KickStarter Free Stars: Children of Infinity - upcoming Star Control 2 sequel from original creator Fred Ford

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pistolshrimp/free-stars-children-of-infinity/posts/4175633

2024 Summer Update​

We don’t really have seasons here in California—just “dry” and “wet”—but I’ve been told there are apparently four canonical seasons. If there were more, we’d write more blog posts. Where should the new one go? My vote is between winter and spring, just to throw off Groundhog Day and finally sow ultimate disarray among rodents. A dream shared by all humankind.

With the Kickstarter behind us, it is time to resume our more moderately-paced seasonal updates. What have we been doing in the past few months? In short: making a plan, growing our team to fit the plan, and then executing. (The plan, not the team.) In this update you can learn a bit about our post-Kickstarter process, hear what we’ve been working on in Children of Infinity since the Kickstarter ended, gain some insights into what’s next, and get to know some of our new teammates.

BackerKit to BackerQuiet​

Our Kickstarter campaign was ridiculous. In every sense of the word! The amount of success, the amount of work, and the pace of everything was beyond what we could have anticipated. While it seems like our flurry of communication ended at the closing bell for the Kickstarter, things really weren’t quiet until after we had gotten our surveys out and seen the issues that cropped up with that. Just getting to the point where we could send the surveys required a lot of auditing, problem solving, and setup in BackerKit. We also had to address some of our bespoke needs, like including our Patreon supporters.

With over 7,000 backers being managed through BackerKit, we wanted to do as much as we could to help both our supporters and ourselves prepare for any questions or confusion. At the time of this post, 86% of our backers have completed their surveys, which we consider a success! Those people were able to complete the survey, and we’ll be able to deliver rewards! Once the surveys went into the wild, I (Dan) was the help desk, and stayed busy not just with my usual work but also fielding as many as a dozen emails a day—along with questions on Discord. We don’t have a dedicated support team; it’s just me, and your support requests just wind up in my inbox! In addition to adding a cozy vibe to our operation, I actually really enjoyed helping backers out, though I’m grateful it tapered off. As someone who dreads any phone call to any service where I’ll be dealing with support teams, escalations, bureaucracy, or robots I have to dial and talk my way past, it’s fun to provide a different experience.

Pin popularity breakdown. Fwiffo triumphs again.

BackerKit Learnings​

I learned a lot from our Kickstarter and BackerKit experience, and I’d love to do a full retrospective when things are quieter. The biggest takeaway I’d want to share for now with other developers learning along the way is to actually add more questions to the survey for information gathering! Just by doing a survey with our limited information, we were able to learn so much. We had educated guesses on some things, but nothing beats some real, human-reported data backed by people actually committing funds. For example, we assumed the majority of backers would be interested in a PC version (Steam/GOG), but we now know just how much of a majority they comprise. We can also see there’s a relatively large interest in a GOG release for the game, with about one in seven players interested in playing there. What we don’t know, though, is how many players are planning to play on Windows, Linux, or Mac. We should have added a question!

As a comparison, we know just how desired our different console versions will be compared to the PC. About 85% of backers are exclusively interested in playing on PC. For consoles, the Switch ranks in the front by a large margin, with a bit of a gap to the PS5, and with only a small number of our backers interested in an Xbox version.

There are more questions we could have asked but didn’t. How did backers even find our Kickstarter? How many players were planning on playing couch co-op together? Keyboards or controllers? TVs or monitors? Obviously, we could have tired people out with too many questions, but some would have had more sway on our development. Seeing just how much of a PC-player majority we have does tell us we’re focusing on the right things (PC first), but it would have been great to know just how many people want to play on Linux, for example. As we start looking to do things like broader playtesting with players, knowing just who has access to a Linux gaming setup would have been useful information.

Top 5 activities for the Lost Crew Log. Stop petting the wildlife on alien planets!
All that said, especially after the insane pace of running our Kickstarter, I’m grateful to be receiving far fewer help requests and to be able to focus largely on the work for the game, even if it’s at the expense of some of our getting-the-word-out efforts. Keep in mind that our Kickstarter was also not just busy during the Kickstarter, but also for many months leading up to do a Kickstarter! If things have seemed a little quiet lately, it’s because there were many months of work happening non-stop. I needed a break! I had a regular, five-day workweek for the first time in months and finally took a week off in July as my last deep breath before aiming to finish our work.

