Future of Space Travel Idle
Dear Space Traveler Community,
We’ve been silent for too long. First of all, our sincere apologies for not openly communicating what is going on with Space Travel Idle.
We started working on STI in 2020 - two friends, incredibly excited about developing an Idle Game that is exactly how we would like to play it. A game that has elements of space travel, card collection, different layers of idle progression and enough content to last a player a long time of exploration.
Back then, everything was quite in our favor: we had ample time to develop the game, and all the positive feedback we got on Steam and our Discord/QQ communities kept us rushing for more content and better updates. It was so much fun coming on Discord every day and talking to people who are playing the game that we created. It’s an amazing feeling that is really hard to describe. We learned a LOT about game development in the process - be it, how much fun it is, how valuable all feedback is from you, how much Beta testers must be cherished, how to handle and prioritize bugs…
But we didn’t learn how to handle communicating progress with you well. The reality is that we got very stuck around October 2021. Errors were popping up that we did not know how to fix. While we were extremely excited to keep working on STI and had lots and lots of ideas in store for how to make it better, we also knew that we cannot ship a game that is prone to crash in production.
As you surely know, we did not monetize STI and were still at early stages of our individual careers. Well, we still are, to be honest. And we decided to focus on those careers for a while - hoping that the winning idea on how to solve our issues with the game would miraculously come to us. It was a pretty dark and unhappy spot - we wanted to fix something we couldn’t fix. Our cherished community was understandably unhappy with not receiving any updates or communication. We did not dare to communicate that we are simply stuck - so silence simply went on for months and months.
Every now and then we dared to stick our head into Discord and QQ, just to see that, miraculously, people were still playing our game. We felt like we let you all down and could hardly believe there were actual, active conversations taking place. People asking questions and others helping them out.
Seeing this, in November, we firmly decided that this is not how we want STI to end. We went back into the codebase and realized that there is more awry than just that single error we couldn’t fix. The game needs a redo. With this post, we want to announce that we will be working on that redo. We dare not give an exact date for when that redo will be publicly available but we are hoping for Late 2023. The redo, upon release, will include all content up to now - and also finally include all Planets until Pluto. Some mechanics might be slightly different but the game will largely be the same - just optimised for better performance, less error-proneness, fewer crashes. We will include better documentation to make it easier for others to read (and support) the codebase.
We will also keep the game active and available on Steam for now. It’s incredibly fortunate to see the player base still actively playing the game. We also encourage anyone who would potentially be interested in a redo, or who would just like to put that belief in us, to join either our Discord or QQ communities. However, we naturally understand anyone who would prefer not to be in any such community with no expected game updates before late 2023.
Either way, we want to thank everyone for their patience. It sucks to like a game and watch it suddenly get abandoned by the devs. It happened to us too. But we haven’t given up on STI.
So rather than goodbye, from our side this is until we meet again. Hopefully soon.
Lots of love,
Aya & Berk
We’ve been silent for too long. First of all, our sincere apologies for not openly communicating what is going on with Space Travel Idle.
We started working on STI in 2020 - two friends, incredibly excited about developing an Idle Game that is exactly how we would like to play it. A game that has elements of space travel, card collection, different layers of idle progression and enough content to last a player a long time of exploration.
Back then, everything was quite in our favor: we had ample time to develop the game, and all the positive feedback we got on Steam and our Discord/QQ communities kept us rushing for more content and better updates. It was so much fun coming on Discord every day and talking to people who are playing the game that we created. It’s an amazing feeling that is really hard to describe. We learned a LOT about game development in the process - be it, how much fun it is, how valuable all feedback is from you, how much Beta testers must be cherished, how to handle and prioritize bugs…
But we didn’t learn how to handle communicating progress with you well. The reality is that we got very stuck around October 2021. Errors were popping up that we did not know how to fix. While we were extremely excited to keep working on STI and had lots and lots of ideas in store for how to make it better, we also knew that we cannot ship a game that is prone to crash in production.
As you surely know, we did not monetize STI and were still at early stages of our individual careers. Well, we still are, to be honest. And we decided to focus on those careers for a while - hoping that the winning idea on how to solve our issues with the game would miraculously come to us. It was a pretty dark and unhappy spot - we wanted to fix something we couldn’t fix. Our cherished community was understandably unhappy with not receiving any updates or communication. We did not dare to communicate that we are simply stuck - so silence simply went on for months and months.
Every now and then we dared to stick our head into Discord and QQ, just to see that, miraculously, people were still playing our game. We felt like we let you all down and could hardly believe there were actual, active conversations taking place. People asking questions and others helping them out.
Seeing this, in November, we firmly decided that this is not how we want STI to end. We went back into the codebase and realized that there is more awry than just that single error we couldn’t fix. The game needs a redo. With this post, we want to announce that we will be working on that redo. We dare not give an exact date for when that redo will be publicly available but we are hoping for Late 2023. The redo, upon release, will include all content up to now - and also finally include all Planets until Pluto. Some mechanics might be slightly different but the game will largely be the same - just optimised for better performance, less error-proneness, fewer crashes. We will include better documentation to make it easier for others to read (and support) the codebase.
We will also keep the game active and available on Steam for now. It’s incredibly fortunate to see the player base still actively playing the game. We also encourage anyone who would potentially be interested in a redo, or who would just like to put that belief in us, to join either our Discord or QQ communities. However, we naturally understand anyone who would prefer not to be in any such community with no expected game updates before late 2023.
Either way, we want to thank everyone for their patience. It sucks to like a game and watch it suddenly get abandoned by the devs. It happened to us too. But we haven’t given up on STI.
So rather than goodbye, from our side this is until we meet again. Hopefully soon.
Lots of love,
Aya & Berk