Galactic Crew Steam Charts & Player Count

13 Mar 2021Developer post

Dev Log #13: The "Economy & Colonization" update is now live!

Dear players, The first major content update of Galactic Crew II "Economy & Colonization" now live and available to anyone having access to the Beta version of the game! All features were already explained in previous dev logs, but here is a summary of all the things that are

Dear players,

The first major content update of Galactic Crew II "Economy & Colonization" now live and available to anyone having access to the Beta version of the game! All features were already explained in previous dev logs, but here is a summary of all the things that are new or improved!

Tutorial added

The first major addition to the game is a Tutorial that will teach you the fundamental mechanics of the game and give you an introduction into space battles, crew management, navigation and operations. It takes you by the hand and guides you through everything step by step. Any veterans of Galactic Crew 1 won't learn much new, but it will help any new Galactic Crew members.

Creating new games

The category "Background" was renamed to "Profession".
There is a new profession for you to choose: the scientist. She has similar abilities as an engineer, but she isn't able to build colonies or salvage wrecks. Instead, she can use her skills to search for resource deposits on planets that can be mined by your drones while you are exploring the outer space.
A new role has also been added: the colonist. If you play as a colonist, you start with a large amount of construction materials that will come in handy when you build your first colony. You won't generate any threat and you will gain additional experience when doing any task on a planet! The ideal role for any aspiring colonist!
The first story line has been added to the game! It will not only offer you several paths to become rich, but it will also introduce you to planetary colonization and managing trade routes!

Colonies & trade routes

The command center now has two terminals that can be used by your officers to plan trade routes or prospect for resources.
You can also send your crewmen to the workshop in which you now can craft a vast variety of resources and items.
Each botanical garden now produces four units of food each round.
The ore storage room is a specialized storage room. It has a way larger capacity than the normal storage room, but it can only store ores.
Each solar array now generates 32 units of energy while each floor tile uses 1 energy. Rooms can only work if your energy level is high enough to operate your base!
The drone bay was added as a new room. Each drone bay comes with two mining drones that will mine any ore deposit you found with your scientists on the planet while you are out in galaxy. The quality of the ore deposit determines how successful the drones are.
The landing pad is also a new room that enables your officers to create galactic trade routes. Each landing pad unlocks a slot for a new trade route.

Further improvements

There are new quests and spaceships you can salvage while exploring space.
Each station on your spaceship and your colonies that can be manned is now symbolized with a white icon. If the station is manned, the color switches to green. This gives a better indication on how efficient your spaceship operates.
There are now three new filter buttons that can be used to filter the things that are displayed on the galactic map like trade routes, outposts and missions.
It now way faster to build new rooms on large colonies.
Generating new planets is now way faster than before thanks to smart caching of re-useable information.
The galactic map now shows the description of the mission for each planet that has a mission location if you move your mouse over it.
Several improvements have been to the Tech Tree to ensure that new achievements are unlocked properly.

Bug Fixes

It could happen that crew members still had the icon from the previously manned spaceship station above their head after teleporting on a planet.
The crafting dialog showed the wrong icon for fusion elements.
Removed potential crash source when updating the minimap in dungeons.
When a floor could not be destroyed because of an adjacent door, a wrong error text was displayed.
When a room could not be built because it was outside the valid construction area, a wrong error text was displayed.
You could harvest the lettuce in the botanical gardens in colonies.
The experience bonus from the Necklace of Wisdom wasn't properly used when calculating the experience gain for a character.
Removed potential crash source when spawning the crew too close to an enemy.
Mission progress for bounty missions wasn't saved.
After jumping out of a combat, the game could lag when moving the camera.
Removed issue when animating the laser beams of mining drones.
One could lose the game when jumping to a new sector with a full inventory.
After killing a crew member on a planet, the crew overview in the main window wasn't properly updated.
Some user interface elements were not properly updated after resizing the screen resolution or toggling between fullscreen or windowed mode.
The list of game settings were collapsed by default.
You could build rooms into enemies.
After removing all tiles of an outpost, the planet was still considered as colonized and it was not possible to build new rooms on this planet.
Crew members could walk through the doors of your colonies.
If you built several solar arrays next to each other, only one of them was displayed.
Resolved an issue with overlapping user interface controls on space stations with an active route when changing the screen resolution.
After destroying an enemy vessels, tool-tips of achievements were not properly updated.
The probability of quests was not evenly distributed.
When an engineer got experience using mining drones to mine asteroids, opening the crew overview could cause glitches.
Removed possible miscalculations in the pathfinding algorithm.
The button to trade with random merchant encounters in space was misplaced.
Solved a typo in a quest description.
The achievement to mine 100 ores was not properly updated.
You could talk to dead NPCs on planets.
When settling on a planet with a recruitable NPC, you could recruit this NPC at any time you visited the planet.

