PULSAR: Lost Colony Windows, Mac, Linux, VR game

Hello everyone!

Today we are releasing Beta 1! To clarify: Beta is where the majority of PULSAR’s content will be added, systems and mechanics we didn’t consider to be “core” will also be added, and all of the game’s current systems will continue to be improved as development continues! Hope that’s clear, we’ll be happy to answer any questions about why we are going this route if there are any!

So first off there is a new ship to fly! The C.U. Roland-Class Starship! You can see some footage of what it looks like in Devlog 58. We’ve added an inherent ship qualities system to the game, we think this will be a really useful way to not only differentiate all of the ships we plan to have, but also help balance them. Games names are now separated from ship names, pretty straight forward.

We took some time to sit down and actually play the game for fun (not testing) these past few weeks and we came to the same conclusion a lot of you came to as well, the game is far too easy. We took some early steps to correct this issues by having stronger enemies, and slowing ship progression by having ships drop weaker / less loot at the beginning.

We still have a ton of plans to help bring a nice bit of challenge to the game and help its pace, but we hope the changes we’ve made are beginning to go in the right direction.

We’ve also changed the save file format, since we are now going to be adding more content to the game, this will inherently change how galaxies are generated, we are hoping the new format will keep a much data as possible pertaining to your ship and crew while leaving the galaxy room to grow and change when new versions are released.

A new optional game mode has been added: Ironman mode. This will cause your active save file to be deleted upon ship destruction. We will be working on making this system stable and functional over the next few updates! As usual, any feedback or bug reports are greatly appreciated.

We were planning on having a nice number of AI improvements to this build but we lost a bit of time assembling a new trailer for the game. We focused on improving the two biggest complaints which were Pilots not lining up and engineers preventing shields being lowered. Keep in mind the AI still has a ton of work to do before we are happy with it.

Thanks again for all of the bug reports and feedback that you have been sending in. We couldn’t do this game without our great community!

Additions

- New Ship: The Colonial Union Roland-Class starship is now available!

- Ships now have inherent qualities based on their type

- You can now zoom in while operating a turret by pressing left ctrl

- Optional Iron Man mode added that will delete your save file upon ship death

- Hosts can now name the game and their ship two separate things, this allows two games to have the same ship name without any unexpected issues

- New: Focused Laser Turret. High-damage variant of the Laser Turret. Uses substantial amount of power.

Changes

- Small tweaks to ship armor effectiveness

- Major balance changes to ships, turrets, chaos, etc

- Ships will now handle differently based on type / mass

- Tweaks to join, create and continue game menus

- Camera / shadow quality tweaks

- Upgraded save file format that will allow us to keep save data while allowing new content to be added to the galaxy. This will allow the galaxy to be regenerated with the new content while saving relevant data when it can be kept (mission data, ship components, crew level, etc). This should enable us to keep your save files working for much longer than before as we add new content to the game.

- Removed “Auto Turret” component from shops. This was a leftover component that wasn’t meant to be in the game. It can be somewhat glitchy.

- Pilot bots can now line up to the next waypoint when not in combat

- Engineer bots shouldn’t startup the ship shields while in green alert. This should help with repairing the hull

- Improvements to piloting AI

Fixes

- Added additional filtering for save file names to prevent some saving issues

- Spacebar now should properly center the starmap

- Guns should no longer file while a dialogue window is open

- Fixed some problems with shop networking that would prevent clients from seeing a shop’s inventory

- Fixed networking issues with planetary creatures that caused them to behave incorrectly

- Fixed issue with “Hunt the Resolution” mission that prevented proper registration of the ship kill

- Fixed issue that caused waypoints to not show up for the pilot

- Sector discovered percent now shows percent of sectors visited in galaxy

- Fixed music playback to prevent overlapping music tracks

- Fixed issue that prevented players from being able to close the buy/trade dropdown when in the shop menu

- Fixed an issue with piloting controls / camera alignment

- Fixed an issue with galaxy path building when a game is reset

Known Issues

- Some issues have been seen with crew bot networking

- Some audio crackling has been observed

- Bandits will sometimes not spawn / fall through the level on certain planets

Thanks for your time!

Best,

The Leafy Games Team