Beyond These Stars News

Kia ora everyone!

Our new dev blog is out - for all the juicy details, please hop over to our website read it. For those of you who want a summary (and believe me it is a summary), read on:

[h3]Crafting the UI[/h3]
With city builders and other simulation games, the UI can often be a "make or break'' moment for them. MJ, Sam, and Tom have been working *very* hard for quite a while now to make it as slick and intuitive as possible. There's also been a massive effort put towards making the tutorial UI flow well, too. No screenshots yet, sorry 🤐

[h3]Writing the Tutorial[/h3]
Wondering why I've been so quiet? Well, it's because I've been writing the tutorial for the game! I'm up to my third revision right now, and I'm writing it with all the feedback from BWL's tutorial in mind. It's challenging work, but it'll be very worth it in the end.

[h3]Making Kewa Shine[/h3]
Tom, Isaac, and Rafał (our 3D artist in Poland), have been working their butts off to make Kewa look absolutely incredible. Since Kewa is so big, Tom has been putting a lot of thought into scaling the textures correctly. Isaac has also been working on developer tools to make Kewa aesthetically pleasing, too.


[h3]Pathfinding[/h3]
Speaking of Isaac, he’s been working on Peep pathfinding too! Please note that he’s doing all of this while dealing with the exhaustion of being a new dad a second time around. What a legend.


[h3]Testing, One Two Three[/h3] - Nina has been making headway on playtesting Beyond These Stars with our friends and family, and assessing the data from those sessions. Some trends are starting to emerge, and I think I speak for the whole team when I say we’re VERY excited to learn her findings.

[h3]Planning and Performing[/h3] - Behind the scenes, Sarah has been the hardworking navigator of the BMG ship, tracking, planning, and steering us away from risky shores. She’s also been very active on TikTok, tracking trends and making content to bring people joy and information about us and our Very Cool New Game.

[h3]FINS[/h3] - We’re also attending the inaugural Festival of Interactive Narrative & Storytelling in Dunedin! I'm one of the speakers; hopefully the talk will be recorded so I can share it with you all.

Thank you for reading! I’ll be back soon with another chonky news update for you all ❤

- Emily
Community Manager

Hey gang!

I'm popping in to post the most recent dev blog from Sam, our creative director. If you're keen to see specifics on what we've been working on in terms of mechanics and systems, this is the dev blog for you!

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Hello again! We’ve cycled through everyone at the company doing Dev Blogs, and so it’s come back to me, Sam, your friendly neighbourhood Creative Director.

Lots has been happening since I was last here, because with 11 of us working on the game in some capacity there’s always lots happening! Just in the last few weeks, off the top of my head:

[h3]Elevators[/h3]
Elevators are working! Elevators in Before We Leave were many layers of hacks and refactors and redesigns layered on top of each other in a teetering pile, so this time around we wanted to make them much more solid. That did mean though that they kept getting put off as there were other more important systems to build - so it feels great to get to the point where we can start giving some attention to things like this.

[h3]Look and Feel[/h3]
Just about every time I look at the game it’s gotten more pretty to look at and better to play - new building models, better peep models, polishing features that used to be just “good enough for now” and many many bugfixes.


[h3]Decisions on UI[/h3]
We’ve decided on the graphical style and basic layout for the main game UI elements. A huge amount of design and analysis has gone into this to get something that will display as much useful information as possible without being overwhelming!

[h3]Game Balancing and Analysis[/h3]
We’re putting systems together to allow for a much more analytical game balance. Last time the game balance was just whatever I thought made sense (then lots of tweaking with player feedback). This time we want to find a balance between a carefully structured tightly wound web of resources and buildings and a relaxing amount of slack, so having systems and processes in place to help us manage that is vital.

[h3]Playtesting... Soon(ish)[/h3]
We’re putting into place the systems we will need to run our playtesting - private Alphas and Betas and the like. NDAs, feedback systems, plans for what to test and who to look for etc. Very exciting! We’ll be announcing more about this fairly soon, so keep your eyes peeled on our Discord.

[h3]Writing the Tutorial[/h3]
Work on the tutorial has begun! Timing when to create the tutorial is tricky - too early and the systems you’re teaching are going to change too much, too late and the game has become too locked in to change if needed to make the tutorial play right.

[h3]Scoping and Planning[/h3]
And we’re just finishing off planning out our next phase of development, trying to take account of all the things we need to get done in the next couple of months then estimating how long it will actually take.

