Space Haven News

Space Haven Alpha 5 - The Cool UI Update.

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Greetings, Spacefarers.

Christmas is closing in and so is the Yogscast Jingle Jam! We have decided to join the Jingle Jam Bundle this year, with one of our older games Battlevoid: Harbinger. All the proceeds of the bundle go to charity! We try to do something charitable every year, even if it something small. Part of the fun of having some success is the ability to give back! =)

Additionally, the Yogscast crew has promised to play Space Haven in their stream, and we're really excited to see that. This will be a great opportunity for you to see the current state of Space Haven, and do check out their Jingle Jam streams throughout the whole of December!

The Jingle Jam is already live. The Yogscast plan on covering Space Haven on the 14th sometime between 11am-2pm GMT, be sure to tune in and watch them play then!
We've been working on improving the user-interface the past month, to support you on your journey through space. Step-by-step the UI is improving, making everything more intuitive and valuable information more accessible.

Moving things around, improving and adding some stuff and sprinkling it with some new features. Above is a screenshot of how the UI looks now. We've rearranged things a bit to allow for the possibility to show more resources in the top bar with a customizable window. Crew members are also shown at the top and how many are shown can be customized. We've added a development progress bar to the main menu, giving a very rough estimate of when a next update could arrive.

Customizable resource window in the top bar of the user interface. You can play with your own desired setting. If you want to see a lot of resources on the screen at all times you can keep the resource window large. If you don't, just keep it small =)

Crew members are now shown at the top part of the user interface. You can also customize how many crew members you want to see at a time with a drop-down list. Various elements, such as mineable asteroids, derelict ships and spaceships belonging to other factions are shown in their own part of the UI.

Spaceships and stations now have roofs! And you can see them. This is the beginnings for being able to add cool stuff on the roof, like turrets, shields and solar panels.

Some other cool new UI features:

Big notifications for important events.
A much requested even faster game speed option.
The game clock has also been refined.
Bind objects to groups using ctrl+(0-9).

Furthermore, we added a log to the game, giving that nice little touch to creating a story. Want to know that Pete got the "shat pants" condition? No? Well, you will know anyway.

We have also started working on ship-to-ship combat, which is also why the UI needed some redesigning to be able to support and show valuable information related to ship-to-ship battles. Christmas is closing in fast, we're not sure if we can manage a beginnings of ship-to-ship combat update before it but we will try. We will see how it goes =)

You can find more information on Space Haven and the Alpha at:
http://bugbyte.fi/spacehaven/

Discord: https://discord.gg/zx2AN4F
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceHaven/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpaceHavenGame
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BugbyteGames/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spacehavengame/

We also have our mailing list which is great for keeping up to date with important news: http://bugbyte.fi/register

Until next time. Thanks for reading! =)

Space Haven Alpha 4 - The Big Mixed Bag Of Goodies Update.

Girl. You walked into the wrong ship. Now show our Captain Pedro some respect or you gun' get it!

Greetings, Spacefarers.

Time flies when you are working on something cool and we believe this is the most exciting update for Space Haven so far! This big mixed bag of goodies update has it all, the biggest feature updates include:

A new alien and the alien behavior implemented further.
Hailing and communicating with other factions, with faction relationships, settlements and more.
Boarding with the ability to surrender, take prisoners and demand ransoms implemented.
A tool to create your own prison areas aboard your ships and take prisoners of your own.
AI behavior and user interface improvements.
Medical beds now functional with doctors capable of tending to and patching up injured patients.
Graphical additions and general improvements.
A ton of bug fixes and many more smaller feature implementations and improvements.

This new alien is capable of charging and knocking down your crew members. It also transforms incapacitated crew members to cocoons and drags them to the alien lair.

We added a new alien to the game. This specimen is capable of charging forward like a squid in water, by using it's tentacles to create a forward motion force. This allows it to quickly cover a lot of distance and even ram a crew member or other target.

The alien does its thing on a incapacitated crew member.

Once a crew member has been incapacitated this alien is capable of transforming them to an alien cocoon. This locks the crew member into a paralyzed state, optimal for the alien to transport them.

