Greetings Captains and Crew!
Good to see you again. We’ve been holed away this winter, enjoying the snowy weather in NYC. It’s been a good time to focus on some heads down work. Some of it has been… pretty boring. But when we haven’t been staring at performance graphs, we’ve been up to some improvements, big and small. We’re finishing content as we march towards release later this year, and working on changes based on your feedback from our last Alpha in December.
(I see this performance graph in my nightmares)
Tutorial
A consistent theme in feedback from all channels: the need for more hands on time with the game before jumping into a game. We had planned an initially modest tutorial, just enough to get you up and running, and introduce you to the Galactic West. One thing we weren’t expecting was a bit of hesitance to jump in and try out the alpha because players didn’t want to ruin a match. (We appreciate the courtesy, but it’s an alpha. Breaking things is half the fun!) So we’re taking a look at expanding our tutorials with some optional content for new players to explore and practice with for each class. We don’t want to get in the way of playing with your friends though, so you’re free to jump in and learn hands on in matches after you complete the basic tutorial. The best way to learn is always going to be someone teaching you hands on.
New Map & New Ship Exteriors
The art team has been hard at work completing and refining visuals for maps and ships. In particular, we wanted to take a pass at some of our ship’s silhouettes, making them more readable, and a little less boxy or toylike from some angles. We’re also making a pass at texturing, shading, and lighting to ship exteriors, to make them feel a little more worn down and metallic, and a little more in style with our anime inspirations. Those improvements are also helping bring our characters a little more into style as well, with particular improvements to our outlining visuals. (If you’re coming to Pax East in Boston later this month, come get a look!) On the level side, we’ve been cleaning up rough edges, and also working on something new to fly around in. Have a sneak peek of our next level, Omicron!
New Game Mode
We’ve been exploring additional game modes for Stars of Icarus for a long stretch of development. They’ve proven to be pretty tricky to build for this game. Bringing multiple ship sizes to the table introduces some really unique, really interesting challenges to the design table. Even something as simple as King of the Hill gets a lot harder to design when actually, some of your ships are way stronger if they get to happily camp a single point all match, while your highly mobile fighters cry about losing their main advantage. But we’ve cracked something that adds a new twist to an old classic, and we’ve been having a blast playing it internally. We’re calling it Cargo King. We’re still putting the finishing touches on it, but we hope to show it off to you soon.
Controller Support
We’ve got a solution for advanced multi joystick setups that should support almost everything you can throw at it. We’d love to see your multi joystick, pedal combo, ultrawide immersive sim rigs! Or even if you have something more modest, jump on our Discord and share your space gaming setup! We want to know how you plan to play, so we can do our best to support it!
Performance
Remember that graph giving me nightmares? It’s kind of like a puzzle. Except the puzzle is making all the pieces disappear. We call that optimization. You can also move the puzzle pieces into different boxes than try and fit them into the puzzle. We call that multi-threading. The puzzle pieces do NOT like to go into other boxes though. Did I mention that staring at the graph makes you go insane?
In Progress
And while some systems get a little more time in the oven, a few are starting to get finishing touches. We’re putting some extra attention into the lobby, with a little more to do while waiting for your team, and some extra celebration at the bar after winning a match.
We can’t wait to share more about what we are working on in our next devlog but in the meantime follow us on TikTok, Instagram or join the Discord to keep up to date with us.
See you in the stars,
Muse Games