Starcom: Unknown Space News

[p]Quick update this week: I'm currently working on a longer news/update post and player survey, but they're not quite ready yet.[/p][p]Last week I talked about making the Creator Tool available to all players, but was blocked due to an issue in the Steamworks backend that prevented it from being visible. With Valve's help, that's been resolved and now any interested player should be able to see it within Steam. Note that it appears in "Tools" not "Games".[/p][p]On a related topic, there's an Opt-in Beta available that fixes a skill check issue and adds the necessary changes for supporting Workshop published Creator content. [/p][p]Until next update![/p][p]Kevin[/p]

[p]There's a new Opt-in Beta available. This is a minor update:[/p]

• [p]First, it hopefully addresses a long standing bug that caused skill check modifiers after certain anomalies not to be reset, leading to weird modifiers, like +1530%.[/p]
• [p]Two, it implements necessary changes for future Workshop story content. That is, once the Creator Tool is ready, Creators will be able to share their content with other players via the Workshop. [/p]

[p]As mentioned last week, I'm also preparing to make the Creator Tool publicly available for all players, so anyone who is interested in trying it out is able to, without me having to email a key.[/p][p]Right now, the next step in making the Creator Tool publicly available is... figuring out how to make the Creator Tool publicly available. It exists in Steam as a "Tool" (which is a distinct product category from "Game"). But pressing the "Release" button doesn't seem to have added it to player's accounts, so there must be a second step I'm missing.[/p][p]Since Starcom: Unknown Space is an already published application with lots of players I don't want to start randomly changing settings unless I'm sure I know what the effect is. I've submitted a support ticket with Valve so hopefully we'll get it sorted soon.[/p][p]Until next week![/p][p]Kevin[/p]

[p]Two weeks ago I talked about posting a player survey in the next couple weeks. I still plan on doing that, but decided to prioritize a few other tasks. One of those, as I posted about last week, was getting the game Steam Deck Verified.[/p][p][/p][p]The other is working on a patch for the game. As I've mentioned in the past, I've made the "Creator Tool" (the tool I build to author the game's anomalies, missions and stories) available for beta testing. I don't know how much interest there is in this tool, but at least some users have been experimenting with it. But there's currently no way for them to share their creations, so I need to make some modifications to the game's Steam workshop logic before that can happen.[/p][p][/p][p]Also, a player has helped me identify a potential source of skill check bugs that can accumulate during the course of a session. Fixing that and getting the "Creator" enabled version of the game ready for testing have taken the front seat for the past few weeks. It's not quite ready for deployment to the beta branch, but hopefully soon.[/p][p][/p][p]Until then![/p][p]-- Kevin[/p]

[p]Since the game's official 1.0 launch in September of last year, I've been making continuous updates to the game with new content, bug fixes and QoL improvements. Among these have been enhancements to controller and Steam Deck™ support.[/p][p][/p][p]The game has been officially marked "playable" for a while, but the last mile to go from "playable" to "verified" was a bit of challenge.[/p][p][/p][p]There are a few screens in the game that are fairly information dense, particularly the shipyard. The Deck has a resolution of 1280 x 800 and Valve requires that the smallest text be a minimum of 9 pixels high to be Deck verified. That's the "mean line" height, i.e., the height of lower-case letters. [/p][p][/p][p]One of the QoL improvements made a while back was text scaling, so if the game detects that it's running on a Deck it will automatically scale up the fonts. But there were a few places where this doesn't work due to technical reasons of how the UI is constructed. [/p][p][/p][p]Valve was helpfully very specific, with screenshots of all the places they found where the text wasn't quite large enough. But obviously they didn't play through the entire game, so I also went through and looked for screens that they might not have encountered and manually tweaked any layouts to either make room for the scaling or add special cases.[/p][p][/p][p]The good news is that the game is now officially "Steam Deck™ Verified"![/p][p][/p][p]There still may be areas with room for improvement, so if you have any suggestions, please let me know in the Discussion Forums.[/p][p][/p][p]Thanks for playing Starcom: Unknown Space![/p]

