Star Command Galaxies News

Greetings Captains!

Some of you might have seen our Facebook comments where we talked about October 2nd being the release date. Today, we are here to announce...

...

that we are still alive and working on the game, but today is not the release date.

We've been largely upgrading the game behind the scenes, fixing a lot of the bugs we've seen, ironing out some of the balance issues, but we are definitely not ready yet for a full release at this point. We still have assets to add, encounters to build for a bit more variety, and bugs to fix. So release is still a little ways out.



In the meantime, we agree with several of our posters that we haven't given a proper update on what we're doing with the game for too long. Today, we'd like to introduce you to one of the changes we've been making to Nav, one that some of you might have noticed when watching twitch streams of SC:G.

Nav in the live version is currently a bit of a chaotic mess. A call is sent out to you from somewhere in the galaxy, you select the node where the call is coming from, then you travel along a pre-selected path to reach that goal. This can lead to the galaxy feeling less like a specific choice and more like a chore. It can also lead to extremely different feeling play experiences when it takes 5 nodes to get to a mission in one game and 2 nodes to get to the same mission in the next game.

One issue with that system is we can't necessarily control what order you do those encounters in and, on a larger scale, we can't necessarily tell where you are in the macro-game. So to solve this chaotic and disordered delivery of content, we decided to make more of a choose-your-own-route to the endpoint which we call Tendril Galaxies.



With Tendril Galaxies, you get some novelty every time you replay, but the main story missions are delivered in order of the narrative. These are a lot smaller than the current galaxy, but they will have far more obvious paths to take. When you first enter a Tendril Galaxy, you are explicitly choosing where to go and what to do. Do you want to deal with two hard nodes and a vendor, or would you rather deal with 2 medium nodes and a hard node with a nebula on each one? These nodes will also have encounters largely designed to fit within that Tendril Galaxy (with some randomization still around, of course).



At the end of each mission, you will receive a request from your crew to return to your station where you will find new things that await. New vendors, a new mission, new NPCs, possibly even new hireable crew. These changes to your station will help prepare you for the fight ahead...but be warned, the fight ahead will be preparing for you as well.



We should have a new version of Galaxies up on the beta branch within the next few days so you can try out this new setup. We still have a lot of content gaps to fill, but we hope that the idea of where we are taking this comes across better with this new version.

As always, let us know what you think and what bugs you find.

Cheers,
Warballoon

Greetings Captains!

We've just pushed out a hotfix to our beta branch for you to play with should you choose. Several aspects of the game have changed, so it may feel a bit different at first.

- Navigation is now divided up into Easy/Medium/Hard nodes which will determine the difficulty of encounters you run into.
- In-game traveling vendors have been added into the Nav Map as well.
- Encounters with choices will offer different rewards on Easy/Medium/Hard difficulties.
- Most kits have stronger equivalent kits that you can find and use.
- Walls being destroyed now can spawn a small particle that may damage your crew or enemies, and will start to explode more as a ship gets weaker.
- Certain ship walls will consistently stay in their raised state for an improved ship display.
- Many vendors have had their inventories updated, and a Droid Merchant has been added.
- Plenty of bug fixes

As we extend out the content for the next phase of the game and update our in-game balance, we'd like to get your feedback on several items:

- Do any weapons/kits feel super overpowered or underpowered?
- Do any parts of the game just feel weird or confusing?
- Is there any specific encounter you'd like to see improvement on?
- Are you noticing slowdowns in any particular areas?

Cheers,
Warballoon

Greetings Star Commanders!

Today, we have rolled out an update to the Beta branch for testing. There is still a good amount of content to add in before release and some places where things are unfinished (Nav, for instance), but we wanted to get our general structure down and finalized before finishing up the content.

First, let's start with the good stuff. What's new?


For a while, we have felt that our combat has not had a lot of strategy to it. You stand in one spot, the enemy stands in another, and the battle comes down to who remains when the fight is done. To fix this, we have added in several objects to our maps (with more to come) that provide cover when fighting. When any character is hidden behind cover, they will take slightly-to-significantly less damage depending how strong the cover is.




One of the main difference you will notice is that we have brought back energy, but in a different form. Energy now works as a constantly refilling resource which your crew will use for most of their abilities. Healing, Ship Repair, Weaponry, Cloaking...all of these now use energy as opposed to the previous ammo system we had for kits. This means that your pistols are only limited by your recharge rate in combat and can be used repeatedly.




The rebellion has been growing in the time it has taken us to release this game, so you can imagine just how strong it has gotten. They now fight all over, and you might just get a distress call from a Star Command vessel in need. Additionally, you will now see a constant Rebel Threat meter which will grow or decrease based upon your actions in-game. If it gets too high, they will come at all parts of the galaxy with full force. They are of course willing to work with you to grow their strength and might offer you various trades to not fight them in certain places, such as a battle droid or rare weaponry. If you take their deal, they will grow in strength. However, you can also call their bluff and make several encounters intentionally harder. If you win one of these harder encounters, you will take down their threat level a bit.




With the aforementioned new energy system, we decided to make improvements to two of our more problematic systems, healing and repair. These are still done with kits, but are now done via a pressed button cast rather than internal behavior settings. Those settings are still there, but they have instead been given to droids that will work with you as discovered. Additionally, we have also given most of our ship systems and kits three different levels of strength and rarity, so there will almost certainly be better stuff for you to track down as the game proceeds.




Getting money and XP is nice and all, but it just isn't as exciting as being able to choose your own rewards. To this end, we have added and updated our rewards system to give plenty of objects at the end of various encounters & missions. Some, like scrap and money, are far more commonly found in the galaxy. Others, like new crew and droids, are far less common, but will occasionally come up.



