https://store.steampowered.com/app/1932260/No_Creeps_Were_Harmed_TD/ [previewyoutube=IkKGgleb-t0;full][/previewyoutube] Employ lethal turrets, traps, and gadgets to defend against an onslaught of evolving creeps! Step into a twisted, hyper 3D, mind bending realm. Upgrade and adapt your defenses. Become a master maze crafter. Collect bizarre artifacts. Rush creeps for lucrative rewards, and succumb to greed!

TURRETS FOR EVERY OCCASION

CREEPS TO RUIN EVERY OCCASION

GO BALLISTIC!

Clanfolk Demo Upgrade Released

New World Building Controls

• When starting a New Map, players can now choose to spend points to change the amount of Mountains, Lakes, Forests, Grassland, and Wildlife on the generated map.
• Points need to be balanced, so highly increasing one slider, will mean a tough choice on what other ones to decrease.

Custom Clan Builder

• After the map has been generated, you are now able to set up a family tree for your Clan to define the relationships between Clan members.
• The Clan builder provides pre-built scenario family trees as well as a custom option where you can build up your Clan from a single baby, progressing time until they are a senior.
• When building your Clan, you have initially have 2000 coin. This can be spent on Clan members (250 per member), on starting supplies, or be saved for later trading.
• Each Clan member will have their own set of Quirks and Skills that develop as time passes in the Clan Builder.
• Like/Dislike/Skill Affinity rework. Each person will like one job, dislike another, and be good at a job. This will let you get a sense for their usefulness at a glance within the Clan builder.
• Character Re-Roll added for that one lazy/wrong skilled Clan Member (For a progressively increasing coin cost)

Quirks

• Clanfolk now develop Quirks over time.
• Quirks are situational behavior modifiers. For example, many children are afraid of the dark. This would mean that their rooms should be lit for better sleep.
• Quirks can also be passive, for example having a high metabolism. The Clanfolk eats more but also moves and works faster.
• The quirk system is currently in a proof of concept phase with many more to come.

New Character Art

• New Human art by a professional artist with many component variants to make each Clan member look unique!
• Added a new character art system is highly mod friendly
• Characters now are made of 15 layers Bodies: Torsos, Heads, Hair, Eyes, Eyebrows, Beards, Mouths Clothes: Hats, Hoods, Shirts, Jackets, Pants, Cloaks, Underwear, Plaid

New Creature Art

• All Creature art has also been replaced to keep a consistent look.
• New creature art is historically consistent with 1300's Scotland creatures.
• The Coo has also been added. (Highland Cattle)

New Music

• Two new songs from Michael Pflug our composer from SPAZ 2/Golftopia.
• A flute song played by the Clanfolk in the mornings and evenings for fun To be expanded to even more instruments to get a whole band going.

Contextual World Click

• You can now click on any tile in the world and get a list of contextual options for it. So click on grass, get the harvest option. No more digging in the jobs menu to find what you need.

Meet the Neighbors

• Surrounding Clans from different Biomes have been added!
• Neighbor Clans will send Workers, Traders, and Visitors.
• Workers: Can be hired for a daily coin wage May end up joining the Clan if treated well enough.
• Visitors: Will come seeking a warm meal and a bed for the night Higher satisfaction will lead to improved relations with their Clan
• Traders: Will bring Trade items from their Biome with the quantity and rarity based on relations with your Clan.

Desire Paths

• The Desire Path system allows Clanfolk to slowly break paths in the grass over time as they move through an area.
• These paths become good hints on where to build future roads.
• As paths become more established, tall grass will be damaged, but the Clanfolk's movement speed will increase.
• This increased movement speed will also make the path more desirable to Clanfolk and well established paths will slowly emerge.

New Clothing Sets Added

• All Clothing has been added to the demo! Sack Cloth, Hide, Leather, Wool, Linen variants.
• Since it is Summer, only the linen clothing will be desirable for wearing, but since the Demo saves will work in the full game, having warm clothing ready to go for Fall and Winter is a smart move.

New Items Added

• Bread, Cheese, CuredFlaxStems, Dough, Flax Fibers, Ashed Hides, Clean Hides, Leather, Linen Cloth, Linen Hank, Oat Flour, Clean Wool, Wool Cloth, Wool Hank, Bowl, Dirty Bowl, Brose, Butter, Stew.