Original post

06 Feb 2021Developer post

Dev Log #12: The Closed Alpha is here!

Dear players, Last april, I made my work on Galactic Crew II public and now you can test the current state of development! I will invite more players with promotional actions over the course of the next weeks and months, but right now the Closed Alpha is exclusive to all owners o

Dear players,

Last april, I made my work on Galactic Crew II public and now you can test the current state of development! I will invite more players with promotional actions over the course of the next weeks and months, but right now the Closed Alpha is exclusive to all owners of Galactic Crew!

Important notice!

All game files of Galactic Crew II are stored in a separate folder. That means, that any save game files from Galactic Crew 1 on your computer won't be changed by using the Alpha version of Galactic Crew II, but the Alpha might overwrite your Cloud saves. So, if you have used Cloud saves for Galactic Crew 1, I recommend to start Galactic Crew 1 once to download all Cloud saves before starting the Alpha to make sure you have physical copies of your save games. If you want to make a backup of your save game files, you can find them here:

Open your Windows Explorer
Type in "%appdata%\Galactic Crew" (without quotation marks) and press Enter
This folder contains all your Galactic Crew saves, levels, etc.

How to get access

Please open your Steam library and right-click on Galactic Crew. Select "Properties..." in the opened context menu.

Next, select the "BETAS" tab and click on the combo box at the top to see the available options. Select "development - Galactic Crew II Development".

Now, you just have to wait for the download to be completed. The game will now be listed as "Galactic Crew [development]" in your Steam library. When you start it, you will play the current development state of Galactic Crew II!

What to expect

This is a development version in an Alpha phase. This means, the game is not feature-complete, i.e. stuff is missing that will be there in the final release version. It also means that certain features from the original game are currently not available. This includes especially multiplayer gaming and tutorials. However, anything I wrote about in the past year is included!

Colonization of planets is currently very basic. You can build a lot of rooms, but the only two rooms that currently have a practical effect are the command center which is a requirement for most other rooms and the storage room. Having storage rooms enables you to transfer goods and items between your spaceship and your colony.

Since I re-wrote most of the code and invested a lot of effort into the game engine, it is to be expected to have bugs.

How can you contribute

Those of you who bought Galactic Crew early on know that I value the interaction with players. If you do not understand something, find a bug or have a feature request: start a Steam discussion or text me on Twitter @GalacticCrew.

As you know: Any owner of Galactic Crew 1 will get the new game for free once it is released. However, you can do me a huge favor by adding the game to your wishlist: Steam page. It helps me to promote the game.

What is next

There are two major tasks right now for me: Marketing and game improvements. It will take a couple of months before I start the Early Access phase of Galactic Crew II. Until then, I will invite more players to the Alpha, promote the upcoming game, pitch the game to digital platforms and do other fun business stuff ːsteamhappyː I am also working on a huge update of Galactic Crew II that should be available to you in early March. It will be labeled as "Economy" update featuring new rooms for your colonies, adding many features and mechanics to the existing colonies, adding a story line and much much more. Any update I will make from now on will immediately land on this development branch meaning you will get to play it long before the game becomes available to the public.

I am super excited and I hope you have a lot of fun. I am looking forward to your feedback and please let me know about any issue you find!

Original post

02 Jan 2021Developer post

Dev Log #11: The Closed Alpha is very near

Dear players, I do not have any exciting new features announce, because I spend the time since the last update only on playtesting and bug fixing. When I first started playing the game as a whole instead of testing single features, it was a brutal bug fest. However, with each new

12 Dec 2020Developer post

Dev Log #10: The Closed Alpha is near

Dear players, A couple of weeks have passed since my last update and it was a very fruitful time. Promotional art was created for Galactic Crew II as you can see below. As a result of that a Steam page has been created. I already got a positive review of it from Valve so I can ma

Dear players,

A couple of weeks have passed since my last update and it was a very fruitful time. Promotional art was created for Galactic Crew II as you can see below. As a result of that a Steam page has been created. I already got a positive review of it from Valve so I can make it public at any given time.

Free Galactic Crew II for everyone!

