Starcom: Unknown Space News

I chiseled through most of the small items I wanted to finish for Kepler and started another playthrough. The playthrough so far uncovered three major bugs introduced by the various changes, which I have fixed.

I still need to finish the playthrough and then tackle a few small items that would be difficult to fix in a patch, but Kepler should hopefully be ready for opt-in testing in the next few days. There are some items which I plan on deferring to a patch.

As usual, I'll start with a post on the discussion forums. Once a few players have had a chance to check it out and it doesn't look like there are major issues I'll post a news announcement.

Fingers crossed!
- Kevin

Last week I mentioned that I had two big items and about 50 smaller items that I wanted to get done for the Kepler opt-in, plus another fast playthrough to ensure nothing major has broken.

The two bigger items took a bit longer than I expected, but they are now done. One was a new enemy attack, the other is a new side-quest that connects some story threads. That still leaves about 40 smaller items and a playthrough, but hopefully these will go faster and Kepler will be ready for opt-in in the next week or so.

Tasks done in the past week:

• New enemy attack, effect
  
• Refactored portions of enemy attack AI
  
• Four new anomalies
  
• New side quest
  
• Started integrating new music tracks
  

Until next week!
- Kevin

Last weekend I finished a full playthrough of Kepler and came up with a list of just under 100 candidate items I'd like to fix/add before making it available as an opt-in beta.

Most of these were pretty small bug fixes/tweaks/balance changes, although there is one feature and one new story line that will take more time. In the first half of the week I whittled the list down to under fifty.

Now I'm starting into the two larger items. My current plan is to see how far I get in the next week. Then I'll do another fast playthrough because a number of the latest round changes/fixes are big enough that the chances of introducing a game-breaking bug is significant.

My current goal is to have Kepler available for opt-in testing in the next two weeks, but that will depend on how long the two bigger items take and whether the second playthrough hits any critical issues.

Tasks done in the past week:

• Finished full playthrough
  
• Prioritized list of candidate changes
  
• Lots of fixes, balance changes
  
• Added resource source analytics
  
• Optimized NPC tech modifier lookup
  
• Refactored map icon updates
  
• Started work on new enemy attack
  
• Worked with Moritz on the new music tracks
  

Until next week!
- Kevin

A quick update this week: my wife and I went on a survey mission to investigate a nearby celestial anomaly.

When we got back I started a full playthrough to see how the recent changes felt and get a sense of how much more I want to add to Kepler before releasing it as an opt-in beta.

I'm still in the middle of the playthrough, but I'll have a better idea next week.

Other than that, things done in the past week:

• New anomaly
  
• Added indicator in mission log for critical missions
  
• Various balance changes, fixes
  

Until next week!
- Kevin

Looking at my task tracker recently I realized it's been ten years since I started work on what would eventually become Starcom: Nexus, the precursor of Starcom: Unknown Space. Actually ten years ago to the day, I followed Unity's "space game tutorial" to figure out how to get a 2D spaceship moving on screen.

I've already written a very long postmortem on the process of creating that game, but I thought this would be a good occasion to look at the question "where does the time go?" Like specifically, having spent well over ten thousand hours developing these games, what am I doing all day?

Using data exported from the task tracker, I went through and randomly sampled blocks of time and categorized them to see what kinds of things I was spending time on, and how much.

I organized the data in two ways: features that players would recognize, and hats that I wear. By "hats" I mean what role/skillset would do this task in a mid-sized game company with dozens of employees. I'm guessing a bit on this one-- while I have worked on game projects with small to medium sized companies, it has always been in a fairly narrow role.

[h2]Features[/h2]



[h2]Hats[/h2]



This is just the time I spent. There have been several talented contractors who have composed the game's music, created the alien portraits, created 3D models for the modules, etc. It's also not super precise, because a) there are a lot of tasks that don't get tracked and b) this was a random sample. But I think it's ballpark correct.

In other news, I'm continuing to press on with work on Kepler. There's still a chunk of content I want to add, but in the next week or two I'll start thinking about timing for making available for opt-in.

Until next week!
- Kevin