Starfarer Roadmap – What’s Next?

Now that the alpha has been out for a couple of weeks, you might be wondering what new features and changes are coming in the near future.

We’re aiming to release the next version, 0.34a, sometime around the end of this month. The main goals of 0.34a are to add some new content, enable the sharing of mods, and apply some polish/fix bugs.

Content
We’ll be adding a couple of new missions, both to show off some new ships and to even out the difficulty curve. The “medium” difficulty Hornet’s Nest will be re-labeled as hard, with a new, easier mission to take its place. The Onslaught, I’m sad to say, made a sorry showing in the missions that it’s in, due to how it was outfitted – so you can expect to see a mission where it unleashes its full power on you, the unsuspecting player.

Modding
In the 0.34a release, you’ll be able to easily share mods (download and unzip in a directory, then enable which mods you want to run with from the launcher). Mods can contain new missions, weapons, and ships. If you haven’t seen the player-created ships, you might want to check them out – they’re the motivating factor for modding functionality being in this release.

Bugfixing & Polish
Thanks in large part to your reports and feedback, quite a few bugs have been squashed. We’re also making various usability improvements, ranging from the launcher remembering your settings to tweaking the AI and UI.

For a detailed list of the changes that’s already been made, take a look at the live patch notes.

Looking Ahead
Beyond 0.34a, there are two arcs – adding features to combat, and working on the campaign layer (that’s where you travel, build up your fleet/character, etc). It seems important to get a functioning campaign layer implemented soon, so combat improvements will take a back seat. They won’t be completely ignored, though – perhaps a 25%/75% split.  (Continued after the break)

Assembling The Fleet

I hear you guys like spaceships so I’ve put together some  concepts for new Starfarer ships I’ve been working on.

These are unlabeled for now – ideally their visual design expresses the intended role of each, but if nothing else, I’ll enjoy fueling the flames of speculation. Have a look:

(More under the cut, and then some thoughts on drawing ships for Starfarer.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Starfarer giveaway, preview

The folks over at LinuxGameCast are running a contest to  give away a couple of Starfarer keys. You know you want them!

Also, DIYGamer published a side-by-side preview of Starfarer and SPAZ – read it here.

Dominic from DIYGamer also created a “First Look” video, weighing in at about 25 minutes and very nicely annotated. If you’d like to learn more about the game almost-first-hand, do check it out.

Forum

We’ve just set up a forum. Do drop in to say hi!

You may notice that it’s not linked from the main page yet – we’re working on that, along with a general site overhaul.

Order Form Issue – RESOLVED

Sorry guys, we’re having a bit of a problem with the order form (says that your order is empty when you submit). Working with BMT Micro to get this resolved ASAP.

Update: Looks like the issue is taking a while to resolve.

Update #2: The order form issue is resolved! I’ll be sending discount codes to everyone that emailed me shortly.

Update #3: All discount codes sent out. Let me know if I missed you somehow.

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