Whew, that’s a lot of things! But the thing is, I’m not the primary person working on any of those things. As Creative Director I help with all of them, whether giving my thoughts or helping get things done or signing things off as complete (enough, for now). On Before We Leave, everything listed above was either done by me or didn’t happen (at least until the last few months of development when Isaac and then Emily came along), so this time it’s quite a different beast!

In my heart I’m still a programmer, and some days I do miss just sitting by myself coding on the game (although I do still do that a bunch). But seeing this list of all the things that are happening because other people are working on this project with me is amazing and I wouldn’t change it for anything.

See you next time around,
- Sam

Kia ora everyone 👋

Since November last year we've been writing dev blogs every fortnight(ish) to talk about our work on Beyond These Stars, and to talk about our day to day lives at the studio too. I've decided to link all of them in this post so you can check them out! Expect brand spankin' new posts coming soon though, starting with our Creative Director Sam.

[h3]November 2022[/h3]
Dev Blog #1 with Sam, Creative Director Dev Blog #2: It's Time To Get Together! with Anna, Managing Director
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[h3]December 2022[/h3]
Dev Blog #3: Mushy Peas And Haiku Edition with Tom, Lead Artist Dev Blog #4: Everything is Content with Producer and Social Media Manager Sarah
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[h3]January 2023[/h3]
Dev Blog #5: Into The Clouds with Lead Programmer & Technical Artist Isaac
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[h3]February 2023[/h3]
Dev Blog #6: As Old As Us with Narrative Designer/Community Manager Emily (that's me!) Dev Blog #7: Game.Isfun = True with Game Designer & Programmer Mereana
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[h3]March 2023[/h3]
IWD Blog: Why Should Business Be Like War? with Anna Dev Blog 8: Our Quality QA with Nina, Quality Assurance & Player Support
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Alright gang, that's the archive done! I'm looking forward to posting fresh new dev blogs for you all soon.

Oh, another thing - if you'd prefer to not manually check our website or these Steam forums for our dev blogs, I write a newsletter every few weeks! Sign up here to get Beyond These Stars news to your inbox. I don't spam, promise!

- Emily, Community Manager

Kia ora koutou katoa and greetings everyone!

I’m Emily, the Community Manager/Narrative Designer for Balancing Monkey Games. We made Before We Leave and now we’re working on its sequel Beyond These Stars, a city-builder on the back of a space whale called Kewa.

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[h2]INTRODUCTIONS[/h2]
In case you’re not familiar with us, I wanted to give you a bit of background - we’re a small indie studio based in Dunedin (Ōtepoti), New Zealand (Aotearoa). There are eight full time people in the studio with a handful of contractors helping us make Beyond These Stars. So we’re not as small as we used to be (we made Before We Leave with about half as many people!). All of us are massive nerds, love nature, and we’re working our butts off to make the best game possible for you all.

[h2]ABOUT BEYOND THESE STARS[/h2]
“Journey on the back of the space whale Kewa, building a city for your people as you travel across the galaxy seeking purpose and answers, and developing deep relationships with the universe around you.”

We began discussing a potential sequel to Before We Leave in 2020, and began full time development in 2022. It’s been an interesting journey so far - we do blog posts every two weeks so you’ll see bits and pieces of our journey and our thoughts about it as we go. I’ve posted quite a few already over on the Before We Leave Steam forums but I’ll be posting them here too for you all to read :)

[h2]EARLY ACCESS[/h2]
While we have a strong vision for how Beyond These Stars looks, feels and plays, part of our vision is getting feedback from you all about what’s great, what’s not so great, and where you feel like things could be improved. We’re still figuring out what public testing and our roadmapping looks like, but I will let you know about that when it’s here!

[h2]TALKING TO US[/h2]
So since we’re in a weird timezone, and we do a four day work week between 9am to 5pm, communicating can sometimes be a bit difficult. We'll endeavour to respond here as quickly as we can, but expect a delay. If you need to get in touch with us quickly, I strongly recommend joining our Discord!

[h2]TALKING TO YOU[/h2]
As a community manager I value transparency and sincerity - I’ll always try to give you as much information as possible! Communicating that through words alone can be a bit tough sometimes, so we do occasional Twitch streams. They’re currently on hiatus but returning in the next few months! If you’re super keen to see and hear everything we’re doing, chuck us a follow on our socials. You can find all of them over here.

Anyway, thanks for reading! I’m looking forward to talking to you all more 🙂
- Emily, Community Manager