New Stars News

A new feature has been added to New Stars: modular ship building. Also, a lot of development has been focused on stabilizing multiplayer and the saving system. As a result, many bugs have been fixed in April and the game is generally more stable.

[h2]Modular Ship Building[/h2]
Now you can customize ship components and turrets based on your empires needs.


Adding more sections will cost more resources. Some turrets use special resources but deliver more damage.

Variants of the same ship type, but with different modules, can now be created and managed separately.

[h3]Unlock New Modules[/h3]
Turrets and sections can be unlocked. Another 11 turret unlock and section unlock technologies have been added to New Stars, which brings the total amount of technologies to 40. When you unlock new modules, or ship types, you can customize them in the ship designer.

I originally planned modular ship building in January to be added after early-access, but I felt that the game less complete without it. Nevertheless, this is the largest feature added to New Stars to date.

[h2]Improved Graphics[/h2]
Galaxy graphics have been improved and replaced with an actual galaxy background.

[h2]General Improvements[/h2]
Some of the general improvements that have been added.
Notification Stacking -> Notifications of the same type stack.
Contacts Panel Pagination -> Contacts now have separate pages.
Camera Mouse Wheel Drag -> Move the camera around with the scroll wheel.

[h2]Closed-Playtesting[/h2]
New improvements will need to be from informed decisions and player feedback will be helpful. I have only added one feature to date from player feedback to date - improved galaxy graphics.

Closed-playtesting will precede public playtesting later this month. The goal of closed-playtesting will be to find critical bugs and any potential problems with the game before advancing to later stages of development, and is only available for a limited time.

You can join the closed-playtesting at discord.io/adamjr.

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Stay tuned for more updates, or join the community Discord (linked below).

Join the Closed-Playtesting: discord.io/adamjr
Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com/adamjr

Feel free to comment your suggestions below, or at discord.io/adamjr.

Wishlist New Stars to support development.

This page is subject to change in the future and is intended to be a development preview, which may not reflect the final state of the game.

Credits:
- Star satellites icon by Lorc under CC BY 3.0
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One year ago today, I started New Stars development. In this post, I will explain the origins of New Stars and its goals. I also will summarize each month of development with a screenshot from that month.

It all started with some blobs, in Unity:


Later that day, those blobs became stars in a donut shaped galaxy:


The first system that was worked on was the galaxy generation itself. Now I will show a screenshot from each month of development.

April 2022:
May 2022:
June 2022:
July 2022:
August 2022:
September 2022:
October 2022:
November 2022:
December 2022:
January 2023:
February 2023:
March 2023:
April 2023:


Since this project is large-scale, New Stars improves by around 1-3% each day of development. The screenshots above are a summary of each month of development. Since I have over 1,500 screenshots of development, I'm not going to include all of them here for obvious reasons.

The project still has yet to reach closed-beta. Most the features have to be stable before I am ready to release that. At the start of March 2023, New Stars was unplayable since I added lots of features before making sure they all work well together. Since multiplayer reworked practically all features, it has yet to be fully integrated, and loading saves is the last feature yet to work correctly again. Apart from that, now the game runs relatively smoothly. New Stars will improve and become more stable over time, prior to public playtesting (closed-beta).

Wishlist New Stars to support future development.

Here is how much development time that was tracked by Steam I have spent, since adding Steam integration on July 12th 2022 (~75% of development time):

Note that Spacewar is the placeholder game provided by Steam, which has been used for New Stars development.

In March 2022, I was playing a similar space grand-strategy game, but it seemed to have mechnical problems and each game lacked the ability to be played and finished within a certain timeframe (i.e. 50-100 hours was too long). Why start games that you won't have time to complete? I do not aim to clone that game by any means as New Stars is its own game.

In New Stars, starting and finishing game should not have to be a life decision, and games generally take a few hours long with high replay value. This is the aim at least, and the game is incomplete until this vision is achieved.

New Stars also has simple and universal game mechanics, when combined creates a dynamic and new experience each time. Primary features are randomized, such as procedurally generated skyboxes, planets, stars, empires, backgrounds, and more. As Sun Tzu once said,

"There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen."

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Stay tuned for more updates, or join the community Discord (linked below).

Community Discord: discord.io/adamjr
Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com/adamjr
Feel free to comment your suggestions below.

Wishlist New Stars to support development.

This page is subject to change in the future and is intended to be a development preview, which may not reflect the final state of the game.

Credits:
- Star satellites icon by Lorc under CC BY 3.0
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Achievements have been added to New Stars, which includes 32 Steam achievements for exploration, colony, victory/defeat, diplomacy, and more.



Achievements add more objectives and ways to play New Stars. Some are easy - colonizing 3 different worlds, and some of them are difficult - completing the game on max difficulty. I have also added hidden achievements, which I will not spoil here.



