Starcom: Unknown Space News

It's finally here! After 20 months in Early Access, Starcom: Unknown Space has finally graduated to its full 1.0 version. I, and more importantly the players, are very happy about the current state of the game. The game has evolved and improved with the help and feedback from countless brave commanders during EA. I couldn't have done it without them.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1750770/Starcom_Unknown_Space/

The official "Kepler" version has a complete storyline with:

• 230+ unique anomalies
  
• 60+ main story and side-quest missions to investigate
  
• 150+ technologies to research
  
• Lots of alien factions and characters to discover, ally, trade with and/or disintegrate
  
• Median time for players to reach the main game ending is roughly 30 hours
  

Images from some of the 230+ anomalies

While I am still continuing to improve the game with quality of life enhancements and side exploration content, future updates will be save compatible with the current build. As usual, there is an "unstable" beta branch where new builds will be deployed first for opt-in testing. This branch also has more detailed anonymous analytics, helping me find and fix problems before deploying to the default branch.

As always, you can submit anonymous feedback in-game at any time by pressing F8. If you have questions or issues that you want me to be able to respond to, please post in the Steam discussion forums.


[h2]How You Can Help[/h2]

Some players have asked how they can help the game besides providing feedback and suggestions. As an indie developer, I depend heavily on word of mouth and the mysterious Steam algorithm and am grateful for players' help spreading awareness. Besides buying the game during launch, you can suggest the game to your favorite streamer, and/or leave a review.

But as I've said before, I'm extremely fortunate to have had a fantastic player base who supported the game throughout Early Access and provided enormous amounts of feedback, bug reports, suggestions, as well as encouragement. While I haven't implemented every single suggestion, the game would never have reached the quality it has without them. So thank you again Early Access players, and thanks to everyone has supported this ongoing journey!

- Kevin

In three days, Starcom: Unknown Space graduates from Early Access. It's been over four years since I started work on this game, and over a year and a half since it entered Early Access. Thanks to everyone who has come along on this journey!

I also wanted to give a quick shout out to the players who have been helping out by answering new player questions in the discussion forums, providing large amounts of detailed feedback via F8, suggesting the game to their favorite streamers, etc.

This has been a very busy week, here are the highlights:

Last week Kepler 17318 was promoted to default and there have been no reports of unexpected new issues. I feel pretty confident at this point with the Release Candidate. Yesterday I uploaded a new build to the opt-in unstable branch. This fixes one minor anomaly bug and a dozen or so typos/grammatical issues. The bigger change is that it implements the image thumbnail load optimization I talked about last week. The short of it is that the game no longer loads a full sized version of every anomaly/item/character image that it might need. Instead it loads a small thumbnail until it knows it needs the full image. This speeds up initial loading time and reduces the baseline memory footprint substantially. It's possible this memory reduction might help with the outstanding technical issue some players are reporting with older integrated Intel laptop GPUs, but that's just a hope.

Since this change could introduce new bugs and the current build is very solid, I will not be promoting it to default before launch.

In other news, the Youtuber/streamer Splattercat, who has helped Starcom's visibility enormously over the years (and indie games in general) uploaded a new video on Wednesday. He also mentioned likely streaming(?) the game on launch day. Anyone who enjoys learning about new and upcoming indie games should follow his channel.

I've also started to investigate what I want to tackle in the next post-launch update, but I'll save that until next week when I hopefully will have a clearer picture and a bit more bandwidth.

And I finally figured out why the workshop home page wasn't showing player designs by default: I had originally set it up as visible only to players who had the game, which apparently prevents the home page from displaying anything, even if you had the game.

Until Monday!
- Kevin

Just over a week to official graduation!

On Tuesday, Kepler 17318 was promoted to default. By player reports, the game is in very solid shape with few bugs, so barring any surprise serious issues I've decided this will be the Release Candidate. It adds full, professional German translation, plus fixes a dozen or so minor issues and typos.

With the Release Candidate up, I'm now starting work on what will hopefully be the first post-launch update.

One thing that I've wanted to tackle for a while is image loading. When the game first launches, it loads some of the most common image assets. Then, when the player first starts a story (a "story" in the game's logic is a content chunk) or loads a save, it loads any image assets that it knows that story needs. Loading a single image doesn't take super long, maybe 10-20ms on my computer. This only ever needs to happen once per application start, and at the start of Early Access there were maybe 100 images, mostly anomalies. But now there are around 500 images, which equates to 10 seconds of loading. Again, this is just once per application start, so not terrible, but if it could be reduced that would be preferable.

An obvious solution would be to wait until an image is needed before loading it, but there are areas in the game the game where many images might suddenly be needed all at once, such as in the ship log or cargo bay, which would produce an unacceptably long stutter mid-game.

After some investigation, I determined that the time to load images and create their sprites was roughly linear to the size of the image. Since the size of an image is the square of its resolution, and anomalies are 1024x1024, I could load a 64x64 thumbnail of every image in the game in the time it took to load 2 full anomaly images. Maybe not exactly that many, but in that ballpark.

Earlier this week I created an editor script that generates 64x64 thumbnails for every image. Now where previously the game loaded images, it will load the thumbnail. Specific UI elements can tell the game that they need the full resolution version of an image and the content system will load the full version only then.

A side effect of this change is that preliminarily it looks like this reduces the baseline memory footprint of the game significantly.

It's possible this change may have some unforeseen negative consequence (for example when first testing it I discovered some areas where images looked super jaggy because the appropriate full sized image wasn't being loaded), which is why I'm not going to try to rush it into the launch version.

Until next week!
- Kevin

Kepler 17318 adds professional German translation, plus some minor fixes.

Full list of changes:

• German translation
  
• Plasma autofire will now target neutral obstacles
  
• Fix for Dolson repeated conversion
  
• Fix roughly a dozen minor typos
  
• Validate blueprint name on save
  
• Several minor fixes