It took us about a month before we were back to firing on all cylinders for development, and we needed to start by assembling the rest of our crew.

Space for New Space Friends​

With funding, we can afford more fun! This is the first and last time I will make that joke.

As we discussed on our Kickstarter, our additional funds were chiefly for acquiring additional full-time help. They’re the most critical aspect of what we knew we would need to complete our game and help us deliver on our vision.

Early character concept by Mandy Draeger.
First off is Mandy Draeger, officially joining the development team as an artist and animator. Did you like how our Kickstarter page looked? How about them pins? She was responsible for the art assets for the Kickstarter itself, as well as for designing the physical goods—both for mock-up and eventual manufacturing—which backers will be receiving. Going forward, beyond helping us manufacture our rewards, she’ll be contributing other art and animation and is currently working on alien comms paintings. She comes to us with a wealth of industry expertise in art, animation, design, and even QA. We even worked together at Toys for Bob on several Skylanders titles.

Next is Mallory Littleton, who is joining as our narrative lead. While we have an amazing story written, there’s a lot more work to do to actually implement it in-game! She’ll be developing how the player is going to experience the story, working with our various writers to get our rogue’s gallery of characters all playing their parts, contributing writing/design, and helping lead VO and localization efforts. She has shipped multiple Life is Strange games and is overflowing with experience and enthusiasm in both interactive fiction and leading writing teams.

Last is Andie Nare, who is joining as a programmer. She’ll be developing many of our Godot-driven, user-facing features into shippable form and supporting our bevy of design and art needs. She’s shipped products for PC, Switch, web, mobile, and even for Playdate (UQM2 port when???), and is experienced in building technical solutions and tools for designers and artists.

We are so excited to have these three joining us and reach our desired team size for what’s needed to finish our game.

What’s Been Cooking?​

It took us a month after finishing the Kickstarter to actually finalize our plan, imagine the people we would need to execute it, and then turn those imagined helpers into real people who are working with us. Actual software development didn’t halt during this initial month, but we had plenty on our plate beyond just the game.

Of course everyone wants to know “What’s the release date?” Before we even attempted an answer, we needed to know what we were going to release. And what we were going to release was changing based on our Kickstarter! As our Kickstarter added scope and audience information, we were trying to plan the rest of the project based on a moving target. Once it settled, we started the process of scoping and budgeting. Then we got to making some decisions around what we wanted to do and in what order.

Children of Infinity running on the Steam Deck.
There are two non-mutually-exclusive approaches we use to help plan and prioritize our work when there is much to do. One route is going for the lowest hanging fruit possible first. We’ve proven out our entire workflow for adding new ships, for example, so it makes lots of sense to just make lots of ships. There are no unknowns, we’re sure the work is necessary, and we can easily calculate how much time we need to do them. The second strategy involves going for the most unknown things first. We had been thoughtful about being able to support multiple platforms but had done very little work toward actually proving what’s involved for Mac, Linux, and consoles, for example. We know we can do it, but we don’t know what we don’t know. Because the work has many unknowns, it’s much harder to hone in on even estimating how much effort it will even take or make decisions about what is or isn’t strictly needed.

When building a long roadmap for our project, we try to mix and match these procedures as needed so different teams can keep moving on work that is necessary. In general, we want engineering to be many steps ahead of content (design, art, writing) and understanding any limitations that content creation should be mindful of. Speaking broadly, we focused our narrative, design, art, and engineering teams on their own separate tasks to maximize valuable output for the others and get ahead of our new technical requirements. Here was the broad description of what we wanted to achieve during our first milestone of about two months:

• Create a gameplay experience proving the ‘core loop’ (i.e. the player’s experience flying through space, visiting planets, etc.) and demonstrating what pieces were fun and what needed work.
• Demonstrate a playable version of our vision for hyperspace and raise all the technical and art requirements.
• Start to break down the entire game’s story and characters into a complete plot map with steps we can take to scope and implement it.
• Prove a playable story experience where the player interacts with two different aliens to progress the story with shippable writing we can evaluate.
• Demonstrate the steps needed for art direction and asset pipelines on planetside, our most sophisticated art environment which mixes procedural generation with handmade assets.
• Create 10 fun planetside creatures with complete art and gameplay.
• Onboard an additional comms screen artist to start working on conversation portraits and create a couple of them.
• Finalizing a music scope and schedule plan, and actually create some pieces targeted at a few specific areas.
• Develop a process for creating and distributing builds.
• Create Linux and Mac proof-of-concept ports of the game.
• Scope the technical and business work involved in porting and distributing beyond Steam to GOG and consoles and ensure we have access to development materials.

