I’m very happy to announce that the 0.34a release is finally here!
What’s in this release?
Four new missions and several new ships
Customizable key bindings
Official mod support – you can find mods in our forum
Gameplay and balance changes
Colorblind mode (edit data/config/settings.json to toggle)
Assorted bug fixes
General polish & improvements
For a detailed list of changes, check out the patch notes. The manual is also worth a look – especially for the bits that the current in-game tutorial doesn’t cover.
You can download 0.34a here:
What’s not in this release?
There are no big war room changes. The current implementation is very RTS-like, which, as it’s turning out, isn’t particularly suited to Starfarer. We’re planning to move away from that and focus on letting you make strategic-level decisions, without having to worry about minor details. It didn’t make sense to make incremental changes to the current system now, since we’ll be extensively revamping it soon.
What’s next?
The big-ticket items for 0.35a are:
Ship refit screen
Ability to outfit your flagship for missions
War room revamp
“Custom Battle” option
The idea is to dig into the customization elements of the game, with custom battles providing a good testing ground for your freshly-assembled ships and fleets – and more replay value than you can shake a stick at. Well, at least, more than regular missions.
In the meantime, once 0.35a is out, we’ll start working feverishly on 0.36a, which will provide a first look at the campaign layer.
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)
