Star Command Galaxies News

Greetings Captains!

Christmas has come and gone and we have been watching the game analytics and bug reports throughout the holidays. Unity allows us to track any errors or crashes that anyone playing the game comes across. We had some, and to be honest we never expect to have zero. But in previous launches we had dozens and dozens and many of those were full fledge crashes and major errors. This release has been very different. The game looks very solid and we feel like we have definitely moved into a polish and content phase, which is exactly where we wanted to be with our Beta.

So what does that mean? It means we can do what we have wanted to do for a very long time: create some awesome content and work with our community on fixing up the game.

Our focus for the next week or two will be combat and crew behavior. We are starting a new forum discussion and we are asking you to contribute any of your ideas, thoughts, complaints or bugs. We know that there is some wonkiness to their decision making and how much they commit to your user commands vs. automated elements. We also want to add in range circles for each crew member so you know where they can shoot/heal/repair.

To help with this we have introduced a mode to the game: ENDLESS MODE. In short, you will spawn in the station and battle it out with never ending waves of enemies until you die. As you progress new weapons and crew will spawn. This mode should allow you to quickly play through just the crew combat portions of the game against a variety of enemies and aid in giving feedback for what you think combat needs.

We hope in the coming weeks and months our fans will come back to the game and see that, given a solid base to work from, we can quickly create new content and quickly iterate new ideas and polish old ones.

We also have some new bug fixes since our release a week ago. The biggest one to note is the resolution reset. THIS WILL RESET YOUR GAME PREFERENCES. Why? Basically we have placed our resolution settings in the wrong place and the only way to fix it is to reset all save games. This will help fix resolutions getting stuck.

PATCH NOTES

• Added in Endless Mode
  
• Resolution reset - refactored where we store resolution settings so they can
• be more consistently overwritten (GAME PREFERENCES WILL BE RESET)
  
• Fix to options menu getting stuck in windowed mode
  
• Fixed options menu to no longer display “default”
  
• Addressed low resolution (1366x768) menu problems
  

Looking forward to getting your thoughts!

Cheers,
Warballoon

Greetings Captains!

Happy holidays to everyone! We are super excited to announce the release of Star Command Galaxies Beta, just in time for a holiday break. We know this is a time of the year when you have a TON of new game options but we hope that you will download the latest update and check out the progress we have made with Galaxies.

So what does Beta mean? It means that all of our features are in the game and we feel that the game is highly stable. Does this mean bug free? Not yet, but close. We still have a ways to go on polish and balance – but we need your help and feedback for those! Please leave any and all forms of feedback on our Steam Discussions forum - we read them all and they can make a HUGE difference to the final game.

This is also only one ‘galaxy’ of gameplay. We plan on launching with two or three full galaxies of adventure, danger and intergalactic hangovers.

For those asking what have we been doing, the answer is simple: working hard on Galaxies. We hope that all that work will now start to show as you pick up the latest version of the game and go on your own adventures.

Galaxies was always conceived as a moddable, expandable, starship simulation platform that we could support for years to come. We finally have hit that point. We will no longer be chasing concepts and instead be working on new weapons, new ships, new maps, new missions and tons of surprises.

We have now transitioned into content-creation mode. We have literally been looking forward to this for 4 years and cannot wait to make some awesome adventures for you and your crew to go on.





Below are some of the MAJOR areas of new features or drastic improvements.

• Completely rewritten support for low-resolution screens. The GUI overall should be much more predictable and stable.
  
• Added 9 new classes to the game: Engineer, Tactical, Science, Handyman, Scout, Doctor, Machinist, Soldier and Hacker.
  
• Brand new crew job menu for choosing your crew members career path.
  
• New perks menu for upgrading your crew members
  
• New crew desires. Your crew will continue to want to grow and acquire new things like beds, art and other unique items and experiences.
  
• Over 15 new missions.
  
• Over 15 new weapons, items and upgrades.
  
• New stores, new vendor missions, new stations.
  
• Star Command Report Card: receive bonuses based on your daily performance and pay your crew their daily paycheck (or don’t…)
  
• Completely revised happiness log and events. Crew should be much clearer on what they want and what you need to do to make it happen.
  
• New indicators for helping you decide what each crew member should be using.
  
• Healing and repair automation.
  
• Countless cosmetic improvements to every area of the UI.
  
• Brand new options menu brings the game to the 21st century.
  

We also have hundreds of bug fixes, tweaks and other improvements that we won’t bother listing here.



On to top of that, our Trello list is always available to the public, where you can see our daily/weekly/monthly progress. You can see our current Trello list of things we are working on here.

In the next weeks we will be working on new bugs that are discovered by the larger Beta community as well as polishing the Midorian campaign. We will also be shifting the game to be more area/episode driven and rolling out S.C.I.E.N.C.E. for our mod community (asap). With S.C.I.E.N.C.E. you will be able to build & add your own ships, stations and modify just about everything in the game.

