Hello! It is Liya from Erabit, the publishing support for solo dev Ken on "Star Survivor"
I am sorry for the recent lack of communication and want to explain what is happening now.
Memory leak issue
First, it happened after the update of the enemy models, but it got really bad after the combo upgrade. We hired a professional team of QA with the specific purpose of finding the source of the issue, and while there was an improvement in performance, their suggestions did not fix the issue entirely.
Ken is an indie dev who worked on this game solo. Meaning, that his full-time job is not in the gaming industry, and he has no teammates to ask for advice from. And it happened so that fixing the issue could be beyond his skill set at the moment.
Our next step is to give the source code to the mobile porting team. It is a couple of people who have done game dev on Unity full-time for the last 10 years. As mobile devices are more RAM-sensitive, they will find the best solution. For now, exiting the game every 30 minutes will clear the memory leak.
The recent slowdown in the development
Ken was facing a lot of OT at his full-time job. Coming back from work, he had little time for the gamedev. In the end, working on Star Survivor after coming home led to burnout. As he was running out of creative fumes, he needed to take a pause and have a distraction, so he was playing around with some prototypes for the next possible games.
It is widespread in the industry that developers work on two projects simultaneously. It allows the devs to take their minds away from monotonous tasks, leading to more sudden enlightenment to fix issues they would not find a solution for if worked on constantly. Ken starting to play with prototypes while the Star Survivor gameplay content is already complete is actually quite a big gap between projects that most full-time gamedev studios cannot afford.
Exiting the Early Access
Early Access helped Star Survivor become a much better game. We are all very grateful for your support for the game. There were some bumps in the road, but Early Access allowed the game to become a more polished title, and it is a much better choice than entering the Full Release with bugs but no promise to fix them, as is a recent trend with 3A games. At this point in time, the game is complete, with only a few rebalancing and memory fixes needed.
Source code and IP
Erabit never owns the IPs or source code of the games we publish. We are the publishing and mobile porting support that works on the commission that is relatable to our input and never endangers devs of losing rights to their games. Nevertheless, the technical support is our lack of attention, and we are trying to fix the issue with the mobile port.
The latest small patch will fix:
- fixed enemy not seeking player
- removed replaced equipment from history to prevent replaced equipment (now non-applicable) upgrades being drawn
- fixed shields picking up items
- added notification when hate increases