We're finally back with another Dev Blog! What an exciting few months we've had. Let's catch up on what's happened, what's coming in the future, and gather your input on a couple of things. We'll start things off by turning back the clocks and looking at what has happened since our last Dev Blog in February. Fleets & Carriers March saw the release of Fleets and Carriers, introducing a number of cool new features like being able to give basic commands to a fleet, recall them to the flagship, as well as the additional of a couple of new rail blocks enabling players to design their own docking mechanisms. If you want to catch up on what came in that update then click here. Massive Bug Fix Period April gave us some rounds of bug fixing as we addressed many lingering issues and bugs that plagued the game. Many game enhancements were addressed as well, for example, the ability for the build helper to remember the previous settings. There have been so many things addressed, for the lists check here (Round 1, Round 2, Round 3). Fleet Build Contest Near the end of April, we announced a Fleet Build contest to the community and the response has been fantastic, not just in that we've received 71 fleet submissions to date, but even the quality of them is amazing. There's still time to submit as the contest will close June 21st, 1:00AM UTC so click here to view the announcement post to find out all the details. New Council Term 3 May wrapped up our 2nd council term as elections were held for the 3rd Council term. Results for Term 3 were announced a day ago. We see the return of some familiar faces, as well as a new face on the council. We also reduced the number of councilors this term, to see if less works more efficiently; time will tell. Main Menu
The latest major feature to the game is the introduction of the main menu, something that we've needed for quite a while and so it's exciting to have it finally in. While simple on the surface, the main menu introduces some things to the game that we haven't had previously, like the ability to edit a lot of the settings and options right here in the game. Other features include the capacity to change servers or from an online to a local universe without closing the game. Find out all about this update here. What's coming up That brings us to where we are now. Behind the scenes an incredible amount of planning has happened, mapping out the rest of the game through to Beta, which is really exciting. Looking at the more immediate development plans, we will be bringing more objects into the game over time as we position ourselves to best do that. We're also going to be starting on introducing more trading aspects to the game, which will include starting some of the new Trading Guild ships. Beyond that, updates will include setting up some foundations, ready for new features to be added down the track, as well as some improvements to existing parts of the game. One of those foundations is the introduction of videos in-game, allowing us to create stylized contextual tutorial videos to assist with the learning curve of the game. This is a significant addition as it introduces the ability for us to ensure that we provide adequate tutorials for new features as they're added in with each major feature release. Your input This is where you come in. Now that we have the ability to provide specialized contextual tutorials for in-game content/features/mechanics we want your suggestions on what we should make tutorials for and how. For example, we could do videos on every single weapons system, or we could do one video on "weapons systems" as a whole. It's all dependent on your experience with the learning curve of the game, so let us know by replying to this news post with your suggestions on video tutorials you would have either found useful when starting out, or would find useful now. This will give us an excellent basis to be able to address the issues surrounding the learning curve of the game, and position us to continue easily adding tutorials and support in-game in a similar method when we add new features. That's it for another Dev Blog. We're excited for all that's around the corner and we hope you are too. - The Schine Team​