Steam keys
The main thing we've been working on lately has been getting steam keys to our kickstarter backers. You can read about it all here:
On our blog
New Game Content Update
Steam keys are taking about half of our dev time so we are also working on some big engine changes.
We have the game in a state where we feel it is stable enough to let it sit for a few weeks without an update. I'm not sure if that's our way of saying that its safe to work on longer duration projects because the game is stable, or if it means we fixed so many bugs that all of the remaining issues require a longer development period to fix. Either way I think it's good news. We're working on some really cool new stuff, and as usual we are going to make the game engine better in the process.
I don't want this rant to be too long, so I'm not going to go into any details of what we are building until after we get the store live. However suffice to say that while waiting on updates from our 3rd party web developers I have started completely rewriting the code for handling the procedural generation of the game world from the ground up.
Similar to how the rewrite of ship thread management gave us an order of magnitude increase to stability and simulation speed while enabling new features such as quick save, we expect the new version of the game world code to be more powerful and more efficient while weeding out some big issues with faction AI and save game files due to crummy design on the first pass. If you haven't noticed, I'm a big fan of iterative design which involves throwing out existing code and making a new draft with loads of improvement. Sometimes you can only find the bugs hiding on your desk by cleaning up the mess.
Some things we are hoping to improve are:
- How interesting the procedural world generation is
- How the universe map looks and functions
- Better management of world saves and save game persistence.
- Better support for modding game world content
- New data layers that will enable us to make the world more dynamic and get AI ships to do something other than fly around randomly with randomized cargo.