Greetings, space travellers!

Today's patch contains fixes for a number of memory leaks, and should address an obscure crash related to custom character names.

We have also reworked how character name colors are assigned, making them consistent across all platforms. Base character colors are now more in-line with their sprites, and custom character colors are drawn from a pool of pre-defined colors (this can be edited in assets/general/character_related/custom_colors.json if desired).

For full details, check the Patch Notes thread, and as always, if you encounter any problems, let us know!

Greetings, space travellers!

Today's update contains a number of miscellaneous fixes and tweaks for edge cases surrounding achievements. We've also added a number of command line parameters/launch options for testing, troubleshooting, and running on low-end systems.

For full details, check the Patch Notes thread, and as always, if you encounter any problems, let us know!

Greetings, space travellers!

Today's teeny update includes a fix for in-game challenges not unlocking for endings under certain conditions.

For full details, check the Patch Notes thread, and as always, if you encounter any problems, let us know!

Greetings space travellers!

Today's update includes a number of core tech upgrades and low level changes that should improve the stability of the game. In addition to this and several more explicit crash fixes, we've also increased the likelihood of multi-planet sectors.

For full details, check the Patch Notes thread, and as always, if you encounter any problems, let us know!

Greetings, space travellers!

Last week's update includes a number of fixes and tweaks that make the third story mission (Clarke 67) a little more forgiving, as well as fixes for the sector clock and zero planet sectors.

For full details, check the Patch Notes thread, and as always, if you encounter any problems, let us know!

Greetings space travellers!

Today's update includes some improvements to the sector clock, some mission tweaks, and some changes to how default/fallback resolutions are handled.

For full details, check the Patch Notes thread, and as always, if you encounter any problems, let us know!

Greetings space travellers!

Today's update includes a fix for the sector clock and a small piece of new character-specific narrative. For full details, check the Patch Notes thread, and as always, if you encounter any problems, let us know!

P.S. Happy space Valentine's Day for those who celebrate it. May we find room for a little more love in all our worlds <3

Hey Spacefarers!

Today we are pushing v2.6 which includes a few minor fixes to the game. We also wanted to point out for windows users if you get a crash it should create a .dmp file now in the applications root directory. This was a feature added in 2.5 that has been slightly overlooked.

Getting down to the general patch notes, it's various soft fixes and crash fixes that should added some more stability and strengthen the flexibility of the application. Things like uninitialized variables shouldn't cause issues anymore. If they do they should be clear and easy to track down now.

This should help a few fixes we have been seeing in our Support Discussions and I'd like to thank everyone who cares enough to leave us feedback. It is extremely valuable as we don't invade your privacy and collect data automatically like a lot of games do in order to get at these crash reports.

Full patch notes can be read here at our Patch Notes thread

Thanks,
Underflow Studios
Michael Brune

Greetings space travellers!

Today, we are proud to finally announce that The Away Team's demo and soundtrack are now officially available. Alongside this, we are also releasing a patch that brings in a few new features.


The Away Team's Soundtrack is available for US$5, and includes a mix of 16 ambient and melodic tracks in FLAC format. This has been long-requested, and we're glad to get the high quality versions of the game's music tracks into fans' hands. If you're new to both or would like to gift both to a friend, we've also made the game and soundtrack available together in a bundle.



The new Away Team: Lost Exodus demo offers prospective players the opportunity to have some first hand experience with the game before committing to the full version. Including 8 characters, two side missions, two story missions, and one set of random event missions, it's a little taste of everything. If you've been trying to work out whether The Away Team is for you, or haven't quite found the right way to recommend it to a friend, the demo lets you do that hassle free. The demo can be installed from the Steam store page, and any progress made in the demo will carry across to the full version of the game.



Last, but certainly not least, we have released the 2.5 update to the game itself. This is not a large patch, but it does contain a number of small additions that we hope will make players' experiences more enjoyable.

• Added in-game "Challenges" screen for viewing achievements and achievement progress
  
• Added a clock/time counter to the sector screen
  
• Added two "Cheats" that allow players to modify gameplay to suit personal preferences
  
• Added tooltips for food, fuel and time in the sector screen
  

Hey Spacefarers!



We have this great new article that talks in-depth about mementos and how we focused on creating memories. You can read about that here: https://underflowstudios.com/away-team-lost-exodus-making-memories/

Additionally we have this gource video that details 5 years of development on The Away Team. Measuring time in games can be rough especially as you shelve and unshelve or contract out to other projects. Of course I'd never be able to finish The Away Team and wrap everything up with a large patch if it wasn't for our contractors and especially Josh Bush. As proud as I was before, I am even more proud to have made The Away Team with all these people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34R3oJUgHvw

Lastly we pushed out a patch to help gain feedback and address some minor bugs. You can see the changelogs here
--

Michael Brune

Hello Space Travellers!

