Happy Sunday! Our last public development update of 'Space Station Designer' here on Steam was in mid-July. That was nearly three months ago, so another one is well overdue.
As mentioned during our last development update, the Playtest version of Space Station Designer was well received, and the most frequent piece of feedback that we got was that the game needed more tutorials in order to explain the core mechanics. We got down to work immediately on this and, in August 17th, we released 24 interactive tutorial as part of the 0.3.6 update.
With the new 'Tutorials' mode out of the way, we went back to the implementation of modding support via mod.io, which is something that we started to experiment with in early 2020 and we think it's going to open lots of interesting opportunities.
Modding in Space Station Designer allows you to:
- Add new astronauts and/or replace the names and portraits of existing ones.
- Add new space station modules or replace existing ones.
- Add new resupply spacecraft or replace existing ones.
For modules and resupply spacecraft, we even allow you to define your own shaders and materials. This means that, among other things, you can replace the existing modules with a new set of them featuring a different art style.
For example, here's how the space shuttle looks by default in the sandbox mode:
And this is how the space shuttle looks in one of the sample mods that we'll be providing:
Modding is conducted by using the Unity Editor and downloading a custom package featuring several examples. We're also currently writing a modding guide, which we expect to finish in the upcoming days.
The modding package features seven examples that you can use as a starting point for your own creations:
and yes, that includes Apollo and Skylab :)
We hope you're as excited as we are about all these new features, which hopefully we'll be able to make available for all of you in the upcoming days.
Let us know if you have any feedback, and remember that you can sign up for the Playtest of 'Space Station Designer' by clicking the 'Request Access' button in the game's store page:
Have a great Sunday!