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Starcom: Unknown Space

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Starcom: Unknown Space is Steam Deck Verified!

6月13日

Since the game's official 1.0 launch in September of last year, I've been making continuous updates to the game with new content, bug fixes and QoL improvements. Among these have been enhancements to controller and Steam Deck™ support.

The game has been officially marked "playable" for a while, but the last mile to go from "playable" to "verified" was a bit of challenge.

There are a few screens in the game that are fairly information dense, particularly the shipyard. The Deck has a resolution of 1280 x 800 and Valve requires that the smallest text be a minimum of 9 pixels high to be Deck verified. That's the "mean line" height, i.e., the height of lower-case letters.

One of the QoL improvements made a while back was text scaling, so if the game detects that it's running on a Deck it will automatically scale up the fonts. But there were a few places where this doesn't work due to technical reasons of how the UI is constructed.

Valve was helpfully very specific, with screenshots of all the places they found where the text wasn't quite large enough. But obviously they didn't play through the entire game, so I also went through and looked for screens that they might not have encountered and manually tweaked any layouts to either make room for the scaling or add special cases.

The good news is that the game is now officially "Steam Deck™ Verified"!

There still may be areas with room for improvement, so if you have any suggestions, please let me know in the Discussion Forums.

Thanks for playing Starcom: Unknown Space!

Starcom: Unknown Space

257

Weekly Update: June 6, 2025

6月6日

In the my last news update I announced my wife and I were taking a trip to Scandinavia at the end of May. Now we're back.

Nordic Game

In the first half of the trip we were in Malmö, Sweden for the Nordic Games conference. This was the first time I've gone to a game developer conference and didn't have a concrete agenda: my main reasons for selecting this one specifically were: a) it happened to fall at a time where I felt like I could take a break, b) Copenhagen (a 20 minute train ride from Malmö) is a direct flight from Boston, and c) I've never been to Scandinavia.

I had a lot of fun, talked to a number of interesting developers, and saw a bunch of cool talks on different aspects of game development.

The two most interesting talks I saw were one by Fawzi Mesmar (designer at Ubisoft) and one by Marie Mejerwall (systems designer) on AI.

Mesmar's talk was on creativity, and I liked that he had a pretty clear thesis on what creativity was: a statistically unlikely idea that creates value in some context.

[dynamiclink href="https://youtu.be/7i6wuit8dXE?t=361"][/dynamiclink]

I appreciated that he's attempted to put out a fairly robust definition for something that is usually described in a very handwavy manner.

Mejerwall's was more technical on combat AI as Finite State Machines. This one was interesting to me because I've been thinking about how I might rework NPC AI's to be more modular. She didn't talk specifically about modularity, but a few of the things she did say sparked some ideas for me:

[dynamiclink href="https://youtu.be/N2cVhqpz71c?t=170"][/dynamiclink]

The Faroe Islands

The second half of the trip was spent in the Faroe Islands, which provided a nice slower-paced cooldown from the intense social activity of the conference. Kristin has wanted to go to the Faroes for quite some time, and I thought they would be a great place to find some anomaly inspirations. I've talked before about the process of generating anomaly images, where I mostly have relied on kitbashing assets in 3D environment rendering software. I have several techniques that I've learned over time to produce images that are both visually appealing and spark some sense of alien mystery.

I took a lot of reference pictures while we were there: not so much to specifically recreate a location, but to have something to understand when/how a 2D image can communicate things like distance and scale. Most everyone has had the experience of taking a photo of something dramatic only to discover that the image is somehow much less impressive than what you saw. Reversing this process is a big part of anomaly visuals: taking basic models/shaders and using tricks of perspective, scale and lighting to make them look convincingly alien and impressive. So finding locations that look impressive in real life and then also translate well as images can help me figure out what types of terrain layouts will work well.

One of the most famous locations in the Faroe Islands is Traelanipa, a dramatic cliff where a lake seems implausibly posed above sea caves.

This is partly an optical illusion: While the lake is 100' above sea level, the cliff's edge is 250' above sea level, but slopes down quickly below the eyeline. The large scale, plus lack of reference objects of known size like trees or buildings tricks the eye into thinking the lake must be about to spill over the cliff's edge.

(The general lack of trees and large vegetation has some additional advantage for my purposes: for one, these environments naturally look more "alien". For another, lots of independent meshes are really computationally expensive to place and render. Terrain that looks good with just a shader applied is just overall an easier environment to create.)

