Space Station Designer News

Season's Greetings! We have been a bit quiet since our last update in October. Despite the lack of posts, we have been hard at work fixing various bugs, improving the user experience, and optimizing performance. We have also been working on the implementation of a launch minigame for resupply spacecraft (you can find a WIP screenshot that we've posted two days ago here)

Before 2021 comes to an end, we wanted to thank you for being with us during this past year and providing invaluable feedback for 'Space Station Designer'. This has been a great year for us, and with the addition of various features such as modding support, interactive tutorials, and the Earth facilities, the game is really starting to shape.

As always, please let us know if you have any feedback, and remember that you can sign up for the Playtest of 'Space Station Designer' by clicking the 'Request Access' button in the game's store page:



Merry Christmas and Happy New Year =)

Best wishes,

--Ignacio and Mauricio (Polar Motion)

Space Station Designer 0.4.0 is now available via Steam Playtest!

This update adds modding support via the cross-platform modding service mod.io. You can find Space Station Designer's page in mod.io at https://spacestationdesigner.mod.io/. We allow both the creation of new space station modules, resupply spacecraft, and astronauts, along with the replacement of existing ones.



If you're interested in making mods, we've written a comprehensive guide which you can find here. The guide comes with seven sample mods, and provides extensive documentation so that you can use as a starting point for your own creations. The samples include new modules such as 'Skylab', a realistic replacement for the 'Space Shuttle', and a realistic version of the 'Apollo' spacecraft.



As always, we're very interested in your feedback, so if you have any comments about modding support (both about consumption and production of them), please open a thread in the Steam forums and let us know so that we can look into them.



Have a great Sunday and see your next time!

--Polar Motion (Ignacio & Mauricio)

Happy Sunday! Our last public development update of 'Space Station Designer' here on Steam was in mid-July. That was nearly three months ago, so another one is well overdue.

As mentioned during our last development update, the Playtest version of Space Station Designer was well received, and the most frequent piece of feedback that we got was that the game needed more tutorials in order to explain the core mechanics. We got down to work immediately on this and, in August 17th, we released 24 interactive tutorial as part of the 0.3.6 update.

With the new 'Tutorials' mode out of the way, we went back to the implementation of modding support via mod.io, which is something that we started to experiment with in early 2020 and we think it's going to open lots of interesting opportunities.

Modding in Space Station Designer allows you to:

• Add new astronauts and/or replace the names and portraits of existing ones.
  
• Add new space station modules or replace existing ones.
  
• Add new resupply spacecraft or replace existing ones.
  

For modules and resupply spacecraft, we even allow you to define your own shaders and materials. This means that, among other things, you can replace the existing modules with a new set of them featuring a different art style.

For example, here's how the space shuttle looks by default in the sandbox mode:



And this is how the space shuttle looks in one of the sample mods that we'll be providing:



Modding is conducted by using the Unity Editor and downloading a custom package featuring several examples. We're also currently writing a modding guide, which we expect to finish in the upcoming days.



The modding package features seven examples that you can use as a starting point for your own creations:



and yes, that includes Apollo and Skylab :)



We hope you're as excited as we are about all these new features, which hopefully we'll be able to make available for all of you in the upcoming days.

Let us know if you have any feedback, and remember that you can sign up for the Playtest of 'Space Station Designer' by clicking the 'Request Access' button in the game's store page:



Have a great Sunday!

Nearly three weeks ago we started bringing the first group of players interested in trying out the Playtest version of 'Space Station Designer' and started receiving the first pieces of feedback in the forums. After addressing some minor technical issues via a series of small patches, we're now focussing our efforts on the most common concern raised by players: the game could use a tutorial system in order to introduce its various mechanics.

In order to address this, we went to the drawing board and designed a 'Tutorials' mode that is broken down into several categories, with each one of them containing two or more bite-sized tutorials that aim to cover a small set of concepts. So far, we've come up with a list of 8 categories and a total of 29 tutorials.

We've added a way in order to access this mode via the main menu:



And implemented the UI for accessing the categories:



and the tutorials within them:



The next milestone is actually implementing the logic for each tutorial:



We don't have an ETA for this feature, but we're planning to release an update as soon as possible containing the tutorials that belong to the first category ("Basic Concepts"), so that you can try them out and give us your feedback.

Remember that you can sign up for the Playtest of 'Space Station Designer' by clicking the 'Request Access' button in the game's store page:



Have a great Sunday!

A week ago we shared with you a new blog post with details on the features we've been working on for the last six months. We'll be making version 0.3.0 of Space Station Designer publicly available here on Steam so that you can try out and give us feedback. We don't have a set date for this, but you can register your interest by clicking the 'Request Access' button in the game's store page:



Have a great weekend!