Starcom: Unknown Space graduated to 1.0 release a little over a month ago and I thought it would be a good time to take a step back and give everyone an update on how it's gone and my plans for the game in the near future. There's also a player survey (see the link at the bottom of this announcement).
Graduation Results
The natural cycle of Steam games is that a significant percentage of lifetime sales happen in the first month of launch as Steam shows the game to many new potential players. So first month sales are critically important (or graduation month in terms of Early Access titles). The game sold a bit over 20,000 copies during all 20 months of Early Access. A typical expected graduation for that number of Early Access sales would be ~10,000 copies in the first month. Starcom: Unknown Space sold well over 30,000 during graduation month, so definitely a result to be happy about!
Future sales will be at a much lower rate, but the game has already hit my success metric of covering my external development costs, plus a fair salary for my development time.
Latest Updates
As many of you probably noticed, the game has had several post-launch updates adding QoL improvements, additional guidance where players have gotten "stuck", bug fixes, revamped controller/Deck support and some minor additional content. The most recent of these went live on the default branch on Wednesday, with a couple of hotfix patches since-- you read the full patch notes here.
There are still plenty of minor enhancements and fixes that I could tackle, but I'm starting to turn my eye towards larger possible updates to the game. Which brings me to...
What Next?
Some of you may remember from the Starcom: Nexus post-mortem that technical details of how content was created caused development iteration to get significantly slower as the game grew in size. This put a drag on releasing updates, so there were not a lot of post-1.0 patches. These issues were addressed in the technical design of Starcom: Unknown Space, so it is much easier for me to continue working on the game. There are some challenges on the design front, because I want any future updates to be save compatible. But that still leaves a lot of flexibility for continued development in terms of side quests, Easter Eggs, procedural anomalies, etc.
While I could continue to iterate on small QoL improvements and bug fixes, I have several potential larger updates to the game I'm considering. I'm not promising to deliver all or even any of these, but barring some unexpected circumstance I plan to continue work on the game for at least the near future. So I've created a Google survey to gauge player interest, (and give you the option of signing up for email updates).
Potential Updates
One of the questions is about ranking potential updates. I'm giving a bit more detail here:
- One major new quest line: This would be a single, optional new story line that involved multiple objectives. I don't have a specific story in mind, but one potential candidate would be a resolution to the Nimion/Kyrnan conflict.
- Multiple smaller quests/discoveries: This would be numerous little bits of content that might be small missions, void discoveries or Easter Eggs.
- Weapon variants: Currently, missiles and fixed guns allow unlockable variants, like the Brogidar cannon or the Swarm Missiles. Maybe there could be more of these?
- Cosmetic ship modules: More visually interesting ship module that didn't have a major game play impact.
- An endless survival mode/region: A few players have asked for some kind of region where they could fight infinite enemies. Perhaps as a challenge on how long they could survive?
Content Tool / Modding
The game was created using the Unity Engine, however as part of my experience in creating Starcom: Nexus, I decided to separate out most of the game's content into an external format and created a collection of tools that I use for authoring anomalies, character dialogues, items, missions, regions of space, etc. With some work these tools could be made available allowing others to create their own content and potentially share in the Steam Workshop.
The tool would not necessarily require programming experience, but I should caution that even with the tool creating content is not easy. This is also something that I don't have much experience with and there are few games out there with a similar tool (in fact if you are aware of any, please let me know in the comments).
Separately, because the game was developed in Unity, it's at least theoretically possible to mod the game on a deeper level. This would be more technical than creating content but would allow for changing or adding game logic features. E.g., while it would be possible to create a quest with anomalies and factions with the content tool, creating, say, a weapon variant would require actually modding the game's assets and code.
My expectation is that most players are probably not interested in creating content/modding, but if a significant minority are, then helping them out would be a good use of my time.
Thanks for taking the time to complete the survey:
- Kevin