Check out our new Youtube video with an update and a look back on the past, present, and future for Stationeers Development. Been a very busy month for the team! It's now been one year since we officially started the project, when we originally only had two on it (Scott and myself). Now we have twelve people on the team full-time!
Stationeers One Year Development Recap
Aaron made an awesome video that takes a look at where the project came on, why we've taken longer, and where we are going too from here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFiulsdCpXo
A year ago we had a "dreams" list of things we wanted to do. Every single one of those has either been developed, or is still on our key milestone list. The biggest is "motherships". We've touched on their role a little, but we'll be demoing these officially at PAX Australia on 28 October 2017. Be sure to check in for our session there as there will be a Q&A.
Release Date
Many have noticed that we have, again, shifted this to December this year. We're much more confident about this, however we still will not release the game until we are happy even if this date comes around. Is this annoying? Yes! But it's really important that we get our release right.
Our key priorities that must be met for release:
- Core gameloop; At least one full game loop. Likely to be the "away missions" or "events", together with basic survival building and maintaining of your mothership and associated bases.
- Stability; No catastrophic failures (i.e. no broken saves, robust backups, obvious messages when servers start failing).
- Performance; At least ten players, 60 FPS on good clients. Lots of settings for clients to adjust their performance.
Progress update
Most of our focus has been "behind the scenes" for the stability and performance priorities above. We completely redid our water system, to work together with the voxel system. Lots more content going in for character customization. Work is now ongoing to redevelop the AI movement system so that it can work with voxel terrain - enabling our "bug" aliens which are going to be our first AI antagonist.
There has also been more redevelopment of the UI to bring us forward towards release. More usability work. Lots more stability work. The only thing really holding us back has been our work on motherships, but when trying them out so far you can already see the huge difference it will make to the game loop.