So, how did we do with those two months? We were largely successful! We can play, create, and distribute a build of the game via Steam. In that build, you can play an experience representative of "just after the start of the game,” where the player has limited resources and will find the universe pretty threatening, with regions they probably don’t want to explore. We didn’t get to prove much of how the player grows stronger yet. The build represents how we want a few of our gameplay twists on UQM to play, like our more interactive hyperspace, different motivations for the player to explore or return home, and even letting the player be defeated without a game over screen.

Feeling chipper! Alien "lifeform" by Tim Sjastad.
We can play through a sequence (no spoilers!) where the player can either enlist the help of an alien, threaten them, or ignore them to get something needed to help solve another alien’s problem, which includes multiple possible outcomes which are all represented in both gameplay and conversation. In true UQM tradition, we’ve even added options we don’t even think most players will pick, but we can’t wait to see what people do.

Work in progress comms screen by Robert Mauritson.
On our art side, we created about a dozen new planetside creatures and have a solid workflow for designing, arting, and animating them. Our planetside procedural generation is behind where we’d like it to be, as proving a workflow which demonstrated the more fantastical art style we wanted forced us to go backwards several steps. We are able to procedurally generate unique space scenes like nebulae and starfields. We painted, animated, and implemented three new alien comms screens, with two more almost complete. We’ve developed new tech to streamline our animation implementation process. We were mostly done with our UQM1 ships, but we finished making their additional “accessories” (Orz space marines, VUX limpets, etc.), so we can sign off on the original roster. The Slylandro Probe is still M.I.A. as intended. Sorry. Or you’re welcome.

From scribble (Dan Gerstein) to creature (Tim Sjastad and Zach Sundberg). It seemed so much cuter in the doodle.
We adapted our technology—Simple and its Godot connections—to support all our PC (Windows/Linux/Mac) platforms and even got further than expected. We have playable builds on all of these platforms now! The additional effort put into porting for Apple silicon will also help us get a head start on Switch, which also uses ARM architecture.

We have also satisfied our business requirements (i.e., a lot of contracts) and obtained development materials necessary for porting and releasing on GOG, Nintendo Switch, Sony Playstation 5, and Microsoft Xbox Series X|S, which will allow us to not just release the game on those platforms but also to satisfy digital key delivery for our Kickstarter backers.

What’s Next?​

Early alien comms screen concept by Mandy Draeger.

For Development​

We have a laundry list of work to do, but our next milestone is broadly focused on a few areas: bringing other areas of gameplay (e.g. gas giant exploration, the Mark II, Floyd) up to speed with what we did this milestone along with any art spec we need for them, adding even more of our story sequences and aliens into the game, finalizing the full spec for all of the alien interactions, nailing down our planetside art needs, and starting on Switch development.

All in two months!

If it sounds too good to be true, it’s because in some ways it is. Game development is very cyclical, and especially in a game like ours with many, diverse experiences, not all aspects are going to play as nicely as others. Just because certain things are functioning and satisfying to us does not mean we expect them to be satisfying to players yet. We have oodles of polish to do! “Functional” is often a useful goal just when we’re proving out how we’re going to do a big pile of work, since much of game development includes doing things not just once, but at scale.

We hope to share our progress along the way, even if it’s not in these lengthy blog posts. We do have a lot of work to do, and prioritizing these forms of sharing can be tricky when it becomes a lot of work (i.e. attempting to write thoughtful words). Following us on Twitter and joining our Discord are the best ways to get micro-dosed updates, along with our development streams (which will be returning!).