We also do have plenty of smaller pieces that we have added in as well, including a "Select All Crew" keyboard shortcut (Y), purchasable inventories on some NPCs, and several bug fixes.

We do plan to continue working on this, including more encounters, weapons, maps, scenarios, missions, storyline, and more. We also need to do a few more balance passes, so things like the in-game economy and drop rates are still very WIP right now.

In any case, let us know what you think. Thank you for all of your support!

Cheers,
Warballoon

Greetings Captains!

Many of you have been asking questions about the Star Command Isometric Enhanced New Creation Editor, aka SCIENCE. For those that don't know about it, SCIENCE is our in-game modding tool. We have occasionally had the Maps portion of SCIENCE available in a test version on the beta branch, but it largely has not fully been discussed. Please keep in mind that some of the screenshots and assets we will be showing here are still works in progress.

Modding is one of those things which we have designed and redesigned in our efforts to get it right. We want players to be able to customize and build everything in the game, but we also want to keep the difficulty level & story as presented. We want creators to have the freedom to do whatever they want to do, but we also want to ensure that someone doesn't break the full game to the point of needing a redownload simply by making a mistake while learning our tools. Ideally, we want SCIENCE to be a tool set that is not incredibly difficult to understand and use for beginners, but has enough flexibility that experienced modders can really do a lot.





The main portion of SCIENCE right now is the Maps portion, where you can build or create a ship of various objects/weaponry/crew to fight or explore. You can pick a hull, draw out a floor map, add in walls/objects/treasures, and create a decent looking map. But a ship is far more than just a simple collection of floors and objects, and we want you to be able to make yours more than that as well. Within SCIENCE Maps, we have added several characters that you can bring in and place on your ship. We have also extended out our Captain Creator to allow for non-captains to be built and saved into SCIENCE, just on the off chance someone wants to write themselves into their own Star Command fanfic.



We have also added in things like Trigger Tiles and Cargo Areas that you will be able to use in your own encounters in the future.



Much like any good house/apartment/dumpster, your ship will also need some good lighting. While we can't bring the entirety of Unity's lighting engine into the game, we have been working on a custom tool to allow you to build and save your own lights onto a map. You can set their range, color, type, intensity, as well as update a lot of position/rotation aspects. They are saved in a list, so you can go back and change them as needed.





Once you have built a ship with lights, you might be wondering how to test it out. For this, we have added a Quick Battle option. In Quick Battle mode, you choose a ship you have created and then choose how many extra characters you want to put on it. Once chosen, the ship spawns with your specifications and the battle begins! Can a generic player ship take down your custom ship? If so, you can always spawn another ship and continue the fight!





Once you have edited your ship to be crazy difficult, you may well want to show off your work and watch other people die to it on Twitch. Or just put it up on Steam Workshop. For that, we have added a Bundler as well as tools to upload to and browse from our Star Command Steam Workshop page. With the bundler, you can choose to put in any set of custom Maps, custom Characters, and custom lighting designs.



Once you have chosen all the items you want in this bundle, you can then upload it and watch the comments roll in.





While this is the start of what we have planned for SCIENCE, we have plenty more to come. Probably the next pieces after these will be custom Objects and Hulls, so you can fully customize all aspects of your ship. From there, we also want you to be able to write your own stories, so we have plans to add in areas for custom Dialog, Encounters, and Missions. Among the other options we have discussed for some point in the future are custom Races, custom Galaxies, and a place to build and move around the UI.

We hope to have this in your hands for testing and breaking the game fairly soon. We can't wait to see what feedback you have for us and what ships you create!

Cheers,
Warballoon

Greetings Captains!

We hope you have been enjoying Beta 2.1 so far. Today, we will be pushing up an update to our Save system which may or may not cause some issues in the short term. With this change in place, the games you save from here forward should now load you properly back at the node you were on, within the encounter you were facing, and with everything left as you remember it. We expect that this will cause several bugs and look forward to fixing them as quickly as we can.


Saves can very much be a game breaker when they are available whenever and wherever. The galaxy tends to feel a lot less dangerous when you can simply save at every node, especially in games where you might wind up with easier fights or a less damaged ship simply by reloading.

In addition to being a game breaking feature, they can also actually break the game. Those of you who have been in the Alpha/Beta for a while have likely noticed that we have gone through several iterations of saves as well as save bugs. Many of you have lost Captains or Crew due to saving games when they were on other ships, never to be loaded again. Others of you have noticed saves that never seem to reload, instead leaving you hanging on a "Loading: Textures" display. Most people who sent their saves into us for fixing had errors within these two categories.

To fix both of these, we tried a setup for a while where you had to load at your station or at least at the nearest warp gate. This seemed like an optimal solution both for the bugs as well as the danger factor. What we found was that while this did help a lot for many broken saves, this instead led to a lot of confusion within the game. It feels weird in play to be fighting a pirate fleet, save your game, then come back later to that save at the station as if it was all a dream. Coming back to an old save and already feel weird enough without us changing it further.


After hearing a lot of feedback about how our saves felt, we have come back around to making Saves available anywhere, loading you in hopefully the exact situation where you last left off. While this does still feel a bit game breaking in an overall sense, we feel that we can counteract this with proper balance. Even if we are unable to, the trade-off is worth it for a less confusing save system.

Unfortunately, that means that we may have some save bugs in the short term. So we are asking you all to try it out and let us know what you think. If you have a save bug, let us know. If you don't have a save bug, let us know.

As always, thanks for all of your support!

Cheers,
Warballoon