Early-Access - Mistakes Were Made

The early-access launch hasn't gone smoothly so far for a few reasons. https://steamcommunity.com/games/2231270/announcements/detail/3871469509823929286

Miscommunication: State of the Game

In the last post, I didn't make it clear enough that the game only had the bare minimum early-access standard, but used overly-technical terms and didn't go into enough details. The original post draft was a lot more pessimistic. Here is an example of notes I had for the release post: - "the game is absolutely not finished" - "unfortunately, the game has a long way to go to be stable and polished" This was written when it was taking many extra days to fix and balance each playmode. I will say there were many issues after release that I have never seen in development such as device-specific GPU memory leaks, and device-specific memory leaks that are still not fully resolved. These require lots of time to fix, and delay features being added. I personally think the game is often fun to play, at least when things don't break, although I was not 100% happy with the state of the game on release but the release date was decided for 2023. I will say the state of the game is better now than it ever has been.

Miscommunication: Intended Scope/Scale of the Game

I didn't define a roadmap, because I don't know what the game will look like next year except from a lot more stable, which may have caused the current expectations not matching the scope of the game.

December 2022: When Times Were Simple

I first intended to release in December 2022, or January 2023. However, I decided to expand every aspect of the game, for better or worse, before releasing. This is what the game looked like over a year ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxy9r4FKq2w

2023: Overdevelopment

When I decided to improve the game at the start of the year, by adding animated star systems, animated combat for the purpose of depth, decoration, and polishing, although it increased the scope of the game. I think that may have also disproportionately increased expectations and did double development time as such.

Future Roadmap

There will be no hardcore development over a prolonged period of time. It won't happen because I have already done that for a year and it is unsustainable, and possibly a mistake in the first place. I plan to develop the game until it is a lot more stable/polished, and then we will see from there what to do, with improvements based on player suggestions, balancing, and many bug fixes. The 'shallow' mechanics such as combat could definitely be improved upon, if that is what players desire the most. However, time and resources may be limited so features will have to be prioritized.

Some things are overdeveloped, some things are underdeveloped

So even if workshop support, 1000 game events, localization, and multiplayer would hypothetically be added, the game would be still underdeveloped, as the other things players care about are ignored. I think this will change feature priorities. My idea for the scope of the game is similar to Northgard and Civilization inspired mechanics, with Stellaris inspired visuals, without the overly-complicated mechanics. I think that has been achieved, although the foundation is not set in stone, and content and polishing can still be added over time such as game events, turrets, origins etc.

What Went Well

Since I didn't start this project primarily for money, it is good that the release caused less attention than expected, but future development would have been harmed more if that happened, and focus would have been diverted away from bug fixes and improving the game.

2023 Plan

There has been 6 patch updates with many bug fixes since early-access release, and there is more to come. I may consider at least one or two features/improvement this year, but we will see.

New Pricing

As a result of all this I plan to reduce the price of the base game further by from $20.99 to $19.99. This will be effective on the 26th of December, after the 10% launch discount has ended, so the players who buy before the discounted price still get a better deal. [hr][/hr]

Stay tuned for more updates...

Feel free to comment your suggestions below. Playtest New Stars: discord.io/adamjr. Wishlist New Stars to support development. This page is intended to be a development preview, which may not reflect the final state of the game. Credits: - Star satellites icon by Lorc under CC BY 3.0

[ 2023-12-23 02:38:27 CET ] [ Original post ]