For Streams​

I (Dan) have been considering how best to handle my favorite form of communication—streaming—going forward. Streams won’t be on a regular schedule but will instead be a mix of ad-hoc ones when I’m doing low-key work, and announced-in-advance when there’s some focused/specific work to show.

It’s important for me to be able to mix the “quiet” ones in because, hey, a lot of my work is quite dull, but the point is to let everyone be a part of our development and for us to enjoy sharing our work with you.

Streams can’t be guaranteed to be completely spoiler-free for certain aspects of the game at this point. You’ll catch flashes of things like the starmap, allusions to some names of things, and so on; but any time I am working on story elements involving a character’s plotline for whatever reason, I’ll try to title the stream with a warning.

For Backers​

We haven’t set a hard date on when we are closing our surveys or starting to work with our backers who are contributing their designs, participating in playtests, and learning to make their own ships. For those backers, the plan is to survey everyone’s time availability for their different contributions or activities and then start assigning slots to people. The soonest any of this would happen will likely be November/December, but we’d expect to be handling this more in 2025 since the end of the year is often a scheduling challenge for many people.

The End for Now​

As Children of Infinity continues to take shape, we look forward to showing you more and more of what we’ve been making. There will be lulls here and there because we’re working in a slightly different environment than before the Kickstarter, where our priority is making and releasing a great game. By having funding and the scope we’ve set, we have several new responsibilities:

• We are responsible to our 7,000 supporters. They have committed their support to us for a game and physical goodies they want, and we owe it to everyone to deliver.
• We are responsible for paying our new teammates for the work they’re doing.
• We are responsible to first-party (Nintendo, Sony, etc.) contracts which allow us to use their development software/hardware and platforms in exchange for our respecting their non-disclosure agreements.

We take our responsibilities very seriously. We always did, but when we were self-funding with a very small team, the risks were far fewer and stakes much lower. Now that we’ve staffed up and have made our commitments to our supporters and our teammates, we are working against a very real budget of time and funds.

Thank you for waiting a long while for this giant update. We’re still so happy to have all of you along for the journey and invite you to join us on Discord, Twitter, and Reddit to keep following along.

 

[Cohesion]

They hired 3 females: artist, narrative lead and programmer.

 

[Infinitron]

They hired 3 females: artist, narrative lead and programmer.

Lmao, not likely.

 

[Baron Tahn]

I swesr this project has been in the worls for a decade or something and they are only now getting to building ideas and a roadmap? Theyll be dead before its finished! When was the last Star Control project released, the one they sued/had a huge bitch fight with?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I swesr this project has been in the worls for a decade or something and they are only now getting to building ideas and a roadmap? Theyll be dead before its finished! When was the last Star Control project released, the one they sued/had a huge bitch fight with?

Atari's bankruptcy and subsequent auction was in 2013, and Stardock purchased what they thought was the complete rights to all things Star Control. But from that moment they started working full-time on developing a new Star Control-title, which was finally released in the second half of 2018 as Star Control: Origins. Several DLCs and content patches have been released since, but right now that branch seems to be asleep. It's a decent attempt at Star Control, and certainly better than Star Control 3 (gameplay-wise, at least. I'll defer to others when it comes to the writing).

Up until ~2020, all talk about a potential Ur-Quan Masters-sequel by the Toys for Bob-devs have solely been speculations and/or expressions of desire. The legal battle between TfB and Stardock only dragged that out. But once those were resolved* TfB only had to clear their work schedule, and as one of the more lucrative studios under the Blizzard-Activision banner, that took time of its own. But now they've moved on, formed their own development studio (Pistol Shrimp) and are working on this title full-time... and yet at a leisurely pace, it seems. They're not rushing development here.

According to the Kickstarter the first idea of a plausible release date is August 2025 (a year from now) but I wouldn't be surprised that gets dragged out a bit.

*The settlement acknowledged that Stardock owned the Star Control-trademark, and all copyrighted material related to Star Control 3, including all original characters, artwork and such within. However TfB had a 10-year contract with Accolade for their original Star Control-content (including all original characters, artwork and such that appeared in Star Control 1 and 2) but that expired in 2001, so all those rights automatically reverted to TfB at that time. Atari's estate probably willfully withheld that information to increase the value of the Star Control-franchise, and it took TfB some time to dig up the papers to prove as such, hence why it dragged on so long - neither party was willing to back down. (It doesn't help that Accolade was actively trying to screw over TfB by moving the Star Control-license further away from their content back in the 1990s, but that's another story.)

