Hope you all have had a wonderful Holiday season and that you are ready for the New Year.
We have been back at work this week after a very successful Alpha 1 launch. We are very excited to have our kickstarters and fans playing the game and are looking forward to updating and improving the experience - which is exactly what we are talking about today. If you haven't gotten into the alpha you can right now at www.starcommandgalaxies.com!
The focus for our next update, which comes out in January, is crew interaction. Right now a lot of features in our game are pretty much done but not quite. For example:
- Power is in but not connected to the GUI and some objects.
- Food and Energy are draining but not really causing you harm
- Using objects works but is very clunky
- Teleporting exists but is finicky
- Tooltips tell you a bit but not enough
- It's not entirely clear what it is that you're supposed to do!
All of these items and more are on our list of things to do.
But the primary focus is on fixing and improving how you interact with your crew, how they give you feedback and how they interact with the world.
Desires, for example, should be a strong guiding force for what you are "supposed to do." If your crew member is hungry, tired, wants more light or wants to explore a planet this should be clear to you, the player.
Our central gameplay cycle revolves around keeping your crew healthy and happy. One of the primary complaints in Star Command mobile was the fact that your crew and ship were always ready for battle. You got into a skirmish then proceeded to healed your crew, repair your ship and then head for the next battle.
In Galaxies the ship battles, visits to alien planets, diplomacy and trade all throw off the energy, hunger and desires of your crew. For example: visiting a Trilax ship will introduce new desires for your crew like Trilax art. Now, as Captain, it is up to you to decide who is ready to go on Away Team missions, who is the right person and what the consequences of that will be. You have to weigh that with who is tired, hungry, injured or afraid of alien worlds.
We are also constantly refining our interface. We really want Star Command Galaxies to be extremely deep and complex but very easy to pick up and understand:
You can see our many iterations, refining and polishing the content that your Crew GUI reveals. We are always balancing what you NEED to know vs. what is too much info. It's a delicate balance. For instance, how many desires should you be aware of? The past 4? The past 10? And do you need to know the ones you have fulfilled or just the desires that are still remaining to be fulfilled.
This will continue to get updates in virtually every release.
Focusing on your crew's mood/stress level will be very important. We will be introducing those elements in the next update so that it's much more clear what you have to do with the hours of the day in your crew's lives.
We will also introduce comfort objects - things that help your crew relax and get into a good mood. Plants, paintings, TV's will help your crew get some R&R after a costly battle or exploring the harsh environment of a lava planet.
More to come as we get closer and closer to release of Alpha 2. Tell us what you think and if you have any questions!
Cheers,
Jordan@Warballoon
This looks really cool. I'm tracking this. Looking forward to the next update!
You should take some pointers from rimworld. The interface for each colonist seems very easy to understand and shows you what is immediately happening with regards to their thoughts and how content they are.
Imo i dont think you need to know whats been fullfilled but what needs fullfilling at the present time. This allows you to take the right corrective action and hopefully see your crews moods change in real time.
Rimworld also give colonists random personalities, which in your case would dictate if your crew members prefer to go on landing excercises etc.. It would be good if certain events could change there views and opinions depending on how susceptible they are to manipulation. For instance you meet high hostility on a planet and your engineer manages to get back to the ship but sees all his freinds slaughtered. He would probably rather stay on the ship after an incident like that. Or maybe he would prefer to go back and avenge his comrades :).
This game has huge potential so keep up the good work and dont rush it. Ill be purchasing a copy after alpha 2 when theres a little more to do!
Love the thoughts - we are in alignment. The whole desires system comes from one scene: the death of spock.
Essentially it is the climax of the relationship of the three main characters. Years of traveling around the galaxies, going on adventures, becoming more than friends and then having one of them taken away. We want you to be able to have your own death of spock moment. Characters who go on years of adventures together, survive battles and grow to become best friends. You should genuinely care about your crew, both in the time you have put and the bonuses/rewards you get for having a crew that knows each other so well. And then someone dies and, if we do our job right, you really mourn their loss. That would be the perfect desire/personality/relationship system for us.