In my very first announcement of Galactic Crew II, I said that I will try my best to provide a free copy to every owner of the original Galactic Crew game. In the past weeks, I worked together with a Valve employee to figure out how we can achieve this. As a result, we will do it like this: Once I can start a Closed Alpha, I will create a second branch in Steam of the original Galactic Crew. That means, everyone who owns a copy of the game can, if he/she wants, download the development version of Galactic Crew II. You may know this method from other video games where you can have a stable Release branch and a Beta branch. This way, you can already test the development version of Galactic Crew II and give me feedback and report issues, if you want to. Once Galactic Crew II is published as Early Access game, an employee of Valve will send a free copy of Galactic Crew II to anyone who owns the first game. This way, you can test the development version of the game and get the full release version as a gift once it is available - and I kept my promise! ː2017stickydrinkː

Planets

Besides the project management work, I spent quite some time on planets and bug fixing. While playing the game, I found a large amount of bugs which is normal for this stage of game development. Needless to say, I immediately fixed all of them! ːsteamhappyː

I also invested some time in improving the level editor to expand its features regarding model groups. As you might have seen on my Twitter feed, I added options to configure model groups with scenario types and environment types. These information are used when creating procedural generated planets.

As I wrote in the last update, I re-wrote the entire way how paths for characters and NPCs are determined on planets. It's now way faster than before and it is fully dynamic - a requirement for procedural generated planets. Please note, the very first version you get to play will only have a small variety of planets, but it will constantly be improved until the game's release! Here are two screenshots from a pirate hideout and a research outpost.

What's left?

I need to complete the procedural generation of planets. This will require level design work and completing the algorithm and a couple of optimizations. This should be done fairly quickly.

I will need to create a trailer video, before I can ask Steam to review my game build. This will be also something I will do in the upcoming weeks.

Finally, I will create a full test plan and test every single feature carefully. As soon as I am done, I will give you another update here and explain how you can get the development version of the game. I was hoping to complete it until Christmas, but I think I will need until late January.

Original post

07 Nov 2020Developer post

Dev Log #9: It´s all coming together

Dear players, If you follow me on Twitter, you already know that I worked on basically any feature of Galactic Crew II over the past few weeks. Level Editor I replaced the user interface design with the same design elements I use for the game itself, making the level edior visual

Dear players,

If you follow me on Twitter, you already know that I worked on basically any feature of Galactic Crew II over the past few weeks.

Level Editor

I replaced the user interface design with the same design elements I use for the game itself, making the level edior visually more attractive.

I also added a new feature that let's you group models. You can then insert the model on any planet you are designing making new planets an easy and fast process.

Colonization

I completed the management code for planetary outposts and added the first user interface elements enabling you to transfer goods and items between your spaceship and your outpost.

I am currently waiting for an artist to complete my order of new models, but I wanted to share a preview of some buildings that will find their way into the game soon.

Game engine

I invested two weeks to improve the underlying game engine. My focus was to remove dependencies between components and the way highlighting is managed. It does not have an effect on the gaming experience itself, but it will improve stability and reduce memory and processor usage. I took the opportunity to make these large changes before I started testing the current state of the game.

Quests

I re-wrote the way quests are handled and I was finally able to include more than 50 brand new space events written by a professional writer!

Testing

I did a lot of testing. I found many issues that I could resolve quite easily. Since I re-wrote basically everything from scratch, it was expected to find bugs. I will continue testing the game every week to make sure I find all bugs, before I hand it out to you. I also found several features that needed some tweaking which I immediately optimized. I also used some time to resolve things that went wrong in the first game, like the collectable minerals that resulted in crew members picking up stuff from outside the rooms. Now, there are more resources to gather and they are gathered correctly.

What's left?

Before I can start a Closed Alpha with you, I need to do:

Re-write pathfinding for characters and AI on planets
Procedural content creation for planets
Adding some planets to the game
Resolving an issue with transparency
Resolving an issue with fullscreen windows
More testing

As you can see, the list is not that long any more and I hope to complete many open topics this month! I will soon reach out to Valve to check, if I can easily provide a key to Galactic Crew II to anyone who owns the first game.

Multiplayer and campaigns won't be part of the initial version of the Closed Alpha, but they will be added later. Multiplayer only needs a lot of testing and I will create new campaigns while you test play the Closed Alpha.