But with the settlement in place both Star Control-related games could move ahead full steam, with SC:O only including a single race owned by TfB, and TfB being free to create games using their pre-established characters... which they are doing right now.

 

[Infinitron]

Big milestone update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pistolshrimp/free-stars-children-of-infinity/posts/4232502

Milestone 2 Update​

We’re excited to share an update on what we’ve been working on as we wrap up our latest milestone, Milestone 2! For players who are excited about the story of our game, this update is guaranteed to be mostly spoiler free. As we have more milestones, with even more exciting names like Milestone 3 and Milestone 4, we’ll be sharing these updates so we can show our progress.

Sometimes it might not look like much, but the achievements are in securing technical, design, or creative goals. We usually want to prove anything we’re doing is really worth our while before investing in it, and a critical step which won’t be obvious until the very end is actually polishing what we have. Until we make a lot more stuff, actually play it all together, and evaluate it against every part, we won’t know exactly what parts are fine as-is and what parts need extra love to shine.

Get ready for some things in various states of completion!

That’s a Lot of Stars!​

Our game currently has 718 stars. I actually hadn’t counted in a while and tallied them just for this blog post! The stars in HyperSpace are laid out in a program called Tiled, and Simple uses a bespoke plugin to ingest the Tiled data and create the actual, playable map of HyperSpace. All of this was already working, but there were a few things left to do to finalize our vision.

First was enhancing our procedural generation. Our game is built out of two distinct parts: Simple, which handles our physics-based gameplay and multiplayer needs, and Godot, which we use to do audiovisual representations of the gameplay. Godot observes what’s going on in Simple but otherwise has limited awareness of what might show up and executes no gameplay code. Many months ago, we started to do procedural generation of solar systems, where we create a collection of planets and position them around a star programmatically, as well as override certain things when we want to place special things like Rainbow Worlds. All of that work was done within Simple, since it’s important to gameplay.

Each of those stars contains piles of planets!
The problem is, Godot doesn’t run Simple logic, so it couldn’t do the same procedural generation. It only knew how to visualize planets, minerals, and so on when the player was actually there and they had been generated.

This created a challenge for how we would go about tracking progress or guiding players to things. It would be difficult to know what, exactly, a player would find or had done in a star system if we didn’t know what was happening there except when a player was in that star system (say that 10 times fast)! Beyond that, we have a design for an interactive Starmap which helps a player take notes about what they’ve discovered.

We needed a way for Godot to be able to get the same information about procedural generation that Simple was using, but at different times, like from the Starmap menu. We now do our procedural generation in a C++ plugin. Godot and Simple both run the same, shared code to generate a star, even though they will each do wildly different things with the information. Simple will actually make a solar system, planets, and minerals when the player enters the appropriate game space, while Godot will get the same information about what will be made as a JSON response.

The game running in Simple on the left. The JSON we see in Godot on the right.
Second was authoring some of what we call our “HyperSpace topography.” We were currently using Tiled only to generate stars, which are always the same shape and were always the same kind of thing (a star). For Children of Infinity, rather than a straight shot through space on manual or auto-pilot, we wanted the player to actually experience some texture in HyperSpace. We’ve talked about it forever and did some prototypes, but it wasn’t clear how we’d handle it at a large scale. Using nautical metaphors, what if there were currents, shallow areas, deep areas, treacherous rapids, and other navigational hazards in HyperSpace? What if there were many things in HyperSpace besides just gravity wells?

We now support a bevy of features that let us make unique shapes and gameplay. Using Tiled and Simple together, we’ve been able to demonstrate fun gameplay with 2D shapes and actually make the Starmap much more of a game map, with tools the player will gain to help them traverse new challenges. More on that shortly!

