Salvors in the Ruin, a digital painting story

For the most part – for almost the entire part – I have been working on new game content since the last update. Talking about it in detail is 100% spoilers, and while I do believe there’s an interesting blog series to write about the overall strategy of narrative design in Starsector during a long development cycle, properly contextualizing it… well, that’d be spoilers.

What else to write about, then? Man, I dunno – but then I had a discussion with Alex about creating an illustration to go with the content I was working on and decided to show him all of my sketches leading up to the final composition. “This could be a blog post, couldn’t it,” I said.


So, hello. This is a digital painting blog post. I’ll show you my process and attempt to explain in hindsight why I made certain decisions. And, to come clean, this is only partially motivated by my desire to insert fan art for Alastair Reynold’s Revenger series into Starsector. (More of it, anyway.)

Earlier this week I created a mission which involves having the player fly out into the fringe of the Persean Sector to dig around in some ruins. There is indeed a Galatia Academy mission which does this very activity, but I assure you that this new mission does it slightly differently! And thinking about these two missions, I was struck by a notion: why not draw some Revenger fan art why not do an illustration of a salvage team finding loot in creepy ruins which could be used for both missions? This situation comes up fairly often in Starsector anyway, and I never really did previously create an appropriate illustration for this sort of thing. Great!

My mind immediately goes to the sequence in Alien where the crew of the Nostromo investigates a derelict ship on LV-426. That era of science fiction movie art production is a huge inspiration to my take on the Starsector aesthetic, as I’ve written about before somewhere on here at some point.

Here’s the shot:

Fantastic! Love the suit silhouettes, the texture, the grim lighting. It’s a bit too organic and boney for what I’m going for, but it feels like a good starting place in terms of setting the mood.

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Wormholes and Sundry – Getting Around the Sector

Let’s talk about the options the player has for moving around the Sector! For a long time, the set of movement mechanics has been incomplete, with additions made here and there (slipstreams, unlocking the use of the Gates), but still lacking some of the options that in my mind would make up the final picture. Perhaps “final” isn’t the right word – things will certainly be tweaked as necessary – but it’s about having a more complete set to tweak, rather than what has been, until now, a partial implementation.

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Narrative in 0.96 aka Movie Night With David

I’d like to take a moment to talk about the development of narratives in the last update, and maybe in the game in general. I should note: this is a process post, not a lore-dump. So this is about how I went about coming up with these ideas and implementing them, not what Baikal Daud’s favorite flavor of ice cream is. More on anti-lore later. But yeah, I’m dying to talk about all of this but I have to play it fairly close to my chest to avoid spoiling what we’ve got in mind for the long game.

Two things first.

1. As anyone who’s written creative fiction knows, it’s terrifying to work on something for over a year and then show it off to who-knows how many thousands of people all at once. Especially in a field you’re not really ‘proven’ in (though, uh, arguably this feeling was far more pronounced with the introduction of the Galatia missions. There, yes, I was legitimately freaking out a bit. This time, much more confident and comfortable.

… Nonetheless, not everyone is going to like what you do. But I’ve been in games for, what, almost 15 years? And shipped at least one trainwreck. C’est la Vie! Regardless: You’ve all been very kind.

2. And: I know you guys want narrative payoff for the hanging plot threads at the end of Galatia, for the Gates, and now for the fate of the Church and Askonia. And I want to give them to you! But we have to do it when we have the mechanics in place to do it right. I know that sucks to hear, but I think playing the long-game will pay off. (- I think the narrative slow-burn that eg. Andor did was really, really smart because the payoff was fantastic. I have no idea how Disney executives approved that show and let them get away with what they did.)


Oh yeah, this is going to have spoilers for v0.96 story missions. You’ve been warned!


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Starsector 0.96a Release

Update (5/20/23): a hotfix for a number of bugs, a few balance and QoL tweaks, and a return of the Pegasus to most of its former glory. Full list of changes here; please re-download the game using the links below.

Update (5/13/23): a hotfix for a number of assorted bugs, significant changes to the Hostile Activity mechanic (aimed at both dialing it down and increasing its interactivity), and number of other changes and improvements.

Update (5/6/23, 2:00pm EST): a hotfix for a crash when viewing the Hostile Activity intel in some circumstances.

Update (5/5/23, 3:15pm EST): a hotfix for a crash when viewing the Gilead shrine intel after visiting the shrine.

Starsector version 0.96a is now out!

  • Take on new missions exploring the story of the Luddic Church and the Sindrian Diktat
  • Cut deals Warlord Kanta’s pirates or Luddic Path fanatics to stop their attacks… though peace may come at a high price
  • Fly new ships, including 5 new capital-class hulls and numerous smaller vessels
  • Acquire new weapons, including a lineup of missiles that shoot lasers (“Directed Energy Munitions”)
  • Face faction fleets with distinct identities driven by the new ships and weapons
  • Deal with hostile activity at your colonies and master hyperspace navigation using the new “Event” system
  • Build hullmods into ships to gain unique bonuses
  • Additional illustrations, portraits, descriptions and encounters help bring the Sector to life

In addition to these, there are a slew of smaller changes and addition, including balance adjustments, bugfixes, modability improvements – along with a new exploration music track, and faction music for the Persean League!

The full patch notes, and the comment thread, areĀ here.

You can download the new version here:

(Alternate download links, please try the above first: Windows Mac Linux)

As always, thank you so much for your support!

screenshot_release0951a

 

Hyperspace Topography

I’m not sure where to start with this, exactly, because this is something that pulls together a bunch of different systems, using the “Event” infrastructure (introduced in the previous blog post) to tie it all together. So, let’s just start… in HYPERSPACE!

Primarily, this is a system that interacts with slipstreams. In brief, those are temporary passages in hyperspace that can make travel much, much faster and enormously more fuel-efficient. One of the problems, though, is that it can be a little hard to plan for – there are some general indicators of where they are and where they might take you (i.e. the direction they travel in is seasonal, you can use the Neutrino Detector ability to find them, and so on), but I think for a lot of players, that doesn’t quite add up to being “enough” to make slipstreams as useful as I’d like them to be.

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