships to weapons.


And that’s all for this month. There’s quite a lot more new things upcoming in the next month, so keep an eye out then. We’ll hopefully have some news about demo 1.7 by that point too!