Dust Fleet News

Hello, commanders!

It's been a really exciting two weeks since Dust Fleet's release! The community has been so helpful and I really do appreciate all your support. Thanks to everyone who has been sending in suggestions and bug reports, it was incredibly useful in getting those early bug fix releases out. It's also been really helpful in helping to understand what features I should prioritise next. So let's talk about the future!

I've used your feedback to help put together a plan for Dust Fleet's first updates. Here's what's coming in the weeks ahead!

[h2]Update 1: Quality of Life[/h2]
This is being worked on right now, and will be the next update.

[h3]Active pause[/h3]
I've heard you loud and clear! Active pause is definitely something you want to see, so it's coming to Dust Fleet.

[h3]Movement and formation[/h3]
Currently, when you issue a move order, ships arrange themselves into a wall formation based on the size of the biggest ship. So if you include a carrier in there, your wall could end up being enormous. I'm looking into ways for ships to organise themselves a little better in these situations. I'll also clean up some unusual behaviours, like when a ship lags behind the others.

[h3]Group by type[/h3]
Ship selection was a common topic. Once you get a large number of ships, the ship selection bar becomes less useable. So, with this update, ships are going to be stacked by loadout. You can expand a stack at any time and assign to groups just as you can now. So selecting all your drilling barques will be as easy as a single click.



[h3]Keep what you capture[/h3]
Ships captured during battles are currently only usable during the battle. This update will allow you to keep them afterwards!

[h3]Toggle overlay[/h3]
A toggle for the the green overlay icons.

[h3]Balance updates[/h3]
A rebalance of ship hull strength, with the aim to make ships last a little longer in a fight. Also, enemy difficulty will be tweaked to give a better challenge in late game situations.

[h3]Carrier manager improvements[/h3]
Easy fighter selection when you have multiple carriers selected.

[h3]More...[/h3]
You'll also see a number of smaller improvements and bugfixes.

After that, looking further ahead, we have more updates planned! More details about these will be announced in future posts, but here's the headlines.

[h2]Update 2: Strategy[/h2]
This will be a collection of updates to improve your strategic options.

You'll get more ship management options, including the ability to upgrade and scrap ships. You'll also be able to promote them to improve their stats, and see the improvement in new stat graphs for each ship.

Rally points for each station will make it easy to get newly built ships to your front line.

These are just a few of the changes planned for this update.

[h2]Update 3: Tactical[/h2]
This update focuses of the real time battles.

Your ships will gain the option to to engage at maximum weapons range, to make better use of beam weapons on mixed loadouts.

Destroyed turrets will be able to be restored during battles, depending on the situation.

In-battle rally points will be added, so newly built ships can immediately move in to a battle in progress.

There'll be more detail about these and other changes for this update as it gets closer.

[h2]Future updates[/h2]
As these updates evolve the game, there'll be more to do and more to improve. I'm looking forward to seeing what suggestions come out of these updates, and will use them to plan the direction of Dust Fleet's future updates.

That's all for now, see you in space!

Hello, commanders!

We've got another bug fix update for you today. This is a quick one that squashes a single specific space bug.

• FIX: Instances where some players get to the end of a mission but it doesn't seem to complete. This could happen in both Campaign and Sector Assault modes.
  

As always, Steam should update you to this version, but to be sure you're running it, check in the bottom right of the main menu, and it should say "1.2". If not, you might need to restart Steam to get it to download the update.

Please do join the community on Discord to give any feedback, and you can find us on Twitter and YouTube.

Hello everyone! Thank you so much for playing the game and for your feedback. Since launch, I've been hard at work squashing all the space bugs I can find. Here's what's included in patch 1.1

Here's what's fixed:

• FIX: Starmap stuck in "updating".
  
• FIX: Double clicking a friendly ship will select all friendly ships of the same type (correct) but also all enemy ships of the same type (incorrect)
  
• FIX: If a mix of friendly and enemy ships are selected, player will be able to control all ships, including the enemy ones.
  
• FIX: Nuke not detonating sometimes (nuke strike)
  
• FIX: Reloading saved game does not restore the tally of existing ships vs scrappage.
  
• FIX: Braddock incorrect portrait in mission "Eyes".
  
• FIX: Blank fleets left behind after a mission when game saved during a mission.
  
• FIX: Rekjavik unable to fit heavy turrets.
  
• FIX: AI ships not following (or abandoning) move orders in some circumstances.
  
• FIX: Orca unable to be captured.
  
• FIX: All ships show as "station" in shipyard and loadout stats.
  
• FIX: Module buttons available for stations present in the battle, causing issues when they're used. During a battle, station modules should only be available from stations in neighbouring locations, not the one at the current battle location.
  