Original post

25 Sep 2020Developer post

Dev Log #8: Planetary colonization

Dear players, I primarily focused on adding the colonization feature I wrote about last time. I am not completely done, but I managed to implement the most vital parts of the feature. Whenever you are on a planet, your engineer can start building an outpost anywhere on the planet

Dear players,

I primarily focused on adding the colonization feature I wrote about last time. I am not completely done, but I managed to implement the most vital parts of the feature. Whenever you are on a planet, your engineer can start building an outpost anywhere on the planet. The feature works similar to video game classics like Dungeon Keeper where you build your base by placing floors, walls, doors and build rooms.

Like starship rooms, each outpost room has a specific purpose and active or passive influence on the outpost. Solar arrays provide energy, while crew quarters provide living space and workshops enable you to craft a wide range of objects. There will be a limited range of features you can do with your outposts once I start the Closed Alpha, but more features will be added over time. I am working with two skilled 3D artists who are currently creating game assets for Galactic Crew II like walls, guard towers and special equipment required for certain rooms.

As always, the screenshot provided below shows the current state of development not the final version of the game. I want to include an auto-terraforming of the planet during base building so that it looks more consistent. The walls you see in the screenshot are only few of the new models. I also literally added more than two hundred new game assets to the game to provide a wide variety of planets.

I also did a lot of performance optimizations. For example, loading planets take no longer than ten seconds independent of the planet's complexity. I will spend the next weeks on further optimizations and carefully testing and improving the game. While the artists are creating more models and textures for the colonization feature, I also started working with a professional writer for exciting new events and missions. I am also currently looking for other artists to make more custom content for Galactic Crew II.

I hope to be able to provide a key for the new game for each owner of Galactic Crew 1 later this year. I will then create a development branch of Galactic Crew II where you can play the latest development version of the game long before it's release and have direct influence on the further development of the game. But before I open Galactic Crew 2 to you, I want to carefully test and improve it to make sure all basic features work as intended.

If you want smaller updates on a regular basis, feel free to follow me on Twitter.

Original post

29 Aug 2020Developer post

Dev Log #7: More planets and shield effects

Dear players, As I wrote in the last update, I was mainly working on three different tasks in the past weeks. Planets First of all, I continued working on the new environment system I developed for planetary missions in Galactic Crew II. The terrain is now smoother and the water

Dear players,

As I wrote in the last update, I was mainly working on three different tasks in the past weeks.

Planets

First of all, I continued working on the new environment system I developed for planetary missions in Galactic Crew II. The terrain is now smoother and the water looks more natural.

The new environment system does not only look better than in Galactic Crew I, but is also faster, more efficient in terms of CPU and memory usage and it enables features that simply were not possible in Galactic Crew 1. One of which I will announce later with great enthusiasm. ːsteamhappyː

Spaceship shields

After finalizing the terrain shaders, I invested time in a new shield effect for spaceships. As you know, in Galactic Crew 1 you could equip your spaceship with shield generators, boost their efficiency with shield boosters and you were able to regenerate them with drones and engineers. However, they were not visualized. As I wrote in the very first announcement, I not only want to extend the content for Galactic Crew 2, but improve any existing content. Therefore, I wanted to make proper shield effects to increase the immersion when playing Galactic Crew 2.

I also updated all other shaders to create a more natural look of lighting and shadows.

More enemies (and decorations)

Finally, I invested money to buy a large variety of 3D models and characters for Galactic Crew 2 to offer a greater variety of enemies. Most of them are already implemented in the game. But for some of them, I face issues with the animations. But I will figure it out, eventually. Most of the models I bought are to improve the atmosphere on planets and to widen the range of available planet types. I will show you screenshots of new planets or dungeons with the next dev log updates. So, stay tuned for that.

Colonization!

When I announced Galactic Crew 2, I said I wanted to add more content and features. I already announced the option to salvage ship wrecks, more asteroid types to mine, deeper dungeons and much more, but there is one feature that I am most excited about: Colonization of planets! You will be able to build your own base with its own features and game mechanics on any planet you have visited. Are you in the middle of a mutant-infested jungle and like the atmosphere? Build a base! Did you become friends with the local stone age civilization? Build a base! Do you enjoy the company of the miners in their outpost? Build a base!

Over the course of the next weeks, I will start developing this feature. I am currently comissioning jobs to 3D artists to make the necessary 3D assets for me. Since I re-wrote most of the game code, there are currently a lot of bugs in it. I will also spend a lot of time polishing everything I have done so far and do a lot of playtesting. The plan is to create a proper Steam page within the next months and add a development branch to it so you can start playing the game in its current state. This way, you can playtest everything I announce long before the game's actual release. However, I want ensure the game's quality first. I have also started working with other artists like writers to write events, quests and missions and I am looking to further expand my team.