Holy shit, those are some big eggs! They don't look like the kind you boil in the morning. We need to get the hell out of here.

The new alien will eventually drag the cocoon to the alien lair and plaster the poor captured crew member to a wall. It's up to you to decide if you want to try to rescue the poor souls.

You can now hail and communicate with other factions. Communication is currently done from the bridge module, and once both parties are ready to receive each others transmissions a communications window will pop up to allow you to interact with the other party.

We've also implemented faction relationships, discussion mood, power balance between fleets, the ability to surrender, agree to cease fire and pay settlements. This same interaction system works also for interactions with characters you meet or capture.

All factions are now capable of attacking not only you, but also each other. Pirates may attack you and take all your crew members captive, then demand a settlement for setting you free. You are able to do the same for any other faction group you meet. Pirates may also attack civilians or any other faction, and the factions can make their own settlements between each other.

A character may give up and surrender to the enemy in the heat of combat, the chance for this rises with every wound the character sustains. When a character has surrendered you can no longer draft or control them.

We've created a new tool to enable you to create a prison of your own desire. Build a room or many rooms to be used as a prison with more or less comfort. Prisoners would probably appreciate a Kitchen and a toilet would be good too, but neither of these are requirements. It's up to you to decide how comfortable you want your prisoners to be, and if you want them to stay alive or not.

Medical beds are now functional and will help crew members heal from their wounds and Doctors can patch up more serious cases.

Inevitably, all this fighting causes wounds and injuries for your crew members. We've made medical beds functional and linked them to the Doctor skill. Medical beds use IV fluids to help patients heal and give the patient nutrients while resting, and Doctors will use medical supplies to operate on patients and patch up open wounds.

Laurie's open wound was patched up by a doctor. She's doing good but feeling a little lonely in the med bay all by herself.

The character conditions system allows us to create injuries, wounds and open wounds. An open wound might cause a crew member to bleed to death. It can heal by itself if the crew member is lucky, but bringing the individual to a medical bed and having a Doctor patch them up will close wound and thus prevent the character from bleeding to death.

Space Haven is steadily transforming into the game of our dreams, hopefully yours as well! It's been a pleasure bringing this update to you, we're once again one step closer to Steam Early Access launch.

You can find more information on Space Haven and the Alpha at:
http://bugbyte.fi/spacehaven/

Discord: https://discord.gg/zx2AN4F
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceHaven/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpaceHavenGame
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BugbyteGames/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spacehavengame/

We also have our mailing list which is great for keeping up to date with important news: http://bugbyte.fi/register

Until next time. Thanks for reading! =)

Space Haven Alpha 3 - The Resource Overhaul.

Greetings, Spacefarers.

How has your summer been? Ours has been a nice mix of hot and rainy. We enjoyed our 3 weeks of vacation immensely, and it brought us a whole lot of new energy to work more on Space Haven. We've been quietly working more on this next Alpha update for more than a few weeks already, wanting to announce our vacation ending and giving you a nice surprise in form of a new Alpha update at the same time =)

What is new? You might ask. Well, what is not new! Let's jump into it all, shall we.

NOTE! Some of the new facilities are still lacking coloring and texturing.

New Facilities and Resources

We've added 7 new resource production facilities, and modified the functions of the existing ones a little bit. The purpose of this resource overhaul was to give us a better base to expand on, and make it easier to continue adding some more depth to the game in the future. The underlying resource tree will enable a wider array of various resources and both low and high tech facilities, as well as production chains that make sense.

Water Purifier - Transforms ice into purified water, essential for many life forms.
Chemical Refinery - Used to produce various chemicals. Releases hazardous gas and is noisy.
Metal Refinery - Transforms carbon and basic metals to steel plates. Releases heat and is noisy.
Energy Refinery - Transforms energy crystal to energy rods and hyperium to hyperfuel. Releases hazardous gas and is noisy.
Scrapper - Transforms scrap materials into a variety of usable resources. Releases heat and is noisy.
Assembler - The assembler produces basic construction components, including Soft block, Hull blocks and Infrablocks.
Micro-Weaver - The Micro-Weaver creates fabrics from fibers.
Cell Fuser - The Cell Fuser uses electronic components and energy rods to create energy cells.
Electronic Fabricator - Transforms noble metal and raw chemical to electronic parts.
Optronics Fabricator - The high-tech Optronics Fabricator is capable of producing optronics components.
Advanced Assembler - The advanced assembler facility is capable of producing high-tech construction components, such as tech blocks and energy blocks.