• FIX: On "Assault" missions, the mission is missing when a mid-mission game is loaded (see the mission text in the top left during battle), but reappears when restarting. When the mission is missing, it means the battle cannot be won.
  
• FIX: Hold Fire does not work for ships that have already begun shooting at a target.
  
• FIX: Mission: "Nobody likes packing" - Script lock if asteroids are destroyed at the beginning.
  
• FIX: Repair turrets continuously fire even after something is repaired, instead of switching to other ships to repair.
  

Thanks again and please be sure to leave a review and your feedback so I can keep making the game the best it can be.

See you in space!

Hi everyone!

It’s the day we’ve all been waiting for!

Dust Fleet is now live on PC! 🎉

[previewyoutube]https://youtu.be/-cPHE_VdYlw [/previewyoutube]

Thank you all for your support throughout development! I’m super excited to show you everything we’ve accomplished through development, and I hope you enjoy Dust Fleet much as I enjoyed making it for you.

If you would like to connect with our community, you can check out our Twitter or YouTube! Don’t forget, you can leave us a review, share part of your journey, tell us about a bug you’ve found, or just to give some feedback in our Discord.

That’s it for today - I’ll see you next time.

[h2]Dev Diary: It's happening
[/h2]
Hi, I'm Glenn, developer at Orbiting Disco, and this is another Dust Fleet dev diary.

Okay, where to start.

Well, I think the big headline is that it's finished.

Almost.

We're still working on all the last-minute clean up and launch prep, but it's true - Dust Fleet is launching REAL SOON™. We're gonna be on Steam, GOG and the Epic Game Store.

So what's in the finished package? Let me talk you through it.

[h2]THE CAMPAIGNS[/h2]

Dust Fleet comes with two main campaigns. The first is Prelude, which is mostly a tutorial. Those of you who have played the demo will have played this already, although it is slightly tweaked from the demo to account for some new gameplay mechanics. The main campaign, though, is all-new. Defence of the Dust Zone sees you pitted against a rogue element of Earth's government intent on finding something hidden deep within the Dust Zone. You as the player have to help the people who live there, the Zoners, to fight them off and protect the Dust Zone's secrets. To do that, you'll be playing through a series of story missions and initiating your own battles to keep the enemy at bay.

All the missions are fully voice acted by a great cast, and I'm really proud with how the story turned out.

But that's not all!

[h2]SECTOR ASSAULT[/h2]

Once you've completed the campaigns, Sector Assault is waiting for you. This has similar gameplay to the campaigns, but on a randomised map with no story missions. Just you vs an AI. You can tweak map size and difficulty to get the kind of challenge you want. The full tech tree from the campaign is here too, giving you plenty of scope to try everything out that you might not have gotten to in the campaign.

[h2]THE EDITOR[/h2]

When I was making Dust Fleet, I quickly realised that hand-coding scripts for the missions was just not going to work. So I wrote an editor. But I didn't like it, so I wrote a better editor. And then I decided that if it worked for me, it could work for everyone! So, the game ships with the same editing tools I used.

Now, these are a little complex, and the game won't ship with a full manual for them because it would be huge and no one would want to read it, but I think I'll probably do some walkthrough videos to help you get started. I also can't guarantee any particular level of support for the editors - it's just me here, and I just won't have the bandwidth to be able to answer all questions and issues that might arise from using them. But as long as the game is alive, I will make it my goal to tackle bugs and make sure they continue to work. Ultimately, if the editors see a lot of use, I'll be relying on you the lovely Dust Fleet community to help each other where you can.

Also, the editor and game includes support for mod.io. If you don't know what this is, it's a place where users can share mods for supported games, a lot like Steam workshop, but it'll also work for our players on Epic and GOG. In the case of Dust Fleet, the mods will be campaigns created in the editor. With just a few clicks, you can get your campaign up onto mod.io, and other players can download it in the campaigns menu of the game. So any campaign you make can go straight into player's hands.

[h2]IT'S ALMOST HERE[/h2]

So, the game is coming real soon. You might have caught me chatting with Justin from Media Indie Exchange and Jirard from The Completionist during the recent REMIX live event, where they played through 20 minutes of the game. That was quite exciting, my first ever media event. If you missed it, I've posted that part of the livestream to the Dust Fleet channel. We've got other things in progress as well, so you should be seeing a lot more from Dust Fleet very soon.

I'm really proud of Dust Fleet, and I hope you enjoy playing it.

I'll see you in space!

Add Dust Fleet to your Steam wishlist: Help fill out the wiki See Dust Fleet's appearence on ReMIX Live 2023 (4:05:20)

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]