Social media

I write updates here every couple of weeks. If you are interested in daily updates, you can follow me on Twitter (see button below).

Original post

07 Aug 2020Developer post

Dev Log #6: Planets and level editor

Dear players, Over the past weeks, I focused on a new planet system to make developing planety expeditions faster, to make modding easier and improving performance and efficiency. I am not done, but I want to present you infos about the current state. Before I started anything vi

Dear players,

Over the past weeks, I focused on a new planet system to make developing planety expeditions faster, to make modding easier and improving performance and efficiency. I am not done, but I want to present you infos about the current state.

Before I started anything visual, I made a complete revamp of the way planets are stored and processed in my game engine. I created a few demo levels to test both the level editor and my data structures and even complex planet levels were less than 2 MB big. This means you can create many levels and share it with this community without wasting any hard drive space and you don't have to care about network bandwidth when using them in multiplayer games! I am still optimizing the loading time of planets, but I am already down to a few seconds. I plan on further improving the loading time for an even better gaming experience - no one likes to wait.

A key element to both fast content creation and easy modding is a good level editor. After I completed my work on the data structures, I threw the old level editor away and made a new one from scratch. The following image shows the current state. It most certainly will change or evolve until the game's release!

One thing you will immediately notice is the water! After spending a lot of work last year on my game engine, it now features a realistic fluid water simulation that will be part of Galactic Crew II. You might also see a dragon. It's one of many new enemies I am currently adding to the game. The level editor already has way more features than the old one in Galactic Crew 1, but there will still come a lot of new features. I want to make modding as easy as possible and include Steam's Workshop functions so that you can share you work with friends and other people.

What's next
As you can see, the terrain is still bumpy. I will spend the new few weeks on improvements to the way terrain is rendered to make it smoother and more realistic.

I will also continue integrating new enemies to the game which results in a lot of side-work, because I have to expand the model importer and other components.

I also want to further improve the visual effects of the game and add completely new visual effects. I most probably will spend most of the time until the next dev log on creating a shield effect for ships! Shields were already featured in the first game, but they were not visible. For Galactic Crew II, I will render the shields and its effects to create a better immersion into space combat. I also want to add more visual effects, but I do not know if I have enough time for them unil the next update!

Original post

03 Jul 2020Developer post

Dev Log #5: Mining, Exploring, Equipment and UI

Dear players, I wanted to give you an update last week, but because of a surgery, I was not able to do so. However, I was able to complete multiple milestones in the past weeks. Asteroid mining In Galactic Crew 1, you had the possibility to mine asteroids in space to obtain iron

Dear players,

I wanted to give you an update last week, but because of a surgery, I was not able to do so. However, I was able to complete multiple milestones in the past weeks.

Asteroid mining

In Galactic Crew 1, you had the possibility to mine asteroids in space to obtain iron with a chance to collect energy crystals and rare loot like diamonds. For Galactic Crew 2, this mechanic remains, but there are also other types of asteroids in one belt. For example, you can harvest silicon to craft building materials. Asteroids will also be fully animated to create a more dynamic feeling.

New equipment & UI is completed

I finally completed the work on the user interface and made some further improvements to it. For example, the view below shows the current state of the crew overview. It is similar to the one used in Galactic Crew 1, but is more cleaned up and all features of all pieces of equipment are listed.

This is also important, because there are new wearable armors! The hazmat suit was just merchandise in Galactic Crew 1, but you will be able to equip them in Galactic Crew 2 to walk safely through hazardous terrain. The artist who made the hazmat suit models are created more armors including a sci-fi flak armor and a marine armor that might be featured in a later update. All new armors also come with new special abilities.

These new armors won't be the only new pieces of equipment for Galactic Crew, but they are the ones which were fully integrated into the game since the last update.

Endless space!

Galactic Crew 1 had a random map generated when creating a new game with an average of 117 planets or systems. Galactic Crew 2 will feature endless space! You start on a map of the same size as Galactic Crew 1, but you can scroll it in all four directions. All newly found systems are also randomly generated depending on the features you activated during the game creation setup.

The Galactic Map also features more details when moving the mouse cursor over a system. For example, it lists the remaining resources in an asteroid field.

Quality of life

I want to expand and improve almost all features of Galactic Crew 1 as I mentioned in the very first update. One of the minor improvements I made in the past weeks are new indicators for selected crew members and I added indicators for all enemies. They feature the creatures' orientations and indicate where they will most likely spot you.