In addition to these we also added a battery module to the game, essential for sudden bursts of power consumption or power grid failures.

Added resources and new icons.

A resource overhaul wouldn't be an overhaul without new resources and of course new fantastic looking icons! Our graphics designer has been crafting the new facilities and icons for a long time.

You are now able to customize which resources you want to see in the top bar, and in which way.

This brings us to the next improvement. Ship settings now have a section where you can customize which resources you deem important and want to keep an extra eye on. You'll be able to customize the importance (in which order they are shown), if they are shown at all when you don't currently have any of the type and if you want to be notified if a certain resource is starting to run low.

You can now butcher aliens for meat and make a meal. If you hate one of your crew members...

Speaking of running low on resources. Malakai uses his butcher skills to make some nice monster meat out of an alien body. Become a notorious alien hunter and feed your crew with some greens (It's good for you! Or is it?). If one of the crew members vanishes and the others are having a nice meal filled with meat recipes, you might want to be a bit worried.

Sandbox Scenario

Some type of sandbox mode has been asked for a lot, so we decided to create a start scenario where resources are abundant! And you start with a crew of 8. This scenario will let you focus more on building your fleet without worrying about running out of resources, great for when you want to see how a ship design you have in mind works when brought alive in the game.

'Mobile Platform' built by Kenji

We are once again one step closer to Steam Early Access! =) You can find more information on Space Haven and the Alpha at:

http://bugbyte.fi/spacehaven

We love to hear from you guys so don't hesitate to come have a chat with us =) You can connect with us from through the channels below:

Discord: http://discord.gg/spacehaven
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceHaven/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpaceHavenGame
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spacehavengame/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BugbyteGames/

We also have our mailing list which is great for keeping up to date with important news: http://bugbyte.fi/register

Until next time. Thanks for reading! =)

Space Haven Alpha 3 - The Resource Overhaul.

Water Purifier - Transforms ice into purified water, essential for many life forms.
Chemical Refinery - Used to produce various chemicals. Releases hazardous gas and is noisy.
Metal Refinery - Transforms carbon and basic metals to steel plates. Releases heat and is noisy.
Energy Refinery - Transforms energy crystal to energy rods and hyperium to hyperfuel. Releases hazardous gas and is noisy.
Scrapper - Transforms scrap materials into a variety of usable resources. Releases heat and is noisy.
Assembler - The assembler produces basic construction components, including Soft block, Hull blocks and Infrablocks.
Micro-Weaver - The Micro-Weaver creates fabrics from fibers.
Cell Fuser - The Cell Fuser uses electronic components and energy rods to create energy cells.
Electronic Fabricator - Transforms noble metal and raw chemical to electronic parts.
Optronics Fabricator - The high-tech Optronics Fabricator is capable of producing optronics components.
Advanced Assembler - The advanced assembler facility is capable of producing high-tech construction components, such as tech blocks and energy blocks.

In addition to these we also added a battery module to the game, essential for sudden bursts of power consumption or power grid failures.

Discord: http://discord.gg/spacehaven
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceHaven/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpaceHavenGame
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spacehavengame/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BugbyteGames/

We also have our mailing list which is great for keeping up to date with important news: http://bugbyte.fi/register

Until next time. Thanks for reading! =)

Space Haven Alpha 2 - The Fleet Update.

Build a fleet of spaceships

Space Haven now allows you to build multiple ships and form a fleet of spaceships. We've had to redesign and implement some new features to enable this.

