Minor patch to the latest update:

• Added "resume autopilot" hotkey (default to "I")
  
• Added "turn to mouse" in addition to "steer to mouse" hotkey
  
• Volunteers have provided a number of corrections/improvements to the DeepL Russian translations

Starcom: Unknown Space has just gotten a significant update including dozens of new anomalies, several new side-quests and regions, a few new techs and modules and a bunch of fixes / QoL improvements.

Some of the more significant non-spoilery changes in this update:


There are two dozen+ new anomalies, including a mix of procedural and story-related.


There are several new minor quest lines, which I'll leave to players to discover on their own. (See the Existing Games notes below.)


Some of the existing main-storyline missions have gotten a little bit more guidance and hints where players have reported getting stuck.


By request, trading now tracks "fractional" resources during the same trade exchange, so the "spare change" from different resource transactions is combined in the final reserve currency delta.


As an accessibility feature, plasma cannons now have an auto-fire setting in the ship systems so players do not need to hold down the autofire button. Related to this, higher Tactics skill will improve target selection with your plasma turrets more likely to choose targets that pose a greater threat and less likely to oversaturate low-health targets.


A slightly smaller alternative to the Dreadnought, it's lower cost with a slightly lower max size but a higher built-in support crew limit.

• 25 New anomalies
  
• Several new regions
  
• Several new side quests
  
• Several hint prompts in places where players reported getting stuck
  
• Several new proc planet visuals
  
• New "saucer" bridge module
  
• Added "rename ship/commander" button to Ship's Log
  
• New thermal visualization system, fixed heat not displayed for some modules
  
• Trading now combines fractional values across resources
  
• Steer to mouse bindable hotkey
  
• Rotate to mouse bindable hotkey
  
• Resume autopilot bindable hotkey
  
• Plasma autofire setting in ship info
  
• Changes to some AI targeting values
  
• Changes to plasma autofire: higher tactics skill improves target selection
  
• Added lower particle count versions of Havok and Shroud bursts if graphics settings below "high"
  
• Fixed reference issue possibly causing bugs with reloading the latest save
  
• Fog of exploration "refogging" if a region is added to an already explored area
  
• Fix for faction disposition not decaying if faction not loaded
  
• Fix for possible rare soft-lock after Celaeno or Aletheia are destroyed
  
• Fix for proc anomaly addition sometimes overwriting existing anomaly
  
• Modified fixed gun cycle calculation to ensure fire rate is reached
  
• Map color legend for interaction "rings"
  
• Player damage now correctly preserved in saves
  
• Change to VFX object pooling behavior
  
• Various minor mission changes
  
• Various code refactoring
  
• Hovered module build selection now shows details (including for controller)
  
• Fixed numerous missing minor localization strings
  
• Added MIT attribution for Newtonsoft JSON library
  
• Added "DebugMapCoord(string)" command line (shows map coordinates of persistent by id)
  
• Several typos corrected
  
• Volunteer provided improvements to ML Russian localization
  
• Enabled third-party download of Steam Workshop items (for GOG players)
  
• Missile speed techs
  
• Kinetic (collision) resistance tech
  
• Angled kinetic armor module
  
• Once the player has researched the Gravity Gun, a small cluster of unstable cores are added near the Chariot
  
• New RP sources added periodically during the game to ensure the player cannot exhaust them before story-critical techs
  
• Prevent one of the final showdown Devouts from spawning atop the player
  
• Guild envoy not showing correct Iridium pricing for Sepharial info
  
• New region now set as Emissary target
  
• Warping now cancels autopilot, like other steering commands

This update is compatible with existing saves, so you do not need to start a new game to experience the new content. Although depending on how far along you are in the game, you may be less likely to encounter it "organically". Also, the more of the universe that you've explored, the less likely it is that you will encounter some of the new procedural anomalies.

I will give one low-spoiler hint for players who have completed or mostly completed the main storyline:

One of the goals of the new content is to guide players to revisit the Guild, who are necessary for two important main-story quests. In order to kick-off one of the new quest lines, you need to trade with the Guild, return to Celaeno, then talk to the Guild again.

These changes have been in testing for a while by opt-in beta testers, so I feel pretty good that there's no major new bugs introduced, but there's always the possibility that something was missed since opt-in testers are a small percent of total players. If you encounter a bug, please report in the discussion forums. And a big shout out to the beta testers!