What's next?

I made improvements on various topics in the past months. I will take two weeks off to fully recover from my surgery and go back to development after that. The next big task is a complete overhaul of planets. I will change basically code everything new from scratch with the knowledge I gained from creating the first game. Like dungeons, the new planets will feature way more variety in flora, fauna and game mechanics. This development will take some time, but I will give you updates on the progress every few weeks. You can expect the first update on it mid August.

As I mentioned in the very first update log: When I am coming close to an Closed Alpha version, I will try to find a way to provide a free key to Galactic Crew 2 to everything who owns a copy of Galactic Crew 1. Because I did not do any research so far, I can't say how it will work, but be assured I will try everything I can to make it happen!

Original post

06 Jun 2020Developer post

Dev Log #4: Salvaging

Dear captains, In past three weeks, I worked on several topics. I am still working on the re-design of the user interface, but I am almost done with all controls, which is a great development milestone. Salvaging One of the features I completed in the last three weeks is salvagin

16 May 2020Developer post

Dev Log #3: Better dungeons

Dear players, Dungeons As I wrote in a previous post, I want to make everything better in Galactic Crew 2. I loved the dungeons in Galactic Crew, but I had some issues with them. For example, it took me a long time to hand-craft them and new rooms, enemies or resources were diffi

02 May 2020Developer post

Dev Log #2: New inventory and tech tree

Dear players, Two weeks ago, I announced that I work on Galactic Crew 2. Today, I want to give you a short update on what I did in the past two weeks and what is currently in the making. Inventory One of the ongoing processes is to overhaul the entire user interface. The screensh

15 Apr 2020Developer post

Dev Log #1: I am working on Galactic Crew II

Dear players, Recap Making video games was always a childhood dream of mine. I founded my own company in 2017 and worked for more than two years full-time on Galactic Crew. It was quite a journey. I experience a lot of things and although I could not create a sustainable business

Dear players,

Recap

Making video games was always a childhood dream of mine. I founded my own company in 2017 and worked for more than two years full-time on Galactic Crew. It was quite a journey. I experience a lot of things and although I could not create a sustainable business and went back to become an employer for another company last year, I enjoyed the ride.

The start of Galactic Crew was quite rough. I had to rush it, because I needed financial fundings to keep my business running and as a consequence the game lacked essential features in the beginning. First, I had weekly updates pushing new content every Saturday and I could see increasing player satisfaction in form of nice e-mails and also numbers: The chargebacks/refunds on Steam dropped dramatically in the first months. After the game was released last year, I was proud on one hand, because I could be a full-time game developer for two years and created a game that I personally love and that got me very nice feedback from players, but I knew that I could have done more with more time and money.

Galactic Crew II

Last summer, around four months after the game's release, I continued to work on my game engine. Despite the current trend to use Unity, I was always interested in game engine development and still use my own game engine for my projects. First, I had no specific game in mind. I just wanted to improve everything.

As time passed, I decided to work on Galactic Crew II. The idea is to use my existing game, but make everything better. Making things better does not necessarily mean to change everything. In some cases, it means increasing performance and in some cases it means to add or improve visual effects. In other cases, I have to redo the entire design of a feature. Although I put a lot of time into the game in past months, there is not much I can show you right now, because I mostly focused on the underlying game engine and the game's architecture. However, I can give you some numbers. Launching the game takes now 70% less time, starting a game from the main menu is down by at least 50% loading time, memory usage dropped, calculcations like pathfinding are faster and the entire complexity of the game shrank down massively. Because of the weekly updates in the beginning, I did not always had time to perfectly engineer a feature. Now, I have the experience of implementing all features and can refactor a lot of things. Stuff like network communications for multiplayer gaming is much more stable, trading items is completely bug-free, etc. I also completely changed the way terrain is handled enabling nice water scenes, etc.

One of the things I am currently working on is a complete overhaul of the user interface. Please check out the screenshots below to get an impression of how the game might look like. Please note, that any image I'll share with you shows a snapshot of the current state of development!

Main menu

Creating a new game

Game

Roadmap

As I wrote earlier, I am working full-time for another company, but I spend a certain amount of my spare time working on Galactic Crew II. I will give you updates here whenever I have reached another milestone to share my progress with you. The CoVid-19 virus currently haunts the world and I am in lockdown. I do not enjoy the time, but I take the opportunity to invest time and energy into the game. Therefore, I am quite pleased with my progress. However, it is impossible to say when the game will be finished.

