I started working on Masteroid on April 24th, 2017. I set out to create a space game that was in the vein of 4x games that I loved, but focused on a bite-sized experience that supported short-session play. I also wanted it to be atmospheric and relaxing over challenging.
I built Masteroid to be data-driven so that I could create a large amount of weapons and ships despite it being a mostly-solo project. Some of my ideas were really good but others had problems I didn't expect and those problems significantly impacted how I could expand the game. Additionally when I started, the UI system available in the FlatRedBall game engine that Masteroid is built upon lacked many features. In the almost-six-years since I began the project the UI technology has improved to be best-in-class.
In November 2022 I was playing Masteroid on a SteamDeck and decided I wanted to improve how the UI looked on the smaller screen. As I dug into this problem, I realized I couldn't achieve my goals without fixing some of the core problems that plagued Masteroid since early in development. I spent the next four months overhauling these core systems to support future expansion:
- Core simulation model: how game objects are represented and updated as data over the course of the game
- UI system: how game data is bound to UI and presented to the player
- UI Look & Feel: how the UI looks in terms of art style, color, and layout
- UI scaling: how the UI adapts to smaller screens while retaining crisp text and images
- Save files: how data is saved to disk, which had to be changed due to data model changes
This was such a major overhaul that it required careful attention to how old saves were converted and extensive testing to make sure nothing was broken (some things will definitely be broken).
This release of Masteroid marks a major update to the game's core system. While many of these changes are "under the hood" and don't have a significant impact, we hope you enjoy the new UI and look forward to more features in the future.
Please file bugs in this discussion thread!
Thanks for playing,
<3 Justin
Changelog
- Game now has a public Trello roadmap: https://trello.com/b/ejULa3O3/masteroid-roadmap
- Game no longer supports zoom, this was required to open the future path to different control mechanisms
- Every piece of UI in the game has been redesigned
- Weapons menu now has comparison card to see weapon requirements vs ship capabilities
- Ships menu now has comparison cards to compare current ship with purchaseable ship
- Missions menu can now offer more missions
- Changing ships now has better messaging
- Weapons menu now shows weapon preview
- Ships menu now shows ship preview
- HUD is now on the left and has clearer status bars
- Better notifications when player levels up
- Loading screen has been redesigned
- Better messaging when player is too underleveled to buy ships, weapons, or take missions
- Improved warp menu UI
- Game now has capability for deeper systems simulation (no specific gameplay changes yet)
- Game now backs up old saves before updating
- Game now has a formal system to upgrade older saves
- Game has major logging improvements - log file has more detail, logs more frequently, and saves logs for nger. This will help me fix your bugs!
- Save data and logs folder is now linked from the main menu
- Game now has a formal place to log bugs, linked from the main menu
- Game now has a formal, open roadmap, linked from the main menu
- Indicator now points to the nearest dock instead of the center of the station
- Minor improvements to UI sounds
- UI sounds no longer play when hovering list items
- Fixed issue with sector-wide attack against player happens too often
- Fixed issues with game hints being no longer accurate
- Fixed bug with notifications when player levels up/down
- Fixed bug with saving a ship that has empty turrets
- Fixed a bug where resources on a ship may not be saved when warping to a different sector
- Fixed a bug where cargo UI can be inaccurate
- Fixed a bug where cargo may not be saved when exiting game
- Fixed issues with camera default zoom
- Fixed issues with sound/music volume sliders