Thanks for playing, until next week,
- Kevin

Two weeks ago I posted that there was a new opt-in beta available with a bunch of new content, QoL improvements, bug fixes, etc. Since then, I've released 3 patches to fix various issues players have identified in it.

At this point around 500 players have played at least some of the updated build and there haven't been any major issues reported. So barring any surprise problems, I plan on promoting Kepler 25105 to the default branch in the next week.

If you want to switch to the beta branch now, or want to read a preview of the changes see this discussion post.

Until then!

- Kevin

The big news for this week is that Starcom: Unknown Space just hit a lifetime milestone of 100,000 copies sold on Steam!

This was a bit of a surprise for me: two weeks ago, it was at around 75,000. But last weekend it was featured as one of the "Weekend Deals" on Steam. This part wasn't a surprise, I knew it was going to be featured, I just didn't realize how big of a bump that would be. The game had been previously part of a Daily Deal during launch week which produced some additional visibility, but it was a relatively modest boost in comparison. Thanks to everyone for supporting the game!

As a result I've spent more time than usual in the discussion forums this week trying to answer new player's questions, collate new bug reports and feedback, etc. So another big shout-out to players in the forums and discord who've helped answer new players' questions.

Despite the additional community communications, I've made some good progress on a few tasks. As I mentioned last week, there's a new opt-in beta build. Yesterday, I posted an update to that build which fixed a few things and added some QoL enhancements. I haven't heard any major issues introduced by this build; it is compatible with existing saves. Players are welcome to check it out now, with the caveat that there may be bugs.

One of the more time consuming issues was addressing a long-standing bug that prevented some modules from showing thermal effects in the shipyard.

The way ships are rendered in-game is with a custom shader that blends several masking layers together, each multiplied by some color value allowing for faction and player customization. As I talked about in a video entry during EA, there's also an emissive component that handles the glowing for windows and power supplies.

In the shipyard during thermal analysis, this emissive component gets a color added to it to show the heat levels.

At some point I had added an optimized version of the module shader that removed the emissive property for modules that didn't have any glowy-bits. But I forgot that the thermal visualizer was relying on it (it may have been less obvious because most heat generating modules are also emissive).

The simple solution would be to switch all modules to use the emissive version. But this adds a small GPU cost for every pixel of every ship module on screen at all times, even if they never glow outside the shipyard.

Instead I decided to bite the bullet and use a similar trick to the one I used for cloaking ships, where a second material is added but only when needed. Due to the nuances of material stacking, it looks a bit different from the existing thermal analysis. I also added some light mottling for a more entropic appearance.

Additional things worked on this past week:

• Steer to mouse bindable hotkey
  
• Plasma autofire setting in ship info
  
• Changes to some AI targeting values
  
• Changes to plasma autofire: higher tactics skill improves target selection
  
• Added lower particle count versions of Havok and Shroud bursts if graphics settings below "high"

Until next week!

- Kevin

Starcom: Unknown Space is one of Steam's curated "Weekend Deals" right now, which has brought it in an influx of new players. If this is you, welcome and thanks for playing! Every week I use this space to give an update on what I've been working on, or talk about some aspect of the game's development.

Last week I started a full playthrough of the game to test the new updates/content that I've been teasing for the past month. This was my first complete playthrough since launch. Even using some in-editor dev cheats, this takes quite a while because I'm also noting issues, fixing minor bugs, replaying sections, etc. My save game says it was 11 hours, but actually it was probably closer to 3-4 fulltime working days.

There were a few significant issues, which I addressed. On Wednesday, I uploaded this version (Kepler 21502) to the opt-in beta branch so players can now try it out. It fixes a couple of minor bugs, adds a few QoL features as well as adding some new content, including 25 new anomalies and several new side-quests.

You can find a spoiler-free list of changes and how to switch to the beta here:

https://steamproxy.com/app/1750770/discussions/0/4516632734722382722/


Should you switch to this beta now? Well, on the one hand the existing default build is very well tested at this point. On the other hand, the new beta adds additional content and side quests, including new hints and guidance to a few areas where players have found themselves getting "stuck". So if you want the most content and discover even more of the unknown (which might also include unknown bugs), you should switch.

The beta is intended to be compatible with existing saves, although see the notes in the above post for details.

Until next week!
- Kevin

Happy New Year all!

