This is an medium scale indie strategy game, mainly developed by one developer over 20 months with a 3 figure budget. The game should improve in the long run, but in the short run there will be lots of bug fixes / hotfixes and focus on implementing urgent player feedback.
[h2]State of the Game - Minimum Viable Product[/h2]
It's dumb to compare this game to other such games since there is an intergalactic distance between the game budgets, but for the sake of explanation, I will do it here.
Watch the pre-recorded Steam stream to get an idea of the gameplay:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2231270
Me playing the game should give you a realistic and unbiased idea of what the gameplay looks like right now.
[h3]Pacing[/h3]
Significantly faster-paced than Stellaris, slightly faster paced than Civilization, slower than Age of Empires. Choose your pacing from 1-2 hours to 5+ hours.
Note that the 5-6 hours pacing is unchartered territory in terms of playtesting, since spending the last 2 months mostly fixing bugs has prevented me from playtesting much into the deepest parts of the game.
[h3]Hard to Learn / Overwhelming At First[/h3]
Playtesters often remark that the game is hard to learn, although those with experience with other 4X games may have an easier time. There is a built-in narrated tutorial, but the game does lack a bit of required feedback in some places to help the player always know what they need to do.
[h3]Playmodes[/h3]
Probably the most fun part of the game. Hide from other empires in the early-game with the Silent State stealth mode fleets, raze worlds with Xeno Exterminator, destroy hyperlanes with the Extreme Isolationist, form martial unions and defend the galaxy.
There are 8 playmodes, 8 origins, 8 unique buildings, and 8-16 special abilities (depending on what you call a special ability). The live stream goes into more detail on these.
[h3]Exploration[/h3]
Quite a few different types of exploration and game events for you to uncover such as white dwarfs, and undiscovered hyperlanes. It's good to keep things interesting, and sometimes chaotic.
[h3]War[/h3]
The fleet movement is similar to Stellaris, but the main difference is that when you fully occupy a system and make a peace deal, it's yours to keep. I like to compare this idea system to Civilization wars. To occupy a colony, you surround it with fleets, which is called 'sieging'.
[h3]Colony Management[/h3]
Try to build as many buildings as possible to always keep your empire growing. You may not fully upgrade your colonies on lowest speeds, without disabling the time limit (i.e. disabling time victory in main menu).
[h3]Starbase Management[/h3]
Starbases are 'designated' which means specializing it from 4 different types:
1) Base -> Are regular default starbases.
2) Hub -> Collect system resources (upgrade to collect from neighbouring systems).
3) Dock -> Build ships (upgrade to build faster).
4) Fort -> Provide a defensive bonus (upgrade to improve defence bonus).
5) Capitals -> Inherits all abilities (automatically designated).
Note that these have to be unlocked from technologies.
[h3]Technologies - Non-repeatables, and repeatables[/h3]
There are non-repeatable techs which are researched first, then there are repeatable technologies which increase modifiers. Selectable techs are rolled at random so there is no tech tree at this time.
[h3]Visuals - Could be more polished[/h3]
Animated combat is quite rudimentary but does the job. It looked okay in the trailer, although I am not 100% happy with the state of the animated combat yet. Sometimes turrets are not fired and battles are won, which I do wish to refine over time.
[h3]Possible performance issues on lower end systems[/h3]
The game could be a lot better optimized. There is always a lag spike every 30 days in-game. This has always been a case, and happens when the game is calculating the next 'turn' (game is not turn-based, just an example).
It would be hard and time consuming for me to optimize this, but not impossible.
[h3]Requires a good CPU[/h3]
The CPU is critical since this game is mostly a simulation. An 8-core CPU such as the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X should be sufficient, along with the recommended 16GB of RAM. A 2GB VRAM GPU is also recommended - on the max settings. 4-core, 8GB RAM, and 1GB of GPU VRAM may be possible but you may have to opt for lower settings for things to run smoothly.
[h3]Saving[/h3]
The saving system uses YAML, which allows you to customize things such as the difficulty in a text editor, then reload the save. Special attention towards making this system as stable as possible has been applied, but this may not always be the case in the real world. I'd say that saving/loading is one of the most important, if not the most important, systems in the game for things to work.
The saving system is tested to work cross-platform with Steam cloud saves (Windows -> Linux).
[h3]A decent amount of bugs[/h3]
While I believe I have removed the most critical bugs, there are still hundreds on the to fix, and only a limited amount can be fixed per day. Hundreds of bugs exist because this game is, at the very least, medium-scale compared to other strategy games.
