Dear players,
There was no major update this summer as announced this spring. I did not stop the development altogether, I just did not develop every day. However, I have created a nice bundle of new features most of which are completed. Today, I want to give you a broad overview while going into detail over the course of the next weeks.
Expanding existing content
The game has a wide variety of components and features and I built in a generic way so that I can add new content to most parts of the game. There will be new dungeon rooms, spaceship upgrades, crafting recipes, items, equipable jewelry, etc. I also want to write new missions and I am currently working on a bunch of new planetary content. When you visit a planet, the content is generated using a set of pre-created assets from an asset pool. The more assets I (or you with the level editor) add, the more variety your planetary explorations have,
Twitch integration
In case you want to play this game on stream, your viewers will have the opportunity to influence your space journey by voting for random event.
Global highscores
The way highscores are being calculated has been better balanced reducing the influence of your credit score to the highscore. If you have an activated online mode you can see the global highscores after losing a game and your highscore is shared with others - if you are good enough. It does not matter if you use the persistent universe, activating the online mode is enough.
Lootable crates on enemy ships
Several players requested to have a bigger incentive to board enemy ships. You will now have loot crates randomly distributed on enemy ships. If you open them, there can be anything from 40 credits to epic heavy weapon turrets.
Overall improvements
I am working constantly on improving existing code. Main focus this time was the server code.
.NET 6 Desktop requirement
As I announced in a dev log very early this year, I moved the game and its engine to .NET 6. When you publish a game on Steam, you can select the .NET version that your game needs (if any). However, Steam has not yet offered support for .NET 6. This means, player might not be able to start the game, if they don't have .NET 6 Desktop installed. With the coming update, there will be an option when launching the game to check for the requirements. I hope players who struggle starting the game will use this option to see what component they are missing. I really hope, Steam adds .NET 6 support soon.
Mysterious random crashes
Several players reported random crashes every few minutes when playing the game. While developing the features mentioned above, I tested everything very thoroughly and let the game run idle for two days and I could not reproduce any crashes. Please know that I am working on it, but I have no idea how to reproduce and solve this issue yet.
Kind regards, Benjamin