What's Next?

A number of people have asked about my future plans now that Starcom: Unknown Space has reached the point where I am mostly just making minor bug fixes and QoL updates. (There was a minor patch this week as the games inches hopefully closer to Steam Deck "verified" status.)

One can infer from my activities on this trip that I am at least considering making another entry into the Starcom universe. I haven't 100% decided that's what I am going to do: building these games has been both enormously rewarding but also challenging and stressful. Right now, my current plan is to allow myself to relax a bit, but start thinking about what another Starcom game would look like if I were to make one.

I plan to put a survey up in the next week or two.

Until then, thanks for reading my "What I Did on Spring Break" report!

- Kevin

Starcom: Unknown Space

310

Minor Deck Patch

6月3日

Kepler 21540 is a very minor patch to address some text scaling issues for Steam Deck verification.

Starcom: Unknown Space

158

Weekly Update: May 16, 2025

5月16日

Next week I'll be traveling with my wife to attend the Nordic Game conference in Malmö, Sweden.

This is actually the first time I've ever attended a game developer conference: when I first started out doing indie game development, it was not at all clear that this would be a profitable endeavor, so I resisted any expense that wasn't absolutely essential for making the game I was working on.

At a certain point the Starcom games became successful enough that a conference would be a reasonable expense, but I was so overwhelmed with the literal thousands of tasks that I rarely felt like I could spare the time, and when I could it didn't necessarily align with an industry event I was interested in.

Now that Starcom: Unknown Space has been out of Early Access for 8 months, I'm still making updates, but they aren't critical patches: mostly QoL improvements, bug fixes and addressing the few remaining areas where players need a bit more guidance.

This felt like the ideal time to take a workcation and see what other developers are doing, and the Nordic conference fit our schedule.

So the regular weekly updates may pause or be irregular for the next two weeks until I get back, although I will be checking emails and the forums periodically.

Until then!
- Kevin

Starcom: Unknown Space

449

Weekly Update: May 8, 2025

5月8日

(Posting a day earlier than usual because I'm out of town this weekend.)

On Sunday I posted build 21533 which addressed a few QoL type issues and aimed to fix several of the remaining "stuck" issues. These are spots where the main storyline appears to stall out. Most of these cases arise from the player doing something different from how I expected and therefore missing or not triggering the next directive.

One scenario that I've seen multiple reports for at this point is where a storyline is waiting for the player to return to Celaeno, at which point Cdre Yu will give an update and/or new assignment. So one of the new changes is to have a crew member suggest returning to Celaeno if Yu has an active "attract" conversation (i.e., a conversation that causes the Operations button to glow) for an extended period of time.

This was a bit tricky for technical reasons. When I designed the conversation system, I was not overly concerned with the performance cost of initializing and evaluating a dialogue tree: it was something that happened only at the start of a conversation, so spending 1 ms on the operation wasn't exorbitant. As I later discovered, the evaluation can leak a small amount of memory under some circumstances. But as long as this evaluation is rare, it's not a big deal.

But if I want to check if Yu has an attract conversation, I have to do this evaluation regularly.

As I've previously discussed, the mission system evaluates missions every 0.16 seconds. Even though that's somewhat infrequent, I think that's still too frequent to perform a check that costs 1ms in order to resolve a scenario that most players may not be encountering.

Fortunately, the mission system uses "short-circuit" evaluation so that if one condition fails, no later condition in the same check even happens.

So here's my solution:

By way of analogy, imagine the first lane is someone with a stopwatch who starts it when Yu's conversation button starts glowing, and resets the stopwatch when they notice it's not glowing anymore. Also, they're kind of distracted so only check every ten seconds.

The second lane is someone looking at that stopwatch. As soon as it hits twelve minutes they tell the Biomed officer to say something. A second prompt can occur after that point if the player returns to Celaeno.

Based on the game's anonymous analytics, I know that players have been triggering these prompts. But due to limitations of my analytics, I don't have a super clear picture of where they are in the game when they happen. So rather than spend a lot of time trying to add instrumentation, I'll just ask here:

If you've gotten a prompt in game to return to Celaeno, where in the game were you, what was it that Yu was waiting to tell you and did the timing seem reasonable?

