[h3]Hello Prospectors![/h3]
I just want to give a heartfelt thanks to everyone who played the game. The feedback has been invaluable and I have a lot of things to work on and improve. As a solo developer making their first game, I must admit that the release was pretty overwhelming. Now that things are starting to calm down I plan to ease back into a more regular development schedule.
Your feedback is a gift and I will do my best to improve the game's stability and experience. Here's a list of all the things I was able to do because of your support:
[h3]
Improvements:[/h3]
- Added a connection line between tree holograms and moth incubators to indicate that they will be in-range for moth infestation
- Added a highlight effect for trees in range of a moth incubator before placing the structure
- Extra inputs supported for key rebinding on keyboard
- Added an ore icon above mineral deposits when placing a Mineral Extractor to indicate ore type
- Added an indicator when a belt item reaches the end of a belt to indicate that a Silo is needed for deposit
- Added a better indicator for the Moth Incubator to instruct on it's need for nearby trees and its progress in producing a new cocoon
- Added an on-screen button for entering Recycle Mode to make that more obvious
- Increased the time tutorial messages are on screen by 2x
- New indicators when building a Mineral Extractor that point towards the nearest instance of a Mineral Deposit for each mineral type.
- New help text to help explain how existing mineral spikes must be removed before building a Mineral Extractor.
[h3]
Bug fixes:[/h3]
- Fixed a crashing bug related to input profiles triggering an erroneous debug alert
- Fixed a visual bug where mineral deposit indicators would scale to the entire screen size when standing on top of the deposit
- Fixed a bug where on load belt items would sometimes clump up and block the flow
- Fixed a memory leak issue with load buffers not being properly wiped after load
- Fixed an issue with power routing causing a game crash
- Fixed an issue with resource particle effects causing a game crash
- Fixed an issue with building placement checking for an invalid instance causing a game crash
- Fixed an issue with a silo bug crashing the game on load
- Fixed a bug where valid key bindings would not have a valid glyph and crash the game
- Fixed a bug where the Moth Incubator couldn't be recycled
- Fixed an issue where Ophelia could invalidly walk over water and over cliffs while carrying the player
- Fixed an issue where players would get stuck easily on cliffs
- Fixed an issue where the Habitat would go missing and crash the game
- Fixed an issue with the terrain loader loading invalid tile data
- Fixed an issue where various save data would not be carried over between sessions
- Fixed an issue where termite wasps would look for an invalid water collision which would crash the game
- Fixed an issue with player collisions crashing the game when going outside the valid grid space
- Fixed an issue where recycling a working structure would soft lock upgrades
- Fixed an issue where a belt item on load would randomly crash the game
- Fixed an issue where terrain loading would go out of bounds and crash the game
- Fixed an issue where crystal crabs would do a collision check on water that would crash the game.
- Fixed an issue where using the unstick command would sometimes get players stuck in an infinite loop.
- Fixed an issue where attempting to check for valid belt placement would crash the game.
This list is a small fraction of what I need to work on and I appreciate your patience as I slowly roll out patches.
[h3]Where's the ultrawide support?[/h3]I'm still working on it but I hope to support windowed mode next week. I was unable to make much progress on this since I don't own an ultrawide, but one just got delivered to my doorstep as I was writing this post. I hope to have the feature ready for you all sometime next week.
[h3]A note on the game's tutorials[/h3]I acknowledge that some of the game's content needs better tutorials and I am committed to providing those and conducting more playtesting sessions in the future to ensure that not just the current content, but also future content is better explained. This was a wakeup call for me and I will strive to improve in this area.
[h3]Current state of overall stability[/h3]The current build is still a bit rough in places and I'm working on addressing a handful of bugs at a time. It will take me a bit longer to get to them all, but trying to fix everything all at once will most likely result in new bugs and it will be harder for me to determine their source, so I'm trying to take things slow and steady.
[h3]Current state of overall performance[/h3]I have quite a few reports that towards the end of the game the FPS gets sluggish and some actions like connecting buildings to power can cause hitching spikes. I also have reports from some players that memory usage is too high. Once overall stability is in a better place, I have some existing optimization work I can patch in to improve both those issues, though some issues like the hitching will require extra work on my end. I plan to start with a general performance boost which I hope to roll out sometime next week.
[h3]Come join the Discord community![/h3]I pinned a post over in the community hub, but in case you didn't see it, I've moved all support to my Discord where you can report a bug after seeing the list of known issues, leave me a suggestion on how to make the game better, or just chat with other folks playing the game. The organization makes things easier for me and there are other folks around who can also help if you have questions or want to share your thoughts on what you'd like to see from Prospector in the future.
The community is going to be an important component in driving the direction of Prospector's development and I take community feedback and ideas seriously. If you want to help shape the future of this game, Discord is the place to be.
[h3]Last but not least, wishlist the full game so you'll get notified when it releases![/h3]https://store.steampowered.com/app/1928080/Prospector/
Thank you for being part of Prospector's story and I look forward to sharing some exciting updates over the coming months!
Best wishes,
Jacob