Over the past couple months I've made a lot of incremental fixes, changes and content additions to my local development version. Every small change has a chance of introducing a bug. So on News Year's Day I started a full playthrough, something I haven't done since launch, with two goals: 1) seeing whether anything has broken and 2) seeing if the collective changes are ready for player testing.

A full playthrough takes quite a while, so I'm only about half way through. I've discovered one new bug that has been in the game for over a year, but was only revealed through a recent change.

Currently, there is a bug where if you load a save, any damage to your ship would instantly repair. So I've fixed that exploit. But in this playthrough I noticed that sometimes I'd reload a save and have damage when there shouldn't have been any.

After investigating, I figured out the cause:

What was going on was that a while ago I added an optimization that cached your most recent save after reading it from disk, so when the player did a quick load or died the save manager could quickly pass that to the game without spending 200ms or so reading it.

The problem is that the various game systems assume that when a game is loaded, they can take any values passed to them and assign them to their respective variables.

For example, if the save file says the player has 2000 RP, then the game sets the player's RP to 2000 RP. This is not a problem and will not cause a bug because RP is an integer and integers are value types. The game can change the amount of RP that a player has, but there's nothing that will change the value of the number 2000.

But some of the data is more complex. Things like the structure of ships are represented as a bunch of ModuleData's. A ModuleData is a collection of value types (HP, rotation, module type, etc) represented as an "object". An object is a reference type, which means that when you pass it around, you aren't passing around copies of various values, you're passing around an address in memory where those values are stored.

So when I loaded the cached save, the save system handed the ship a list of modules which it used to reconstruct my current ship. But when I flew into battle and the enemy started blasting at me, my modules were still referencing the objects in the cached save for their data. Which meant that the enemies were actually damaging the modules my save game.

Now I had designed the save system very much knowing about the possibility of accidentally referencing save data, which is why the save system uses "cloning" to create copies of the game data. But it only does this on the "save" side. I suspect when I implemented the cache I had forgotten this and thought it also happened on the "load" side.

Anyway, I'll be continuing the playthrough for the next day or two. Depending on how that goes I may either spend more time tweaking, or make it available as an opt-in test build. So stay tuned!

Until next week,
- Kevin

A short update this week as I spent a few days with the family for Christmas.

This week I spent some more time on the side-quests I previously discussed, created several new related anomalies and tackled some bug fixes.

I've previously talked about how I create most anomaly images using an environmental rendering software product called Vue. Earlier this month I got a reminder from the software that my license was about to expire. When I went to renew, I discovered that the company who made the software had been acquired, and development for the product would cease.

On the plus side, they're now giving it away for free[www.bentley.com]. So good on them for that. It still works for my purposes, so I plan on continuing to use it. It's not as general purpose or feature rich as something like Blender (also free), but it is much easier to quickly create cool environment images.

Some anomaly images created with Vue plus some 3rd party models.

Happy holidays and hope everyone has a wonderful New Year!

- Kevin

Happy Steam Winter Sale! Starcom: Unknown Space is 25% off during this sale, and Starcom: Nexus is 75% off.

I'm continuing to work on some additional side-content for an upcoming update and don't want to put any spoilers in a news announcement. I don't have an ETA yet for when it will be ready for testing.

One of the non-spoilery tasks I accomplished relates to how regions are added to the universe. As you may or may not know, many of the game's regions are added at fixed locations throughout the galaxy so the major areas have roughly a constant layout. But some content is added dynamically, either in response to player actions, exploration, or content updates.

With this new content, since it is intended to be compatible with existing saves, I'm experimenting with a change to the region addition logic. To avoid trampling existing content, the procedural system will still look for empty sectors, but will be allowed to place regions in "empty but explored" sectors.

As a cue to players, if an update does add a region in a visited space, the fog of exploration will be "re-fogged" for the affected area. I struggled with this when the addition of this new "refog" feature broke fog of exploration entirely. Here's the refog function:

What wasn't obvious, because I was too focused on the code changes (highlighted in green), was that I'd actually deleted the SetPixel line from the previous function. That wasn't highlighted because the diff tool simply thought I'd moved it down. While I don't think I've made this mistake before, most developers are probably familiar with tunnel vision: You are so convinced the problem lies in a certain area, you fail to notice when it's something obvious just outside where you're looking.

Until next week, Happy holidays!
- Kevin

Most of this week I've spent working on the side-quest storyline I mentioned previously. To avoid spoilers, I won't go into much detail here.

