Smooth empire claims have been added, as well as visual fog of war, planet features, new UI, and more. There have also been some overall graphical improvements. Here are some features that have been added or have been worked on recently.
Galaxy Graphical Improvements
Seamless Claims
Smooth claims have been in development since August. These blobs are much more sophisticated than they look.
Hidden Veil
Now undiscovered star systems appear hidden from the galaxy map. This adds more mystery to exploration and creates a clear distinction between discovered and undiscovered regions of the map.
Planet Features
Planet features add trade value to planets. I am working on game events to reveal these features over time for colonies - game events for finding cave systems or unique wildlife.
Music Menu
You can now play, pause, or shuffle music. I added this because it is good to be able choose your own mood in the game, to override randomly playing tracks. Most tracks in New Stars are made by Peter Gagliardi.
2023 Closed-beta
Development logs like this take hours to plan and make. I can safely say that New Stars development has advanced dramatically in the past 10 weeks. So much has changed since then in development. If you saw the January DevLog you may see only a third of the features from January that were announced there. That's because they take time to consolidate, and improve enough to take screenshots of them. You may also notice that the store page is almost half a year out of date. That is because I have focused almost 100% of time on development, not promotion, so far this year.
The goods news is that after many iterations of bug fixes and improving the game 2-5% more each day, the game is moving in the right direction - closer to production. I will announce when closed-beta is ready in a following announcement, although it may not be for a while. Hundreds of bugs have been fixed this month, with hundreds more to be fixed in the future.
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Stay tuned for more updates, or join the community Discord (linked below).
Join Closed-beta Discord: bit.ly/newstarsdiscord
Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com/adamjr
Rate-up this post, and wishlist New Stars to support development. Feel free to comment your suggestions.
This page is subject to change in the future and is intended to be a development preview, which may not reflect the final state of the game.
Credits:
- Star satellites icon by Lorc under CC BY 3.0
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