Achievements also have their own unique artwork, and more will be added over time.



I have also been working on other features, such as procedurally generated skyboxes.



You may also notice more realistic planets, and star graphics.
Some of the planets have procedural generated properties as well, as gas giants, terrestrial worlds etc. can appear in different colours, with other differences. In New Stars, all star systems look different from each other.

The 4th of April 2023, which is next week, marks the first year anniversary of New Stars development. This will be the biggest milestone since development started, so stay tuned for more updates.



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Stay tuned for more updates, or join the community Discord (linked below).

Community Discord: discord.io/adamjr
Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com/adamjr

Rate-up this post, and wishlist New Stars to support development. Feel free to comment your suggestions.

This page is subject to change in the future and is intended to be a development preview, which may not reflect the final state of the game.

Credits:
- Star satellites icon by Lorc under CC BY 3.0
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Smooth empire claims have been added, as well as visual fog of war, planet features, new UI, and more. There have also been some overall graphical improvements. Here are some features that have been added or have been worked on recently.

[h2]Galaxy Graphical Improvements[/h2]

[h3]Seamless Claims[/h3]
Smooth claims have been in development since August. These blobs are much more sophisticated than they look.



[h3]Hidden Veil[/h3]
Now undiscovered star systems appear hidden from the galaxy map. This adds more mystery to exploration and creates a clear distinction between discovered and undiscovered regions of the map.



[h2]Planet Features[/h2]
Planet features add trade value to planets. I am working on game events to reveal these features over time for colonies - game events for finding cave systems or unique wildlife.



[h2]Music Menu[/h2]
You can now play, pause, or shuffle music. I added this because it is good to be able choose your own mood in the game, to override randomly playing tracks. Most tracks in New Stars are made by Peter Gagliardi.

[h2]2023 Closed-beta[/h2]

Development logs like this take hours to plan and make. I can safely say that New Stars development has advanced dramatically in the past 10 weeks. So much has changed since then in development. If you saw the January DevLog you may see only a third of the features from January that were announced there. That's because they take time to consolidate, and improve enough to take screenshots of them. You may also notice that the store page is almost half a year out of date. That is because I have focused almost 100% of time on development, not promotion, so far this year.

The goods news is that after many iterations of bug fixes and improving the game 2-5% more each day, the game is moving in the right direction - closer to production. I will announce when closed-beta is ready in a following announcement, although it may not be for a while. Hundreds of bugs have been fixed this month, with hundreds more to be fixed in the future.



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Stay tuned for more updates, or join the community Discord (linked below).

Join Closed-beta Discord: bit.ly/newstarsdiscord
Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com/adamjr

Rate-up this post, and wishlist New Stars to support development. Feel free to comment your suggestions.

This page is subject to change in the future and is intended to be a development preview, which may not reflect the final state of the game.

Credits:
- Star satellites icon by Lorc under CC BY 3.0
▙ ▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▟

Another update is being worked on before closed-beta - Infinity. As part of the update, lots of features have been added and improved. There is lots of progress in features being made before closed-beta. Now there is only a number of features left to add, most of which development has already begun on them.

[h2]Species Avatars[/h2]
Species avatars are one of the main features of the Infinity update and give empire diplomacy more depth, and uniqueness. A typewriter effect has also been added to the empire chat.



Species avatars have also been added to game events...



[h2]Main Menu Rework[/h2]
The main menu has been reworked to make starting games quick and concise. I have also added the ability to customize your species avatar, which is coloured after your primary empire colour.



[h2]Terraform Planets[/h2]
Terraformation was added last month, but is now fully tested. UI has been added to track progress of terraformation. You can transform barren planets into worlds, if there is not already a world in the star system.



Terraformation requires the Terraformation technology, and is an expensive action. It is a mid-game action that gives your empire the ability to further expand within.

[h2]Select and Manage Multiple Fleets[/h2]
No more having to select each individual fleet! You can also use a drag box to select fleets, and order them in a group. This required a complete rework of the old interaction manager system which was one of the first systems added to New Stars. This also works in the galaxy map.



[h2]That's not it...[/h2]
There is still an upcoming Part 3 to the Ubiquity update, among other updates, although it will be the most expensive update so far and will have a unique update name. Development has already begun on that update.

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[h3]Stay tuned for more updates, or join the community Discord (linked below).[/h3]

Join the Closed-beta Discord Server if you are interested in closed-beta testing New Stars.
YouTube: youtube.com/adamjr

[h3]Rate Up to support development, and feel free to comment your suggestions.[/h3]

This page is subject to change in the future and is only intended to be a development preview, which may not reflect the final state of the game.

Credits:
- Star satellites icon by Lorc under CC BY 3.0