I wanted to share this great changelog for everyone. https://gist.github.com/Cheeseness/0d5ea0d2cecf97624eca3f27b769531a It's bulky and includes just about everything we did for this massive patch.

Most notably is our little hidden things like experimental keyboard support and pasting support for biographies in the character creator. Feel free to give it a look over.

Lastly here is our current known issues:

[UI] Alt+F4 does not work in Linux when running fullscreen
[UI] Resolution picker does nothing in fullscreen on Linux
[Misc] SteamOS 2.0 and Debian 8 have GLIBCXX mismatches in libstdc++.so.6

Feel free to come over to the discussions if you find any issues with the game.

Thanks!

Greetings, space travellers!

It is with great pleasure that we announce that The Away Team's Lost Exodus update is out and available to play right now!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t12HtZWVxxQ

In addition to bugfixes, stability improvements and good old typo corrections, the Lost Exodus update includes:

• Expanded story, increasing the game's mission content to over 120,000 words
  
• Enhanced sector exploration with new ship handling, random event missions and asteroid fields
  
• Fancy new ship graphics
  
• A new crew role experience system
  
• A new unlockable character with their own story arc to explore
  
• Over 50 memento items for crewmembers to collect
  
• 11 new Steam achivements
  
• A new character editor with Steam Workshop integration
  
• Improved sprite rendering
  
• Clearer text and an optional dyslexic-friendly font
  

Greetings, space travellers!

We are proud to announce that The Away Team's upcoming update, Lost Exodus, will be launching on Steam and Itch.io on October 22nd!

https://youtu.be/AZqXnaq4PAo

Lost Exodus polishes and builds upon The Away Team's core choose-your-own- adventure and real-time space exploration experiences by adding more content, improved gameplay, and an in-game character with integrated Steam Workshop support.

There are a lot of changes to go over, and we'll be digging in in more detail with a proper changes, but for now, here's a rundown on the key stuff:

• Expanded story, increasing the game's mission content to over 120,000 words
  
• Enhanced sector exploration with new random event missions and asteroid fields
  
• A new crew role experience system
  
• A new unlockable character with their own story arc to explore
  
• Over 50 “memento” items for crewmembers to collect
  
• A new character editor with Steam Workshop integration
  
• Improved sprite rendering
  
• Clearer text and an optional dyslexic-friendly font
  

We recently wrote up a great and art filled article about our design and redesign of the ship you play as in The Away Team, called Argo.

You can see the fully progression of the ship and more but here is a preview of our humble beginnings:



So check it out at: https://underflowstudios.com/the-away-team-lost-exodus-redesigning-the-argo/

Hi everybody! We are very excited to to let you all know we have been hard at work on a large update that rounds out The Away Team while keeping the core game that you (hopefully) know and love.

The big features we have been working on for the Lost Exodus update include:

• New adventures to explore
  
• New in-game character creator (with offline support for sharing as well as Steam Workshop integration)
  
• New gameplay features focusing on searching and survival
  
• More ways to track current status and progress
  
• UX improvements
  
• Many bug fixes!
  

Hey All,

Mac Edition is here! Additionally this update brings massive stability and a new credits button in game. (Finally!) As well as I am proud to announce we are releasing on Itch as well.

One known bug on windows is that the steam overlay causes a crash on exit. This is directly because we are including steam's dll and that dll is throwing an exception after hanging on exit. DRM free versions are not effected by this. Nor does the linux version appear to be effected. I will be working on resolving that crash quickly.

--
Michael Brune

Hey All,

Mac Edition is here! Additionally this update brings massive stability and a new credits button in game. (Finally!) As well as I am proud to announce we are releasing on Itch as well.

One known bug on windows is that the steam overlay causes a crash on exit. This is directly because we are including steam's dll and that dll is throwing an exception after hanging on exit. DRM free versions are not effected by this. Nor does the linux version appear to be effected. I will be working on resolving that crash quickly.

--
Michael Brune

Smaller things this time:

-Replace 'sentient' with 'sapient' in Tux's bio.
- Added check to prevent CharacterManager::randomCrew() and CharacterManager::randomCrewIgnoringCrew() from returning dead crewmemebers.
- Added missing quotes from copper1.lua. Added edge case handling for when comedian says 'That's what she said' in response to their own line.
-Overwrite previous Linux log instead of appending.

Smaller things this time:

-Replace 'sentient' with 'sapient' in Tux's bio.
- Added check to prevent CharacterManager::randomCrew() and CharacterManager::randomCrewIgnoringCrew() from returning dead crewmemebers.
- Added missing quotes from copper1.lua. Added edge case handling for when comedian says 'That's what she said' in response to their own line.
-Overwrite previous Linux log instead of appending.

Hey All,

A wonderful stability update coming through the pipes. The majority, neigh, entirety of the patch brought to you by Josh "Cheeseness" Bush.

