Greetings, commanders!
The public Steam demo has been updated to Alpha 0.15.7! If you haven’t played since our Kickstarter, there’s quite a bit for you to try, including carriers, strikecraft, and a substantial rework of how ship systems take damage.
It’s also been a few months since we posted here, and I wanted to explain what’s been happening with SCOS.
First off, as many of you know, our Kickstarter failed, and we had to work out how to keep development going with the resources available to us. We moved to Patreon, where monthly support from our backers funds continued work on the game (at a slower pace). Since then, we’ve been releasing alpha updates to our Patreon backers and working through the problems those updates uncovered.
Adding features exposed weaknesses in systems we already had, and we’ve spent a good deal of time reworking those before moving on. I want to catch you up on what that work has produced.
What’s changed
Carriers and strike craft. The Thane and Atlas-class carriers can launch, direct, and recover fighters and bombers. You can send fighters to attack enemy strike craft, and we’ve been improving how wings stay together and fight.
A much more detailed subsystem model. Weapons now have separate systems for beams, cannons, missiles, and point defense, with damage affecting how each performs. Communications damage can cut off fleet orders and shared sensor information. A disabled launch bay prevents a carrier from launching or recovering craft. There’s a lot more to consider when deciding what to target, and some true puzzle gameplay for small ships attacking larger vessels.
Missile and point-defense changes. We’ve reworked missile tracking and interception, added missile hitpoints, and fixed problems with point defense. Getting the balance right has taken several passes, and we’re still working on it – but missiles have more depth to them now and are a serious threat.
Fleet setup and sensors. You can save and load your friendly and enemy fleet compositions in Custom Skirmish. Sensors have also been reworked, including shared contacts between ships with functioning communications.
Controls and usability. Manual cannon aiming is back. There are improvements to camera zoom, adjustable UI scaling, and access to options from the pause menu, along with numerous bug fixes.
Gamepad Support Added. Controls for gamepads have been implemented according to a generic gamepad layout, and is still being tested.
Our focus during this phase is Custom Skirmish. The campaign and Instant Action have been temporarily hidden, with plans to rework and bring them back. The existing campaign work is saved, and we’ll revisit it once the time is right.
This is still alpha software, and it will have (a lot of) rough edges. Ship and weapon balance remain a work in progress, the AI needs more attention, and some visual effects aren’t behaving as they should. The latest patch addresses the recurring “Black Square in Sun” bug, though there are still post-processing issues we’re investigating.
Where we’re going next
First and foremost, we’re prioritizing gameplay over graphics and performance right now. (Don’t worry, once this phase of updates is done, we’re making a big push on improving our interior graphics, polishing the exterior and making SCOS a much prettier game, while also improving performance. The team is well aware of the issues there, and they will be addressed.)
One of the bigger priorities is giving you more to do in Skirmish, which right now is basically a large format deathmatch. We’re planning a Convoy Escort setting where you can choose to protect a friendly convoy or destroy a hostile one, while selecting both your fleet and the enemy fleet as you do now.
We also want to make it easier to understand each ship’s role and put together a balanced fleet. A points system with a rating for each ship is part of that work.
The AI will get another pass before we add ship special abilities. Once that work and further balancing are in place, we’ll introduce the tutorial system as a series of in-game videos. More mission types and maps, featuring environmental hazards are also planned. We’ve adjusted the order of work as testing has shown us what needs attention, and we’ll continue doing that.
On the art side, Nyx is nearly finished with our Modular Station Pack. It includes docking modules, shipyard pieces, power generation, storage, and living quarters that can be assembled into thousands of configurations. We don’t have the budget or art team bandwidth to build dozens of bespoke stations, so this gives us a practical way to create variety. There are only a couple of pieces left to texture, but these assets still need to be brought into the game.
The goal now is to get SCOS ready for Early Access on Steam. How quickly we get there depends on the work still ahead and the funding available to do it.
Steam updates and how you can help
We asked our Patreon backers about updating the public Steam demo every few months, and the response was overwhelmingly in favor of doing so. That’s what we plan to do, starting with this update. Paid backers will continue to have access to the development branch as we work through the changes between public updates.
If you’d like to help fund that work, you can support SCOS on Patreon. That support helps pay for the development time needed to keep making these changes. The more backers we have, the faster we can progress and the more features we can incorporate into the EA version of SCOS. You’ll also be able to try the alpha builds as they’re released and give us feedback along the way.
You can help by playing the updated demo and telling us how it goes, too. If you find a bug, details about what you were doing, your system, and any screenshots or video make it much easier for us to investigate. We also want to hear which ships you enjoy, what feels unbalanced, and what you would like to see more of.
Thank you to everyone who has supported the project, especially the Patreon backers who have kept development moving. Please, give the updated demo a try and let us know what you think.
v/r
Daniel Gibbs
SCOS Producer and Creator of the Terran Diaspora Universe