FYI, I won't be responding to discussion posts or feedback for the next few days. Until next week!
- Kevin

Starcom: Unknown Space

215

Kepler 21533 Update

5月4日

Various fixes to areas where players have reported being stuck with no clear way to advance the main storyline, plus some QoL improvements:

Visited trade planets are considered "explored" for purposes of dimming explored stars (existing saves may need to revisit system)
"Highlight investigate" will also cause unexplored star systems to pulse
Add First Officer tip about star dimming
If Cdre Yu has a new "glowing" conversation topic for an extended period of time, eventually a crew member will suggest returning to Celaeno
The Heretic Portal "Kaleidoscope" hint no longer advances when the player revisits the portal, instead it waits for the player to activate it
Add hint lane to Southern Chariot if player hightails away from Chariot before it jumps
A random void system with an ocean planet is added mid-game to ensure Floral Blight can always be completed

Starcom: Unknown Space

228

Weekly Update: May 2, 2025

5月2日

Very quick update this week:

On Monday I posted a small patch that adds the ability to load a blueprint even if you don't have the requirements while in planning mode (plus a few minor other fixes).

I've also started work on another minor update that will attempt to address some of the remaining cases where the main storyline has appeared "stuck" for some players.

Until next week!
- Kevin

Starcom: Unknown Space

202

Kepler Patch 21531

4月28日

Minor updates:

If the player is in Planning Mode in the shipyard they will be able to load blueprints that they do not have the tech/resources for
"Exit station" and "Delete saves" alert/confirmation dialogues now allow selection of a button when using the controller
Several more minor typos

Starcom: Unknown Space

206

Weekly Update: Apr 25, 2025

4月25日

If you missed the announcement from earlier this week, the default build has been updated to Kepler 21530, mostly with changes for improved Deck / Controller support, with a few other patches.

Deck/Controller Improvements:

Improved Save & Load menus to enable all functionality via controller inputs, including toggling selections for delete, deleting old autosaves, etc.
When text scaling is set to maximum (set by default on the Deck) all text should be a minimum of 9 pixels high at 1280x800 resolution.
Eliminated areas where scaled text overlaps other UI elements
Dropdowns now keep current selection in view when using controller
All text input fields should bring up the virtual keyboard on the Deck
Now possible to toggle highlight, fog in map mode
Research panel correctly keeps research selection in view
In cases where there are two scrollviews visible (such as the ship log), right stick scrolls the first, dpad scrolls the second.
Cargo screen allows for quickly analyzing items and proceeding to the next
Improved input handling in the shipyard
Chromaplate swatch customization now works with controller
Crew help should correctly reference controller inputs instead of keyboard if the controller is being used

General fixes:

If the player has set a "design goal", the trade screen previously did not show shortfalls in the faction's own reserve currency. Now it does.
Rendering optimization when in map mode
Several minor typos

There's also a small patch, currently on the opt-in beta branch that I expect to deploy to default in the next few days. This will fix:

If the player is in Planning Mode in the shipyard they will be able to load blueprints that they do not have the tech/resources for
"Exit station" and "Delete saves" alert/confirmation dialogues now allow selection of a button when using the controller
Several more minor typos

In other news, my wife and I are planning a trip at the end of May where I plan to attend the Nordic Game Conference in Sweden, so there will be a pause in regular updates around that time.

Until next week!
- Kevin

Starcom: Unknown Space

222

Kepler 21530 Controller / Deck Update

4月21日

The default branch has now been updated to the Kepler 21530 build. The main goal of this build was to prepare the game for Steam Deck verification, although there are a few minor gameplay improvements as well:

Deck/Controller Improvements:

Improved Save & Load menus to enable all functionality via controller inputs, including toggling selections for delete, deleting old autosaves, etc.
When text scaling is set to maximum (set by default on the Deck) all text should be a minimum of 9 pixels high at 1280x800 resolution.
Eliminated areas where scaled text overlaps other UI elements
Dropdowns now keep current selection in view when using controller
All text input fields should bring up the virtual keyboard on the Deck
Now possible to toggle highlight, fog in map mode
Research panel correctly keeps research selection in view
In cases where there are two scrollviews visible (such as the ship log), right stick scrolls the first, dpad scrolls the second.
Cargo screen allows for quickly analyzing items and proceeding to the next
Improved input handling in the shipyard
Chromaplate swatch customization now works with controller
Crew help should correctly reference controller inputs instead of keyboard if the controller is being used

General fixes:

If the player has set a "design goal", the trade screen previously did not show shortfalls in the faction's own reserve currency. Now it does.
Rendering optimization when in map mode
Several minor typos

Starcom: Unknown Space

351

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