There is one bug observed that crashes the game, and requires a restart, although a fix has been applied a few hours before the release. I am hopeful that crashes do not become an issue. I will say that this is/was the only known bug that crashes the game right now, but this is likely to change with more playtesting.
[h3]Playable to the end, but 'quirky' at times[/h3]
If for whatever reason there is a game breaking bug, 99% of the time you should be able to keep your progress. Bugs with the saving system are currently the highest priority to fix. Bugs can be reported in-game with the F10 key, or on the Steam discussions.
[h3]Not 100% Balanced, but Improvements Have Been Made[/h3]
As I said, the game was grievously unbalanced at the start of the month, but things should be much better now. The release date extension of 4 days was instrumental in helping balance costs, upkeep, turrets, playmodes etc. although it's not close to being perfect.
Some things may be unbalanced such as the alliance builder being able to easily ally half the galaxy. A playtester once used the ship builder to design ships with a 100 damage turret to easily win a war, but this was quickly patched.
[h3]Simple By Design[/h3]
The game is (relatively) simple by design, and I preferred the approach of the simplicity of mechanics of Civilization rather than the doctorate degree required for playing a HOI4 for example. Also, this approach is better because there is only one main developer working on this game.
One reason I made this game is because Stellaris games took me 100 hours on average, and every time I wanted to start a game, it was a major life decision - do I sacrifice 1-2 weeks just to finish this?
[h3]Main Menu[/h3]
The main menu from Stellaris felt overwhelming since there was too much to decide on. New Stars has a similar problem of being very customizable at the start, which may be overwhelming to some, but starting a game shouldn't be as much of a life decision as games are much faster.
While there is enough content for early-access, there is dramatically less content than other games such as Stellaris, for obvious reasons. That's one main reason why the game is also fast paced.
[h3]Visuals need polishing[/h3]
For example, the animated combat is a bit more 'janky' in-game and needs more work, and animated ship movement may have the same problem. Note that animated combat / movement is just for decoration, and the real movement is calculated behind the scenes. When the animated movement attempts to mimic calculated movement, and gets out of sync, it may look glitchy when it recorrects it's position - such as ships teleporting randomly across the star system, but if you reopen the system, things should be resynced.
[h3]Lower price to reflect MVP state of the game[/h3]
The pricing will be 10% lower than initially planned, until the game is a lot more stable and developed.
Instead of 23.99 USD, the originally decided price, the base price has been reduced to 20.99 USD.
The base price will be: 20.99 USD, and you will be able to purchase the game for 10% off at launch. Note this is not a mobile game, so will not be priced as such.
The price could increase later in early-access to reflect a more-stable and developed state of the game.[hr][/hr]
[h2]Why am I releasing now?[/h2]
Here are a few reasons for releasing this game now:
+ Release in 2023 as planned.
+ Players can access the game earlier and get a taste for it, instead of waiting for a few more months.
+ The price will be cheaper because the game is less polished.
+ Since I have spent the entire year purely developing this game, there will be something to show for it.
The downside of this is that there is a higher risk of things going badly, since the game is in an MVP state, although I have done everything I can to prepare the game for release this month.
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[h2]Plans for the game...[/h2]
I won't yet spoil what may be added, because when I announced planned multiplayer support in January, I did not know that I would not have the resources to make the feature stable, as it would bring hundreds of more bugs. The same is true with macOS support.
The short term priorities are
playability:
1)
Stability - bug removal, above everything.
2)
Balancing - keep things challenging, but not too difficult.
3)
Accessibility - making things more responsive and easier to learn/understand.
These priorities may be overridden to account for player feedback such as urgent bugs that need to be fixed.
[h3]Roadmap[/h3]
I don't have plans to publish a roadmap at this time. If features get added, they get added. If they don't they don't. Motivation for game development in the future is hard to predict. There are many features that I would like to add, and the TODO list is currently full - of bugs to fix.
It's still possible to improve every part of the game with enough development time, such as the visuals:
2022:
2023:
2024:
After 2023, we may transition into a more sustainable period of development, with more development breaks. This is because the current development time of 10+ hours a day almost everyday is somewhat unsustainable, and I haven't taken a break from this in a while.
If the early-access launch goes well, and the short term priorities are accounted for, we can move onto adding more content sooner rather than later, and it may some time to get to this stage.
View the changelog:
https://newstarsgame.com