New Objects Added

• Bread Oven, Butter Churn, Cheese Press, Dish Rack, Dish Washer, Dough Table, Flax Dressing, Flax Retting, Kitchen, Loom, Quern, Spinning, Ash Tanning, Bark Tanning, Hide Scraper, Well, Wool Dressing

Going Forward

Hello Everyone!, I am very happy to announce Clanfolk! Clanfolk has been a four year passion project, and now it is about time to show it. A little history, Clanfolk was developed alongside Golftopia, its sibling project. After SPAZ and SPAZ2, we needed a break from space combat for a little while and Narlak and I decided to each try a solo side project. Initially, these projects were supposed to only take 14 months, but here we are 4 years later, oops. When Clanfolk started development, I had been making games for 16 years and had never once touched art or sound or shaders in a game, ever. So I decided that was something I wanted to try. Over time, I think my art has improved, yeah it is coder art, but I like it :) I also wanted to make a game where I could just escape for a while and really care about the inhabitants. Rimworld is an incredibly well made game that came closest to the feel of non throwaway people (I don't want to call them pawns because that is not how I see them) So over time Clanfolk kind of became this merging of Rimworld, Banished and the Sims. It is a home away from home for me. Throughout development, I have not focused on combat at all, instead I went the route of trying to simulate the world as completely as possible while researching/implementing historical survival methods. It turns out that just surviving the elements and preparing for winter is quite the challenge. I also like that you have the time to get to know your Clanfolk while the seasons are more forgiving. Then when they freeze or starve, it is extra horrible :) Now that the world and life sim has formed a very robust foundation, I am beginning to think on external events. I recently added neighbor clans with hired workers, inn visitors, and traders. These clans will of course bring conflict with them, but it is not a focus yet. Right now it is all about day to day life on the homestead. I also want to delve into more natural based events like wandering bears, or crop blight, rat infestations, all real world problems that Clanfolk would face. I just really enjoy working on this game, but yeah 4 years is a long time to not show anything, so here it is. I am very happy to answer questions in the discussion forum as well! https://steamcommunity.com/app/1700870/discussions/ Andrew Hume (Blorf) p.s. We will be participating in Next Fest, and there will be a Demo (Oct 1 2021) Clanfolk Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1700870/Clanfolk/

Hi everyone. A lot of you have been pretty anxious to hear what were working on these days. It's finally time for MinMax to announce our new game! GolfTopia is a retro-futuristic golf management sim, tower defense, pinball hybrid from the makers of Space Pirates And Zombies 1 and 2. Check out our Steam page here https://store.steampowered.com/app/1144020/GolfTopia/ If youre interested in hearing the story about how we got from space pirates to a futuristic golf course, keep reading After SPAZ 2 we both felt pretty burnt out on space operas, having worked on SPAZ 1 and 2 for over 8 years combined. We both knew we didnt want to jump into another SPAZ right away. We wanted to do something different, and not just become a single game studio. For a few months we rolled around several weird ideas, but nothing seemed to stick long term. Were both pretty different gamers, which is an asset during development, but can be pretty frustrating when coming up with a seed idea. We both had wildly different ideas we wanted to pursue. So we decided instead of making another game we would make two. We both would own the full development process for the game we wanted to make, letting us fully dive into these as projects of passion. For me, that game is GolfTopia. For Blorf, that game is something you will all get an opportunity to see at a later date. Both games will be MinMax games, so this definitely isnt a breakup letter. Were still a rock-solid team now more than ever. We still meet nearly every week, help each other, play games, and chat it up. Its been a crazy learning experience for both of us, but were having a lot of fun too! GolfTopia is something Ive been wanting to make for a decade now, being a huge fan of the criminally underrated SimGolf. The original idea for GolfTopia wasnt to take place in the future. It was more grounded in modern day, and the invading weeds were modeled after Kudzu. Things really started to shift after I built a simple decorative windmill. I couldnt help but make it actually functional, blowing airborne balls around the course. Well, that was it! Now I needed to add bumpers, teleporters, and all sorts of crazy fun things. There goes my art style. I started reworking the assets I already had, but also designed a bunch of new features around the theme change, like weed killing laser turrets and the Futurama-Like transport tubes. I just had too many things I wanted to add to the game, and a futuristic art style freed me up to do all of those things. So yes, were two developers making two games at the same time (were crazy). Neither game is anything like SPAZ, and both games are extremely different from one another. That said, some of you know us pretty well and we think some of you may enjoy these new games, having enjoyed SPAZ. We both like challenging games with deep strategy and GolfTopia is no different in that regard. Being just the two of us, word of mouth is pretty important to us. If you know someone that might enjoy GolfTopia, please spread the word and dont forget to add GolfTopia to your wishlist. Thanks for reading

Hi Everyone, Here's some new stuff we hope you will like! :) Proving Grounds: If you have ever wanted to see how your ship would do against the local Arena ship, wish no longer because you can now have a simulated battle vs arena ships to test out your designs with no risk to life and limb. New Map! (Hexor) This new 110 territory map is hex based. It is a much more traditional strategic map but it turns out to be quite fun to play as well! It is only available in Sandbox Mode. Engine Boost Changes: We are experimenting with a new boost system that requires 20% boost fuel to start boosting. This is in response to user input that players were holding the boost button down indefinitely in battle because they were overwhelmed or just forgot. This lead to the boost never recharging. Now what will happen is once the boost pool is empty, it will instantly start filling, but boost cannot re-engage until it is 20% full (only takes a couple of seconds) So if you are holding the boost key too long now, you will get repeated boosts as the pool fills to 20% then drains then fills etc... 20% is about the required boost to actually get the ship moving and it doesn't take too long to fill. Some had suggested just to let the boost pool totally fill once drained even if the key was pressed, but not to start a new boost until the boost button was released and pressed again. We experimented with this as well, but it felt like a bug to have a full boost bar and no boost happening. This change is experimental. Give it a few days and see how it feels. Personally we like it, but we want to hear your thoughts as well. Here is the complete list of changes/fixes/additions.