Lastly, we wanted the ability to create dynamic experiences in HyperSpace. Luckily, stars don’t need to move around, but we were starting to place things that would appear or disappear based on different rules. We had mechanisms for placing all kinds of things, but what about deciding if they should be there at all? What if those rules would change over the course of play? Spheres of influence are a good example, but we’ve got a lot of new things cooking beyond just spheres of influence. Here’s a proof of concept showing the player using their metaphorical metal detector to find some similarly metaphorical buried treasure beneath the metaphorical waves of HyperSpace:

Metal detector (lower right icon) indicates proximity, player triggers a "dive" to perceive the depths (the color shift).
We still have a lot more work to do in HyperSpace, especially in deciding how we want to visualize some things, but we can now build all of our prototypes at scale and see how the whole map plays. And it is a big map!

Introducing the Introduction​

We have sliced our game’s story up into different playable segments which usually revolve around the subplot of an alien or two, and we have been designing and building each piece one at a time. Last milestone, we got our first of these playable segments put together. This milestone, we tackled one that is very likely to change before we finish, but is a critical part of seeing how the game plays: the start of the game!

The beginning of the game has a lot of heavy lifting to do beyond the story elements. We want players to be able to pick up and play the game well enough to be motivated and feel capable. For that to succeed, we don’t want to introduce players to too much overwhelming complexity too quickly while they might just be coming to terms with the very long mastery curve of the unique physics of Melee combat.

We now have a start of the game, including a story, where the player is introduced to ship controls and Melee, then to the notion of scanning and landing on planets, and then finally to exploring HyperSpace. They’ll meet different characters who will be part of the player’s story and can help guide them. We’ve built what we lovingly call ‘the kiddie pool’ where the player can safely learn the core concepts of the game before they’re unleashed on the entire galaxy. We’re still playing with how much we want the player to be forced vs. encouraged to stay in the shallow part of the pool until they have complete freedom, and this is something we’ll know how to tune when we have more playable story segments and player growth.

We hope you're excited to meet Trademaster Placeholder. This is sarcasm.
Last but not least, the beginning demonstrates a starting point for the player’s capabilities. We want players to feel encouraged to grow in strength. Whether it’s getting new ships, practicing Melee, or acquiring some of our many upgrades which will help them progress through the game, we’ve created the floor from which all those things will rise.

Want Success? You Planet!​

If you were to identify places where the player was more likely to lose crew, Melee might be the worst thing in space—but being planetside is dangerous. We put special attention into actually creating a spectrum of planets, from peaceful to absolutely deadly. We had proven the bottom and the middle, but what about planets where you absolutely do not want to go without being properly equipped and skilled? We’re very satisfied to finally have planets where you’re likely to die before you can even finish uttering your shocked expletives.

This is fine.
Planetside work also hit some asset goals. As of our milestone, we have finished creating our entire creature roster, only needing the ones our backers will be helping us design (more on that shortly). We might choose to create more creatures later, but since we only have one artist working on these, it’s great to unleash him on some of our other art needs.

The game is not bug free.
Planetside has proven to be the most challenging art space to nail down because of the mixture of very different types of art: a procedurally generated texture, modeled objects like the lander and critters, and VFX for hazards. The player needs to understand what all of these things mean for gameplay, and from an artistic standpoint, we are trying to strike the right balance between artistic interpretation and abstraction and “what it really would look like.” For this milestone, we created a new workflow for generating planet textures that an artist can interact with. The artist can now actually spend some more time polishing and tuning that texture in an environment with our other Planetside objects to balance that push and pull between reality and computer-generated artistic abstraction.

Flat moon hypothesis.
Speaking of plans, we had long had a plan for how we wanted to handle our camera in Interplanetary view once players are in a star system. This was a bit of a polish task, but because it was never really proven and remained quite unknown, I spent a little time verifying it was going to work. There’s still more polish to do, but here you can see our Interplanetary camera capturing some of the vibes from The Ur-Quan Masters as it provides different zoom levels depending on how close you get to the sun. Elements like battlegroups and other players at different zoom levels all move at different speeds, and we’ll indicate to the player what might be close or far away with some size changes. The idea is that the player’s ship size stays constant even though the size of the world around them changes. Everything’s still subject to change, but we think it feels pretty unique and will encourage players to want to get closer to things to learn more about them–the core exploration principle of Children of Infinity!

Old one on the left, new one on the right.
Last but not least, we continued to work through our alien conversation portraits. We finished three more of them this milestone and started working on our next two. We’ve also created what we call our mini-comms screen, which we will use in special situations where characters might want to talk without pulling you into the main fully interactive comms screen–-like for tutorials, cutscenes, and stuff like that.

