I’ve been working on stuff that I can’t talk too much about since that would spoil it, but there are some QoL improvements I’d made a couple of months ago that I wanted to talk about, but hadn’t had a chance to just yet. Talking about it so much after the fact is a bit tricky – I don’t remember all that was going through my mind as I was working on it. I did take a bunch of notes at the time, though, so hopefully that’ll refresh my memory!

The old planet list (that is, the one in the currently-released version of the game) is one of the older pieces of UI in the game, and it’s definitely showing its age. Part of the problem is that I’d designed it around the same time as the initial implementation of colonies – possibly even before colonies – so while I had some ideas about what might important to show or filter on, it was more speculative and not based on “hey, this is what actual players playing the game need out of this screen”. But at this point, there’s a lot more information to base a redesign on!
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First off: what the heck is the Codex? It’s basically an in-game encyclopedia where you can look up ships, weapons, and so on. The current implementation is very, very old and and this point really showing its age – frankly, it’s clunky and not very useful, but on the bright side, it’s also not strictly speaking a required feature, so it was fine to leave it be for a while. I’ve been on a roll with QoL work lately, though, and the game is certainly far enough along now for a proper Codex rework, so I decided to jump into it – I’d have to do it at some point!

I started working on the Codex update with a sort of standard question to get my bearings, design-wise – “why is this in the game?” That’s a question with sharp edges, because if there isn’t a good answer, then maybe it should be cut instead, and the time and effort put into other things. Obviously, that didn’t happen, or we’d have a much shorter blog post!
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Since the previous release, I’ve been working on a bunch of quality-of-life features. This wasn’t exactly planned – at least not specifically for right now – but these were all things that had to get done at some point, and now is as good a time as any. Perhaps a better time than most, even, since I’m feeling oddly motivated to work on these. Part of it is upgrading from Java 7 to Java 17; it’s nice to see the game running more smoothly – and in a similar vein, it’s satisfying to bring some older parts of the game up to par.

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The combat simulator in Starsector is essential to the experience – you need to be able to adjust your ship loadouts effectively, and being able to test out changes quickly is a key part of that. Imagine having to get into a real fight just to see how your new set of weapons performs! That simply wouldn’t do. This means that the simulator was added early on in the development process. This also means that it hasn’t quite kept up with the times, and was very much due for another look.

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I’ve been doing a bunch of work adjusting skills in the last couple of days. Since it’s so fresh in my mind, and since there were a lot of changes, it seemed like it might be interesting to talk about the reasoning behind each change – nothing huge, just a sentence or two describing the thought process. This is an extremely unplanned/impromptu post, and it (probably?) won’t be a very long one. [Editor’s note: this turned out to be overly optimistic.] I’ll try to organize things roughly in the order that I made the changes, so you get a little more of a real view into how this type of work goes sometimes.

Overview
First, a bit of a step back. While there are 4 different skill categories, or “aptitudes” (combat, leadership, tech, industry), there are two broad types of skills – ones that boost the ship you’re piloting, and ones that boost… everything else. From other ships in your fleet (usually including your flagship, though not boosting it as much as personal skills), to things like colonies , campaign travel and so on.

Coming at it fresh, it might seem “obvious” that skills that boost your fleet are way better than skills that boost your flagship. Boosting more things is clearly better than boosting fewer things! This is perfectly reasonable, but like many obvious things, it turns out to be wrong – or at least, more complicated than that. Read the rest of this entry »