Dear players,
Two weeks have passed since my last dev log and I have been very busy playtesting. I played the game many times starting with a simple Var-class scout and completed all three story lines plus and upgraded my way up to a Zeus-class testing all the new and old features with the updated engine. I also did a playthrough with the version currently published on Steam and I was happy to see the difference in memory usage between the current release version and the version I am working on. There are way less memory leaks and the few remaining ones will be found and terminated! I also used my old laptop to test the game to make sure the game runs smooth on older computers. The GPU was barely over 40% usage and the CPU was only busy when calculating very long paths over planets. So I made a great progress in performance here.
As you know, I am not only working on the game engine itself, but also on new features, new content and new quality-of-life improvements. The first improvements is a small but very helpful one: when you are in a multi-level dungeon, a new panel shows in which level you are. Players were confused in the past why they could not complete a dungeon, but they missed stairs that lead down deeper into the dungeons.
An entirely new feature is the cockpit upgrade which is available for any spaceship. Below your selection for drones and weapon turrets, you can select the cockpit upgrade you want to use. You can change it free of charge at any space station - just like drones. Each upgrade has a certain effect for your space exploration like increasing or decreasing the chance to encounter a pirate.
I also worked on the level editor. The initial concept was that players can create their own worlds and share them with others. This concept has been altered to creating planetary content that will be used whenever you explore a new planet. This content can be shared with others by sending them the files or by creating and uploading your own mod. The first thing I did was cleaning up the window view where the different base worlds are displayed.
I also removed settings from the level editor that are no longer required like spawn position for the crew or the option to actually save the world.
New players are also welcomed to use the new easy mode. It's a bonus card you can select when creating a new game that lets you fail every fail condition once without actually losing the game.
I will continue my testing and adding more improvements. My current plan is to publish a development version for you to test later this year before publishing it as a regular update in late January.
Kind regards, Benjamin