Concept sketches for... someone.

Let’s Split​

We made a number of technical achievements that will unlock further design work. We finally completed the technical heavy lifting which would allow us to prove local co-op play. We now allow the Godot viewer to request an additional viewport for a local player, and our user interface plumbing is set up to support the notion that multiple players might be playing. If you are familiar with programming concepts, this is very much the equivalent of undoing a lot of assumptions, removing singletons, and inventing objects which can come and go as players come or go. This coming milestone, we’ll actually be doing some of the real work for co-op play in general, but this was an exciting technical piece to have under our belt.

Two players on one screen, each with their own view.
We started work on our Switch port this milestone, and as of now, the whole game is playable there! (Well, as much as it’s playable anywhere, at least.) We have a long way to go to accommodate the Switch’s more limited technical requirements, but just getting it running was no small task. We are excited to work with W4 Games to make Godot go-go, but because we have some unique engine components like Simple, we need to do a lot of our own work as well. We’ll be determining strategies to optimize for memory and performance now that we are actually running.

We have a lot of other technical odds and ends we were able to do this milestone which are far from flashy but will make our game so much better. We implemented threaded loading of game scenes so players can play the game seamlessly without loading screens. We have a lot of progression systems functioning, so we can trigger events based on interesting, secret bits of data like how many star systems the player has visited, who you’ve talked to, and other bits of knowledge the game accumulates. We have rudimentary controller support for playing without a keyboard. We made some very cool music mixing tests with multi-tracked music to go beyond simple musical loops for our gameplay. Like we mentioned last milestone, a lot of our technical work is in tackling the biggest unknowns—and there are lots of little ones like this that help us shape our work.

The Big Production​

During this last milestone, I also finished a massive spreadsheet which represented the entire itemized list of every asset, task, design, and feature required for us to finish the game. While we had started working in our milestone chunks already with a roadmap toward completing the game, we couldn’t actually finalize everything until our Kickstarter wound down and we actually learned a bit more from our first milestone about how the work was going to, well, work.

The last time we had such a complete summary of tasks to complete was actually in the lead up to our Kickstarter, where we detailed every single asset, plan, and goal we’d need to do before we could activate the Kickstarter.

With our entire game roadmap, now we can actually say with complete confidence that we’re done with all of our creature assets. We also have it mapped against time and effort, so we know when we need to be done with all of our ship art, for example. We can guarantee all of our contributors will have clear deadlines and we can scope all of our work and make sure they really will have time for what we’re planning. It is also easy to distribute the work so we aren’t trying to do too much all at once.

Trust us, it's really exciting.
It might sound a little weird to say I’m excited about a spreadsheet, but it’s a really empowering spreadsheet. We’re working with a team of people and we’re serious about delivering on time, so it’s critical that we can all look down the same runway together and see the steps we need to take to prepare for takeoff. From a personal, creative standpoint, it’s honestly thrilling to see every single part just described and accounted for. The vision we want to achieve is accounted for, and I personally am excited to actually have an accurate plan for how to get there.

This also helped us make decisions on when we might look to do things like playtesting. We know we’ll have a few willing victims, er… participants. In addition to our supporters who are participating in a private playtest, we planned out when and how we’ll be taking in designs for creatures, lander skins, ships, and the Precursor Legacy. We know the last two months of the year are typically busy times for people, but if you backed at one of those tiers, look out for an email in the next month with some fun “homework” to do. We’ll establish some deadlines (don’t worry, you’ll have time!), but we’d love to start working on your creatures at the start of next year, with your ships and lander skins following.

For everyone else who has already been submitting text in our surveys for the Lost Crew Log and Messages from Earth, we’ll be starting to slot them in this milestone. We’re excited to finally start putting your contributions in the game!