There is also a new character exclusive to the linux version called Tux. Tux can be seen as the image for this announcement and features awesome Linux attributes and traits.

Additionally I'd like to thank Windóusico for helping test the linux versions with Cheeseness.

Thanks all,
Michael Brune

Hey All,

A wonderful stability update coming through the pipes. The majority, neigh, entirety of the patch brought to you by Josh "Cheeseness" Bush.

There is also a new character exclusive to the linux version called Tux. Tux can be seen as the image for this announcement and features awesome Linux attributes and traits.

Additionally I'd like to thank Windusico for helping test the linux versions with Cheeseness.

Thanks all,
Michael Brune

As long as I could remember I always wanted to use linux. Even before I knew what it was I knew I wanted to explore it. To me linux has always been about that vast field of software thrown about. When I first saw it, it was different. It wasn't Windows.

As everyone struggles when they learn something new so did I stumble and fall and waste countless hours on installing, reinstalling and recompiling my userland. I even use to run a free shell service caled "Pulpie" in order to teach others how to use Linux. That created the Fushi shell which was my first programming project.

Linux has given me so much and with that I am happy to announce that I can give something back to it. Although small and niche The Away Team grows the Linux game count by one. Something I could not be more proud to do.

--
Brune Michael J

As long as I could remember I always wanted to use linux. Even before I knew what it was I knew I wanted to explore it. To me linux has always been about that vast field of software thrown about. When I first saw it, it was different. It wasn't Windows.

As everyone struggles when they learn something new so did I stumble and fall and waste countless hours on installing, reinstalling and recompiling my userland. I even use to run a free shell service caled "Pulpie" in order to teach others how to use Linux. That created the Fushi shell which was my first programming project.

Linux has given me so much and with that I am happy to announce that I can give something back to it. Although small and niche The Away Team grows the Linux game count by one. Something I could not be more proud to do.

--
Brune Michael J

Website: http://www.underflowstudios.com/subject-new-projects

Passion is a great thing to have. A strong passion could mean a complex and changing passion. It can also mean a deep and steady passion. In the end a strong passion will usually spawn at least one project that one hasn't any idea how to start. The best way I have found to start something is to just go do it. Attempt to find the best starting point, ensure you know of multiple and take the one that you think you would enjoy and be the happiest with taking. If you start in on a path don't be afraid to turn around. You should never lock in to a path so much that you refuse to see the error of it's ways. You should also be loyal enough to a single path to see at least one to completion.

This is what allowed Underflow Studios to release The Away Team. A strong and healthy passion from everyone involved. While The Away Team was basically myself (Michael Brune) working on it alone with ideas of creating a story like Star Trek or Stargate that would live with me and hopefully others forever. When people ask me, was this project successful? I could point at the numbers and say "Yes, we made a profit." but that's not what I do. I point at the fact that story will now be around for my children, for your children and for anyone reading this. That to me is success.

So with this I would like to introduce a new project of mine personally. I am calling it "On the subject of". A hopefully informative... blog, I guess? It won't be only text. I plan to do vlogs and possibly other mediums like games and podcasts. Sometimes these things will feature just me or they might include others, which will be properly introduced as we go. Lastly I can't guarantee every entry will be free. I can guarantee that every entry will be as cheap as I can make it.

--

Brune, Michael J

Hey Linuxers!

The linux test branch is now available to everyone. (Technically called ;inuxtest because I tyoped and that's now unchangable.)

So what you need to test linux:

First install the dependencies.

For Linux Mint it's as easy as:

sudo apt-get install libsfml-dev liblua5.3-dev

For other distros please simply ensure you have libsfml 2.3.2 and liblua 5.3

Next install steam:

sudo apt-get install steam

and install The Away Team. Right click on it in your steam library. Go to properties then Betas. Opt into the ";inuxtest" (again, a typo I made but should work nonetheless). After that verify project files and ensure you download the linux test files.

Then you are good to go. Please report any issues to the Linux discussion forum.

Thanks,
Underflow studios

Edit: libluabind.so.0.9.1 is also needed.

The Away Team has been fully updated to version 1.1!

We slowly rolled out the patch as feedback came in with various bugs and suggestions. This seemed to work well as it ensured the community that they are valued and their input is important.

• We fixed various story (lua) bugs in which cut the mission short.
  
• Fixed the save system to ensure stability when crashing or other bugs happen.
  
• Added a changable font system and added monofur as a default shipped font. Thank you to Tobias B. Köhler for allowing us to ship the Monofur typeface.
  
• Fixed an issue where going into offline mode didn't allow you to play the game.
  

Hey All,

The Away Team releases on Friday, July 22nd at 6 pm PST. I look forward to seeing the community reaction. It's been a long adventure for this game but it's well paid off. The experience alone has been amazing and I hope everyone who plays The Away Team certainly feels inspired to look at the stars at night.

Underflow Studios