I do not want to make just a remastered version of Galactic Crew, but also add a lot of new stuff. It will be announced once I am working on it. I am currently busy remastering the original game. I will soon hire artists to join me working on the game.

Be excited!

If you suggestions for new features, please comment down below. Since there is no specific release date and nothing is final yet, I am very open to your input. Like the first game, Galactic Crew II will start on Steam as Early Access title. This phase gave me a lot of great input and I do not want to miss this opportunity for the new game.

I could not have worked two years full-time as game developers without you, who bought the first game. I want to show my gratitude to you by providing everyone who owns Galactic Crew a free copy of Galactic Crew II once it is available - if I find a way to do this! Once I reach a points where I can share a first impression of the game with you, I will do research if there is a way to gift a game key to everyone who owns a certain game. I do not know, if it's possible directly in Steam, but be asure I will try to find a way to give you Galactic Crew II for free, if you own Galactic Crew!

Original post

02 Feb 2019Developer post

Update 39 - New planets, dungeons, skills and missions

Dear players, The latest update of Galactic Crew features over 60 new dungeons, four new planets, a new skill and new events and missions. Capturing ships A feature that has been requested quite often is the ability to capture enemy ships. This feature finally made it into the ga

Dear players,

The latest update of Galactic Crew features over 60 new dungeons, four new planets, a new skill and new events and missions.

Capturing ships

A feature that has been requested quite often is the ability to capture enemy ships. This feature finally made it into the game! Your engineers got a new ability to capture an enemy ship after you disabled it! You do not need to create a new game to use this feature, all engineers automatically have this ability as soon as you patch the latest version of the game!

You can start the game with a rather small spaceship and use the Unpredictable Space card that was introduced with the last update in combination with the new engineer ability to capture larger ships. You can also capture ships with unique paintings that are normally not available like the Pirate Zeus!

New dungeons

Sixty new dungeons of various themes have been added to the game with new rooms to explore and new enemies to fight. One of these new enemies is the hellhound that can be found near kennels.

Another new types of enemies are mutants and mutant insects which are the result of some strange bio experiments. Be careful when you explore their habitats!

You can access the new dungeons by either requesting combat missions at a space station or pleasure hub or with one of the new space events.

New planets

In addition to new dungeons, a range of new planets were also added to the game. They feature some of the new enemies I mentioned about but they also feature new enemies that are ... simply too large to fit into a dungeon like Bone Skeletons!

Release is coming

If you bought Early Access games in the past, you might have experienced game that were never finished. They were abandoned by their devs because of lacking profits or because they simply lost interest in their games. I experienced this by myself over a dozen times and promised you and myself to complete the game. The next update (approx. coming in March) will be the Release update. I will spend the next week testing and optimizing the game engine and gameplay before Galactic Crew will finally be released! I will continue support for all players and bug that are found after the release will be fixed, but there won't be regular content updates any more. However, I don't say that there won't be any updates anymore!

Original post

08 Dec 2018Developer post

Update 38 - Level editor

The latest update of Galactic Crew brings you a level editor to create your own levels and several improvements and fixes to polish the rest of the game. Some of these features were requested by the community. If you have anything you want to see in Galactic Crew, feel free to se

The latest update of Galactic Crew brings you a level editor to create your own levels and several improvements and fixes to polish the rest of the game. Some of these features were requested by the community. If you have anything you want to see in Galactic Crew, feel free to send me an e-mail at [email protected]

Level editor

A detailed description how to work with the level editor can be found here. In general, you can choose between a desert and grass type planet and add any model to your scene that is available in the game. There are also a bunch of models available in the level editor that are not part of any planetary scene or dungeon in the game.

On the left side you will find a list of all objects sorted into the categories buildings, props, nature, NPCs and beasts. Simply click on an item and it is added to the center of your current screen. Select a model with a mouse click and move it around, scale or rotate it around any axis using the keyboard and mouse wheel.

Once you are done, you can write your own quest (like you already can) and use your own level as planetary mission. You can share your files with friends or internet strangers to let them play your levels. There wasn't enough time to include support for Steam Workshop, but it will come with the next update! Feel free to send me your levels at [email protected], if you want. If I like them, I will add them with the next updates as official game content!

New features

The bonus card "Contractor" has been removed. Instead, its bonus was added to "Brilliant Salesman" to boosten the value of this card. The newly opened space has been filled with a new bonus card that is available from the beginning of the game called "Unpredictable Space". Normally, all fights in space are balanced. That means that your opponent always has a strength similar to yours (with Nemesis ships as an exception of course). If you use this new card, there is a certain chance to get any kind of enemy when starting a space battle. You might face a large space pirate with your start vessel or you face a small Artemis ship when flying a hulking Ebisu. It adds more variety to the gameplay, but it makes the game also more challenging in the early game!