What’s in Milestone 3​

We have a few big goals for our next milestone. Of course we’ll be continuing to make things like our playable story slices and alien comms portraits, but we’re going to finalize some big parts. In short:

• Complete design for co-op play in Adventure (the story mode) with all parts working. Start preparing our UI and game to handle the user experience for local multiplayer, split-screen co-op and single-screen Super Melee (the player versus player mode).
• Finalize the requirements for every playable story slice, even the ones we aren’t building yet. This will help us ensure we’re not over-scoping anything and can stitch multiple story segments together.
• Implement our Trading and Alien Auction House systems.
• Finish our gameplay experiences for Gas Giant Gameplay and how the player is using the Mark II (!).
• Implement player ship and lander upgrade mechanisms so they can actually grow beyond the starting point we made this milestone.
• Finish all of our new ship designs and art (besides the ones we’ll be making with backers).
• Start finalizing our Interior experiences with Floyd, including building art assets.
• Start supporting more fully-featured and platform-specific network play, like making use of Steam’s “invite to game” feature for playing with your friends.

Definition of Done​

One of the unique parts of game development is identifying what is or isn’t easy to change, and then navigating with that knowledge. To use a metaphor, if you’re building with Lego and you’re making something that’s only two bricks high, you can swap and rearrange different parts quite easily without destroying the entire piece you’re working on. Once you start building a dozen bricks high and start making more interesting shapes like towers or bridges, taking things apart becomes a lot trickier. You might wish you had more blue bricks, but they’re all stuck in that massive sculpture you built. The problem is, maybe you didn’t know how cool blue bricks were until you put many structures together.

Part of creation is letting your creations speak to you. Games are meant to be played! That metaphor really feels apt for how games shape up. Assuming our finished game is a swath of dozen-brick-tall features, it would be a huge mistake to try to stack everything up that high right now and commit that deeply into ensuring every structure is a dozen bricks tall. With a finite amount of time and a broad collection of experiences we’re making for players to enjoy, the challenge is that we don’t know exactly which experiences are going to be best yet. They aren’t all sitting together, and some are only five high while others are just getting their second brick added.

In describing the big spreadsheet above, one of the critical allocations of time is for polish. What are we going to polish? We don’t know! For all we know, many things will be great being only five high, while others will be so much fun that we want to make them the full dozen. That’s why we reserve time to polish the whole product and experience, since we’ll know what isn’t working only when we compare it to all the other parts. You could call it triage, but it’s more like a positive version of triage. What aspects of the game will benefit the most from additional investment? It’s too early to tell.

All project estimates are made up numbers. Here's some of ours!

Finish Now, Polish Later​

I am continually learning on this project. I learn about new technologies, new game design ideas, and how to work with other people on a team. If there’s one thing I hope everyone on the team embraces, it is that we are all here to learn together. One of my biggest lessons I’ve been learning on this project is how to teach and even enforce that notion of leaving polish for later.

We are fortunate to work with so many creative individuals who are filling our game with their dreams. We want their contributions because they have those talents and capabilities! How can something be visualized? How can a story be told? How could a strange alien sound? It’s wonderful what we can come up with.

I’m used to seeing a lot of games in progress, and it’s honestly a joy to share all of the incomplete work with the team and everyone following our development. For our creatives who dream and are unfamiliar with the process, it can seem confusing or outright mortifying! Maybe even for you, reading this update right now, you are wondering or anxious about certain things which don’t seem finished. You are right—they are not finished. As Fred likes to say, nothing is ever finished.

This is true for our game too. We live in a world of constraints, and we will call it finished when we get there. I’m looking forward to actually having players play the game! We still have time to polish, fix bugs, and do playtests, and it is critical that we reserve that time for later instead of trying to achieve perfection before we know if it’s even worth perfecting. You might never know what we didn’t do, what we decided to leave behind at any stage, and what actually got the most polish put into it.

A cake has both cake and icing, and we’re still making layers of cake. It’s not ready to taste, and it’s our job to imagine the icing long before it’s there, not rush to put the icing in before we have our cake layers baked and ready to stack up.

We will have what we think is a pretty great game, and we’re encouraged by the incremental improvements we’ve made to our work so far. We’re so excited to have your support and involvement along the way! Join us on Discord, Twitter, and Reddit to be a part of the community. Our BackerKit page is still available for late pledges and you can still support us on Patreon as well.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

We hope you're excited to meet Trademaster Placeholder. This is sarcasm.

Infinitron the Understudy.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Nice cameo

Concept sketches for... someone.

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Stones of Arnhem all over again hehe