Hello Early Access players! It's been an exciting few weeks since PAX East and our Early Access launch! How did the launch go? Well read on, Starbase Commanders, read on!

Launch Report

Launch is always a nerve wrecking experience. The whole team was distracted for a couple of days watching the sales reports on Steam, reading the early reviews and watching charts, like Steamspy, religiously. We were lucky to be standing in the sales charts with some much bigger games like Banner Saga 2, Master of Orion and Cities: Skyline. All launches have this initial sales spike and the long tail afterwards. Average Early Access titles sell about 8000 copies total in the first 14 months (according to this Steamspy post) and thanks to you, we've already hit more that amount in less than 3 weeks.

Next Steps and Road to Full Release

What's next? Well, we're going to keep pushing towards the Final Release of the game as soon as possible! There will be TWO major updates to the game, the first is Officers Unleashed and the second will contain Acts 2 and 3 together. In between these major updates, we'll be pushing smaller updates to fix bugs, UI issues, polish and 'quality of life' tweaks to make the game better. Once the two major updates are out, we'll launch the Full Release version of the game. After the Full Release, we'll work on immediate stuff like Linux version and the Kickstarter stretch goals (as promised!). So, onto the next major update...

Officers Unleashed!

From the beginning, officers were always an integral part of our game design. We're adding to what we launched in our Early Access build to give players more customization and more control over their officers. First up is levelling up an officer. In Officers Unleashed, you'll be earning skill points as you gain levels and you can go to this screen to spend those skill points however you like. Be it upgrading an existing power or training in a brand new one, the choice is yours. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=682490515 We're also revamping our Tech Tree and moving some upgrades to trainable upgrades that may not need as much resources but simply an officer and time to unlock in the new Officer Academy room: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=682492304 Also in the Officers Unleashed update, we'll be adding Away Missions on planetary surfaces and enemy strongholds. Of course this means more stuff for your officers to do.. we'll be adding more officers into the earlier portions of the game to balance it out. And of course there will be lots of tweaks and balancing as well. We're aiming to get Officers Unleashed out for late May/early June timeframe and yes this is a huge change to the major areas of the game so old saves will not work. As with any major update, we'll be needing you to help us playtest and provide us that valuable feedback that you've been giving during our Alpha, Beta and Early Access phase. Thanks again for supporting us in this journey, we're so proud that we were able to deliver a good experience in Early Access to both our backers and our new players from Steam and we can't wait to get Officers Unleashed, then Acts 2 and 3 into your hands. - Halcyon 6 Team