It’s that time again folks, but this time, rather than the mindless utterances of a dedicated developer – we’re going to directly discuss some of the feedback that’s coming in.

Where's the damned tutorial?

We do have in-game help listing controls with a basic explanation of some of the games mechanics (top-centre left, question mark button,) but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that there needs to be some degree of ‘show me’ style instruction to the game. It’s been suggested that a video tutorial would suffice but experience tells us that these are too quickly rendered obsolete, so the tutorial needs to be in-game. The problem is, as more mechanics are introduced, the tutorial will have to be continually rewritten to accommodate them leading to a duplication of effort. Looking at the feedback now coming in, we now accept that we will have to concede to the request of the Players for a tutorial and have plans to include a modular tutorial that will grow as the games mechanics grow. To start with, the basic module might encompass fleet manoeuvres and management later including an intermediate module of resource collecting and trade. In any case, you have spoken and we are listening – the tutorial is now a top priority.

What's with the bugs?

I’d like to start off by saying that actually we have quite a slick bug reporting and resolving process here! When the game crashes it tells you exactly what has happened and copies it to your clipboard. When we receive the crash report, either on the Steam forums or the Official game forums we are able to directly patch the issue and have a hotfix uploaded to all three platforms often within 4 hours. Let’s break down our rough 4 week development and release cycle:

• Week 1: Major update; new features – new bugs introduced
• Week 2 & 3: Incremental updates; Hotfixes and additional supporting features introduced – bugs get addressed
• Week 4: Update freeze – game is relatively stable

This really works from an internal development point of view; the project moves quickly, features are introduced and tested and from the feedback the bugs are squashed. To some degree this is an ideal reality of ‘bleeding edge’ alpha software. The problem is, people are paying money for this and content aside - people rightly expect the alpha to be playable and with this current system sometimes it’s only stable for 50% of a cycle which is simply not good enough (though it should be considered that we are adding stuff during that 50%!) So what’s the problem? Well to a degree we are pushing forward at a pace that doesn’t really allow for sufficient testing to be completed before the updates are released. Often, only the new stuff that is coded is tested but the new stuff is breaking the old stuff. Problems of this type are known as regression issues which is the price of our rapid progress. We can’t slow the project down, there is too much to do. But the issues are annoying some Players and getting us out of bed at 2am to fix them isn’t much fun. So how can we have our cake and eat it? Well we need to ‘airlock’ the newest updates in another BETA branch in Steam. Similar to how we managed the Open-world Overhaul when it was being updated in parallel with the old alpha, we’ll continue the fast pace and put it out of the way but still accessible to anyone that comes looking with instructions on the update articles. Once we’re sure the new stuff isn’t causing any problems we’ll then make it live. This way the game is stable 100% of the time and we get to keep the rapid rate of progress. Ideal. We’ll be opening up the BETA of Update 5.3 early next week and will post some instructions on gaining access.

Why can't I save my game?

A number of you have expressed strong desires to be able to save and load. The reason why so far this has been omitted is because really the sandbox was only a small cross-section of what is to come. So far we have been focused on injecting mechanics into the alpha. But with the mechanics already in-game and those due to be added shortly, we are now far enough along to consider this a priority. Saving/Loading will be part of Update 5.3 which will be in BETA early next week. We really appreciate the positivity and support of the comments in previous posts, there is simply nothing more motivating than that. Once again let me take the opportunity to thank-you for your patience, the bug reports you’re sending in are massively helpful please keep them coming and brace yourselves because great things are inbound! James

[ 2016-12-02 18:02:48 CET ] [ Original post ]