We hope you have a wonderful Holiday Season. We appreciate you sticking with us after all these years. We know that some of you are frustrated with the “timeline” and all we can do is continue to work on making the game the best possible experience we can. We really want to hear from you on the Steam forums if you have thoughts on bugs, balance, missions or just general feedback.

Most of all, enjoy!

Cheers,
Warballoon

Greetings Captains!

We know it’s been a VERY long time since we had an update. We have been working in the lab every single day on making Star Command an amazing experience and we are ready to start rolling out beta.

We just put the Beta on the (surprise) BETA branch for testing. We have done our own internal testing as well as some test with streamers to squash as much as we could. We are going to be using the beta branch to roll out more bug fixes, improvements and gameplay tweaks based on the feedback we are getting from our analytics and in the steam forums.

If you do download the beta please feel free to post your feedback in the beta forum that we have started here.



Below are some of the MAJOR areas of new features or drastic improvements.

• Completely rewritten support for low-resolution screens. The GUI overall should be much more predictable and stable.
  
• Added 9 new classes to the game: Engineer, Tactical, Science, Handyman, Scout, Doctor, Machinist, Soldier and Hacker.
  
• Brand new crew job menu for choosing your crew members career path.
  
• New perks menu for upgrading your crew members
  
• New crew desires. Your crew will continue to want to grow and acquire new things like beds, art and other unique items and experiences.
  
• Over 15 new missions.
  
• Over 15 new weapons, items and upgrades.
  
• New stores, new vendor missions, new stations.
  
• Star Command Report Card: receive bonuses based on your daily performance and pay your crew their daily paycheck (or don’t…)
  
• Completely revised happiness log and events. Crew should be much clearer on what they want and what you need to do to make it happen.
  
• New indicators for helping you decide what each crew member should be using.
  
• Healing and repair automation.
  
• Countless cosmetic improvements to every area of the UI.
  
• Brand new options menu brings the game to the 21st century.
  

We also have hundreds of bug fixes, tweaks and other improvements that we won’t bother listing here.

To be clear, we are aware of many bugs and will continue fixing these until we roll out the full beta in December.You can see our current Trello list of things we are working on here. This is always available to the public and you can see our daily/weekly/monthly progress.

We hope you enjoy the progress and we can’t wait to roll this out to the general public when it is ready.

Enjoy!

Greetings Captains!

We are super excited to announce the release of Alpha 11 to the general public. This is not our largest release but it is our most solid. We have spent the last couple months polishing things up, fixing hundreds of bugs, adding some long overdue features and ironing out a lot of kinks.

At the most simple level Alpha 11 should feel like a solid, but short, game. We have built missions we feel very happy about, our station system feels solid, ship combat is in good shape and crew should be responsive and predictive. In other words you should no longer be “fighting” the game. Much of this laying the groundwork for our next release: Beta 1.

We are excited to announce that Alpha 11 will be our final alpha. Our next release will be Beta 1 and from there on out our focus will be on content, balance and polish.

High level release notes below:

• Mouseover info panel info added for objects in the game showing good match, bad match and other objects crew members should be using.
  
• All missions have been rewritten or reimagined to be in better alignment with the current state of the game
  
• Loyalty events are in the game and will be expanded in greatly for Beta 1
  
• Fog of War fixed!!!!!
  
• Adjusted the starting station to be more fun
  
• Revised store building so that it is simpler and more natural.
  
• Added in Pizzeria and Bar stores as well as ongoing missions from those stores.
  
• Mutiny, spread disloyalty, spread loyalty and other loyalty backing elements have been implemented and will be expanded on for Beta 1
  
• Tons of adjustments to animations, sprites, balance, etc.
  
• Removed a ton of old code for crew desires and loyalty that was creating lot of interesting problems
  
• Font sizes adjusted for all messages
  
• Adjustments to when phases can be changed
  
• Money, scrap and food now properly being added and subtracted.
  
• Backing pieces for new crew jobs for Beta 1
  
  

Cheers,
Warballoon

Greetings Captains!

Another quick update fixing some more bugs. Notes below!

• Fix to exploding pirate station not giving mission credit.
  
• Fix to occasional QuickTravel Null Issue.
  
• Slight adjustment to character selection and build mode.
  
• Potential fix to some Pathfinding issues that could occur over time and mess with object usage, particularly with multiple selected characters.
  
• Relinked the ShipCombatGrol mission to the end of DestroyPirateStation
  
• Hangover and other status effects should no longer cause someone's head to move and disappear.
  
• Crew desires now properly save and load.
  
• Hiding Class Change body swaps while we fix up the issue.
  
• Fix to box deletion on right click issue.
  

Cheers,
Warballoon