Instead I'm going to post some of my rough notes on mission design. I had the idea of making a video on this, but recording and editing videos take a lot of time, so I decided to post the notes lightly edited together. Note that these have some very mild spoilers for current game.


Here are the major elements that I think make a good mission, both from a player perspective and from a practical development perspective (an otherwise good mission idea might not be worth pursuing if it will take three times as long to develop and test, or has a high likelihood of introducing game breaking bugs).


The core of the game is exploration, discovery and unexpected events. Players are very astute at recognizing patterns and so every mission needs to be unique and structured in a way that doesn't feel like the game is creating a conspicuous loop of ticking off the same three check boxes.

This means not only changing up the goals, but also how missions are revealed/discovered, how the player is guided to objectives, what actions are needed to resolve them, etc.

An unfortunate side effect of this is that every mission can potentially introduce a new problem: either narrative inconsistency or flow bug, but also ways that players might find themselves "stuck".


While having interconnected missions can lead to "brittleness" both due to changes in one mission potentially affecting another, as well as possible sequencing problems (see Robust below), having missions connect to other missions in subtle ways helps the universe feel more alive.


In terms of efficiency, I mean that generally I want a mission to be accomplishing multiple design objectives while the player is completing it. Examples of design goals are:

• Introduce a game feature
  
• Teach the player a game mechanic
  
• Remind the player of a previously introduced mechanic
  
• Put the player in a position to notice a region or object
  
• Foreshadow some future content
  
• Present a choice
  
• Progress a narrative
  
• Develop a character
  
• Promise a reward
  
• Create a connection with a previous piece of content
  
• Fix an issue with existing content

In an open-world game, the player can theoretically reach any location at any point at any time. This presents a challenge from a mission design standpoint. If the "happy path" for a mission is player visits region A, gets a clue that leads to region B, which activates an artifact in region C, we must consider what happens if the player goes B->C->A or A-C->B or C->B->A, etc. The mission logic must account for these scenarios in a way that cannot break the game, and ideally doesn't break immersion in a conspicuous way.

This is harder to achieve than you might think.

Ideally, you'd like it if all textual elements, such as dialogues, crew banter, logs, etc. are consistent with the way events actually unfold. Sometimes this simply isn't feasible. There are several major story elements that the player is expected to have encountered early on, such as the Devout. It would be impractical to have every piece of content that references the Devout changes its wording depending on whether player knows who they are at that point.

Even in very polished AAA RPG games you will occasionally notice points where the designers have allowed some inconsistency to slip through because of the graph complexity of handling all potential "narrative states", such as a PC bark noticing for the first time something you've just spent the last hour exploring.

But the most important thing though is you don't want the ordering of the player's actions to put the game in an unanticipated and possibly broken state.

In many games, this can be solved with physical blockers that prevent the player from accessing certain areas until the mission is in a known, well-defined state: locked doors, rock slides, or "city guard" cut scenes. Since Starcom: Unknown Space takes place in space, these options aren't available. Still, many interactions take place in the context of an anomaly or dialogue, some constraints can be put there.

But this doesn't work in all cases. For regions with more involved interactions, I use a different trick: Space is really big. So sometimes the player will learn of a new region which coincidentally turns out to be in one of those parts of really big space they haven't explored yet. This allows me to enforce some assumptions before certain areas are visited.


When designing a mission, it is very natural to imagine it unfolding like a story. While a good mission should feel story-like, I think it is a mistake to approach mission design from the perspective of starting with a story and trying to turn it into a mission. Most stories wouldn't make good missions: they have a well defined narrative structure that demands things unfold in a certain order and put too many constraints on the player's actions.

It is much easier, in my opinion, to begin a list of things I want the mission to accomplish from the above, construct a fairly robust path that goes through those things, then write a story around that path.

For example, one post-launch mini mission had the following goals:

• Added some narrative foreshadowing for the Devout's increased interest in the player
  
• Encouraged the player to search their ship logs to find a previously visited location
  
• Give the player some way of finding ships of different factions more easily

These elements suggested the rough outline of a story to me: the player finds a derelict that hints at some Devout nefariousness. Later, someone suggests returning to that location (prompting a search of the logs). Once there, a new location is revealed where the player finds more information on the Devout and a tech that improves ship detection.

That's all my notes for now, maybe at some point I'll flesh them out further and make a video.

Thanks for reading, until next week!

- Kevin