[p]In the my last news update I announced my wife and I were taking a trip to Scandinavia at the end of May. Now we're back.[/p][p][/p][h2]Nordic Game[/h2][p][/p][p]In the first half of the trip we were in Malmö, Sweden for the Nordic Games conference. This was the first time I've gone to a game developer conference and didn't have a concrete agenda: my main reasons for selecting this one specifically were: a) it happened to fall at a time where I felt like I could take a break, b) Copenhagen (a 20 minute train ride from Malmö) is a direct flight from Boston, and c) I've never been to Scandinavia.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]I had a lot of fun, talked to a number of interesting developers, and saw a bunch of cool talks on different aspects of game development.[/p][p][/p][p]The two most interesting talks I saw were one by Fawzi Mesmar (designer at Ubisoft) and one by Marie Mejerwall (systems designer) on AI.[/p][p][/p][p]Mesmar's talk was on creativity, and I liked that he had a pretty clear thesis on what creativity was: a statistically unlikely idea that creates value in some context. [/p][p][/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][p]I appreciated that he's attempted to put out a fairly robust definition for something that is usually described in a very handwavy manner. [/p][p][/p][p]Mejerwall's was more technical on combat AI as Finite State Machines. This one was interesting to me because I've been thinking about how I might rework NPC AI's to be more modular. She didn't talk specifically about modularity, but a few of the things she did say sparked some ideas for me:[/p][p][/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][p][/p][h2]The Faroe Islands[/h2][p][/p][p]The second half of the trip was spent in the Faroe Islands, which provided a nice slower-paced cooldown from the intense social activity of the conference. Kristin has wanted to go to the Faroes for quite some time, and I thought they would be a great place to find some anomaly inspirations. I've talked before about the process of generating anomaly images, where I mostly have relied on kitbashing assets in 3D environment rendering software. I have several techniques that I've learned over time to produce images that are both visually appealing and spark some sense of alien mystery.[/p][p][/p][p]I took a lot of reference pictures while we were there: not so much to specifically recreate a location, but to have something to understand when/how a 2D image can communicate things like distance and scale. Most everyone has had the experience of taking a photo of something dramatic only to discover that the image is somehow much less impressive than what you saw. Reversing this process is a big part of anomaly visuals: taking basic models/shaders and using tricks of perspective, scale and lighting to make them look convincingly alien and impressive. So finding locations that look impressive in real life and then also translate well as images can help me figure out what types of terrain layouts will work well.[/p][p][/p][p]One of the most famous locations in the Faroe Islands is Traelanipa, a dramatic cliff where a lake seems implausibly posed above sea caves. [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]This is partly an optical illusion: While the lake is 100' above sea level, the cliff's edge is 250' above sea level, but slopes down quickly below the eyeline. The large scale, plus lack of reference objects of known size like trees or buildings tricks the eye into thinking the lake must be about to spill over the cliff's edge. [/p][p][/p][p](The general lack of trees and large vegetation has some additional advantage for my purposes: for one, these environments naturally look more "alien". For another, lots of independent meshes are really computationally expensive to place and render. Terrain that looks good with just a shader applied is just overall an easier environment to create.)[/p][p][/p][h2]What's Next?[/h2][p][/p][p]A number of people have asked about my future plans now that Starcom: Unknown Space has reached the point where I am mostly just making minor bug fixes and QoL updates. (There was a minor patch this week as the games inches hopefully closer to Steam Deck "verified" status.)[/p][p][/p][p]One can infer from my activities on this trip that I am at least considering making another entry into the Starcom universe. I haven't 100% decided that's what I am going to do: building these games has been both enormously rewarding but also challenging and stressful. Right now, my current plan is to allow myself to relax a bit, but start thinking about what another Starcom game would look like if I were to make one.[/p][p][/p][p]I plan to put a survey up in the next week or two.[/p][p][/p][p]Until then, thanks for reading my "What I Did on Spring Break" report![/p][p][/p][p]- Kevin[/p][p][/p]