The current implementation allows for a max of 2 very large 2x2 ship grid tile sized ships (Seen in scenario 2) or 8 small 1x1 ship grid tile sized ships. You can of course make a combination of these, and create various other sized spaceships such as 1x2 for example.

You can see the user interface to create a new spaceship above. You will be able to select where you want to start building a new spaceship and also the new spaceship grid size. Once the position is chosen you will be able to start building the new spaceship hull.

You can now select the placement of each ship in a sector when jumping out of hyperspace. The same grid system is used to allow you to be able to select where in a sector each spaceship of your fleet goes as you drop out of hyperspace. Setting positions is done with a drag&drop mechanism.

The prepare for hyperspace jump user interface has been redesigned to support multiple ships in form of a list. You'll be able to control preparations from this menu, and give orders to your ships individually. Really happy with the result.

Sketching

You've given us a lot of feedback and some suggestions. Sketching was mentioned by many of you, so we decided to carry out your wish! Space Haven now features a spaceship sketch mechanism, which you can use to sketch out spaceships right from the start and build up the spaceship little by little. The sketch tools are:

Sketch: Sketch out your ship - Sketches will not be build until you activate them.
Activate sketch: Activates an area of a sketch into an actual plan for hull to be built.
Erase sketch: Removes sketch plans.

We have seen that one of the most beloved features of Space Haven has been the building part of the game. We're super happy about this, because we thought long and hard of where to steer our focus when it came to core features and decided to focus a lot on the actual building part of the game.

Salvage

We have redesigned how salvage works. You can now salvage almost everything from any spaceship, which has been cleared out of it's crew/enemies and is now derelict. The current implementation has three different scrap recources; Metal scrap, advanced metal scrap and electronic scrap. These might change with time as the game develops.

When you send out your crew to salvage, you won't know exactly how much will be received from each facility on the ship. This is slightly random, and could later on be tied to a skill, such as construction skill for example. You will, however, be able to choose what kind of scrap resources you want the crew to try to salvage from the derelict ship.

The scrap resources can be brought to the Scrapper facility, which is able to refine them back to usable resources.

Work-in-progress image of the Scrapper from our graphic artist screen.

Scrapper completed.

The Scrapper

A new facility has been introduced to the game. The scrapper is tightly related to salvaging. Salvaging ships will generate various scrap resources, which can be brought to this scrapper facility. Strip a spaceship clean of almost everything and bring it all here to be transformed to usable resources once again!

One of our Alpha players wrote a store about their journey, you can read it below. We would like to see more of these screenshots/video + story combinations. They are really fun to read! =)

Captain Deacon:

"Thanks for coming everyone, I know you're all very busy doing... stuff; I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for your efforts in getting us here to the end of the galaxy. Your hard work has been very much appreciated and you've done whatever I've asked without any fuss or complaining (except that time you ran around the derelict crying like a little baby, Mariah, not your best moment).

We've built an amazing vessel together, which is a small miracle when you think about it, considering how much you all hate each other and me, in particular. But that's not all that surprising really when you see the kind of things you get up to: watching people in their sleep, following others into toilets, crapping yourselves whenever you like (looking at you Wiley) and generally being bitchy (no names mentioned, Jessa) - Sometimes I wonder, I really do.

Anyway, we've drained the galaxy of all it's resources, mined everything and bought all the water. What we have now is all that's left. In a few days or weeks the power and the water will run out, which means the plants won't grow and we'll run out of food and then the heating will go off and we'll slowly starve and freeze to death. Don't worry though, long before then we'll run out of oxygen and suffocate. A much nicer way to go I'm told. So, once again, thanks for everything; over the time we've been together I've come to regard you all as... people... I.... met... good luck, I think we're going to need it."

The screenshot and hilarious story above was sent to us by one of our Alpha backers, Hrochnick.

Thank you for reading =) You can find more information on Space Haven and the Alpha at:

http://bugbyte.fi/spacehaven

Direct Newsletter sign-up to be notified of official Steam release:
http://bugbyte.fi/register

Discord server, come chat with us:
https://discord.gg/zx2AN4F

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceHaven/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpaceHavenGame
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spacehavengame/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BugbyteGames/