If there are any problems during the launch of the game, a message box will pop-up showing the problem and providing a link to a solution. If you don't have any troubles playing the game, you won't ever see it. ːsteamhappyː

Moving the camera by moving the mouse cursor to the screen edge is now smoother than before. There are also new settings to enable or disable this camera movement for space, planets or dungeons. If you find this kind of camera control disturbing, you can simply deactive it at any time.

I also put some time in improving the squad behaviour. For example, when you teleport your crew into a dungeon, they won't stand in each other any more.

A similar issue has been resolved for space combat. Enemy combatants won't be stuck in walls anymore.

You can use Italian language using a start flag.

Two new planets were added.

Gameplay improvements

When looting weapon crates in dungeons, you will get credits, if the crate did not contain any weapon or armor. This way, looting will always be rewarded.

The game no longer freezes, when you send your squad to attack enemies in large dungeons that are far away.

The background of the credit and threat display has been improved so that you can see the values better in dungeons and on planets with a bright background.

When switchting a weapon turret or drone in a SIngleplayer game, the overview won't close anymore. It still happens in Multiplayer games due to synchronization processes.

The weapon turrets sold by shipyards are now sorted according to the turret's size.

Game engine improvements

As you might know, I created my own custom game engine for Galactic Crew. I used the past weeks to improve it and as a result I was able to fix a memory leak that might cause troubles when playing very long sessions. In addition, I was able to reduce the initial loading time (when you start the game from Steam) by around 60%!

The accuracy of object highlighting was been improved.

Bug Fixes

Removed spelling error in German translation.
When you fought two Nemesis ships in the same system before leaving it, the UI elements of the first ship were still visible after travelling to a new system.
It was not possible to damage the Shield Generator II and Drone Booster II. They also were not listed in the status icon bar.
After teleporting your crew on a planet and from the planet into the dungeon, enemies from the planet might be visible in space after returning to your ship.
In two dungeons, quest NPCs were placed inside objects.
The crew of enemy ships won't be placed in walls anymore.
Resolved memory leak when loading texture packs.
The game could crash when you left the game during an encounter with a large Zombie vessel.
Fixed display errors on a few UI controls.
If you used less than four mod quests and deactivated standard quests, the game could hang up.
Corrected the tool-tip of the resource panel, if your ship does not use any energy crystals.
During the examination of two objects that were close together, both objects could be highlighted.
Crew members no longer get experience, when they are dead.
You could the Navigation skill, even if quest was shown.
Crew members could man shield generators and regenerate shields even when all generators were disabled.
When using the option "Say nothing" during a conversation with the weapon smuggler in the Story Line, a wrong tool-tip was shown.
The Galactic Map did not work after loading a quick saved game.
Scrolling the game settings with the mouse cursor did not wok.
You could "upgrade" your ship to the same ship class at a shipyard.
In the tutorial, too many buttons in the tool bar might have been unlocked.

Coming up next

The next update is planned for late January improving and polishing the game. Support for Steam Workship will be added. There will be new dungeons with new rooms and new enemies. And new content for the level editor will be added. If you have feature requests, send me an e-mail at [email protected]

Original post

Galactic Crew

Updates & announcements

Dev Log #13: The "Economy & Colonization" update is now live!

Dev Log #12: The Closed Alpha is here!

Dev Log #11: The Closed Alpha is very near

Dev Log #10: The Closed Alpha is near

Dev Log #9: It´s all coming together

Dev Log #8: Planetary colonization

Dev Log #7: More planets and shield effects

Dev Log #6: Planets and level editor

Dev Log #5: Mining, Exploring, Equipment and UI

Dev Log #4: Salvaging

Dev Log #3: Better dungeons

Dev Log #2: New inventory and tech tree

Dev Log #1: I am working on Galactic Crew II

Update 44 - Level Editor Bug Fix

Update 43 - New settings and fixes

Update 42 - New winning condition

Update 41 - Tutorial Fixes

Update 40 - RELEASE

Story

It's not the end!

Update 39 - New planets, dungeons, skills and missions

Capturing ships

New dungeons

New planets

Release is coming

Update 38 - Level editor

Level editor

New features

Gameplay improvements

Game engine improvements

Bug Fixes

Coming up next