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

[ 2016-05-11 17:40:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Game

On the edge of Terran space lies Halcyon 6, a derelict starbase left behind by a mysterious precursor race. Your mission is to reclaim the derelict station and rebuild it.

A mysterious alien force is making a beeline towards Earth and this starbase is the best chance for the New Terran Federation to establish new alliances, research new technologies and otherwise figure out a way to stop the impending invasion.

Using only the resources you can salvage from the derelict station and gathered from nearby star systems, it’s up to you to rebuild the starbase to lead the Terran Republic’s scientific research, exploration and diplomatic efforts on the edge of known space.

Halcyon 6 is a passion project who’s design is inspired by our years spent playing classic games like Star Control, Master of Orion, X-COM, Civilization and new classics like FTL.

Features:

• Base Building: spend resources to build station facilities (rooms) to enhance your production and technological capabilities, or build ships to help you control more territory
  
• Exploration: assign your fleets to nearby star clusters, where they can handle emerging enemy threats, do missions for alien factions or secure bonus resources
  
• Crew Management: assign crew to station facilities to greatly improve their output efficiency, or to ships where they can contribute in unique ways to combat, missions and events
  
• Deep Tactical Combat: fight tactical ship or ground battles to resolve hostile events, create a foothold in the sector and ultimately defeat the enemy mothership!
  
• Story Events: based on game criteria like rooms-built, alien diplomacy scores or officer traits/skills, the game will produce story events (often with multiple choice outcomes) that can lead to combat, time-related applied bonuses/negatives, officer attribute changes or any number of crazy in-game stories.

Project Goals

Unlimited Replayability: Each playthrough has players dealing with a new randomly generated derelict station, surrounding galaxy, crew recruits, and alien factions

Motley Crew: Each crew member has unlimited potential for acquiring unique behaviours, traits and abilities, for better or for worse. Making the best use of your dysfunctional crew will be one of the keys to success. Who should be your main Science Officer? The insomniac that works insane hours but has an addictive personality or the agoraphobic mad genius?

Encounters of the Weird Kind: There are 6 alien factions in Halcyon 6 and they are all quite different with varying objectives and personalities. Only your wit and your crew’s skills will help you navigate the diplomatic waters to gain them as key allies or valuable trading partners.