• Relations hit added with a transport owner when it is destroyed.
• Relations hit added with faction leader when capital transport destroyed.
• Fix for rare case where player is second last in faction and the faction leader gets zombified thus forcing the player into role as faction leader and starting own faction.
• Fixed case where you could be moving while the assign starbase menu was active, causing potential weirdness.
• Fixed case where strike craft needs 1 blueprint to level up to level 6, but 2 are currently spawned in the level and picking up the second blueprint erroneously says the strike craft is now level 7
• Fixed zombified faction member phone call creating non exitable menu after zombie faction destroyed.
• Fixed issue where a player base couldn't be built if the zombie war meter filled while the player was a member of another faction.
• Added sort captains by distance on the faction info pane. Makes easier to find joiners and get to them quicker when you run a faction.
• Fixed case where battlewagon would fire missiles at targets out of range when another viable target was in range, but the lock was still on the out of range target.
• Changed: New engine boost mechanic where if you hold down boost it will now regen up to 20% before starting to boost again. Initiating boost now requires 20% boost juice, but if you hold the boost button all the time, it will now do something each time the boost recharges to 20% instead of just staying drained until you release the boost button.
• Added Proving Grounds to all Arenas. This lets you test our your own mothership build vs the Arena ship you would usually pilot in a simulation.
• Fixed outdated hangar tutorial image from before the big v0.8 upgrade to the new strike craft system.
• The weapon group HUD now has text to show what the icons mean, so people can find battle wagon mode more easily if they missed it in the tutorial.
• Text and translation updates
• Reworked the objective coloring system so that green objectives are things to do, and grey ones are completed so it is consistent throughout the flow.
• Added new 110 territory hex based map called Hexor. Can be found in the sandbox options.
• The infection balls the zombies shoot now have warning effects on them to show bio hazard.
• Fixed the broken alpha mask on the zoom scope.
• The being chased line on the map is now more scary so it is harder to ignore.
• In VR mode, the cursors now lock to the slide bar they are sliding so you don't need to be a surgeon to use them.
• Fixed VR restore defaults button not saving settings.
• Improved method for adjusting the VR menu position with motion controls.

Hi Everyone, Here's some new stuff we hope you will like! :) Proving Grounds: If you have ever wanted to see how your ship would do against the local Arena ship, wish no longer because you can now have a simulated battle vs arena ships to test out your designs with no risk to life and limb. New Map! (Hexor) This new 110 territory map is hex based. It is a much more traditional strategic map but it turns out to be quite fun to play as well! It is only available in Sandbox Mode. Engine Boost Changes: We are experimenting with a new boost system that requires 20% boost fuel to start boosting. This is in response to user input that players were holding the boost button down indefinitely in battle because they were overwhelmed or just forgot. This lead to the boost never recharging. Now what will happen is once the boost pool is empty, it will instantly start filling, but boost cannot re-engage until it is 20% full (only takes a couple of seconds) So if you are holding the boost key too long now, you will get repeated boosts as the pool fills to 20% then drains then fills etc... 20% is about the required boost to actually get the ship moving and it doesn't take too long to fill. Some had suggested just to let the boost pool totally fill once drained even if the key was pressed, but not to start a new boost until the boost button was released and pressed again. We experimented with this as well, but it felt like a bug to have a full boost bar and no boost happening. This change is experimental. Give it a few days and see how it feels. Personally we like it, but we want to hear your thoughts as well. Here is the complete list of changes/fixes/additions.

• Relations hit added with a transport owner when it is destroyed.
• Relations hit added with faction leader when capital transport destroyed.
• Fix for rare case where player is second last in faction and the faction leader gets zombified thus forcing the player into role as faction leader and starting own faction.
• Fixed case where you could be moving while the assign starbase menu was active, causing potential weirdness.
• Fixed case where strike craft needs 1 blueprint to level up to level 6, but 2 are currently spawned in the level and picking up the second blueprint erroneously says the strike craft is now level 7
• Fixed zombified faction member phone call creating non exitable menu after zombie faction destroyed.
• Fixed issue where a player base couldn't be built if the zombie war meter filled while the player was a member of another faction.
• Added sort captains by distance on the faction info pane. Makes easier to find joiners and get to them quicker when you run a faction.
• Fixed case where battlewagon would fire missiles at targets out of range when another viable target was in range, but the lock was still on the out of range target.
• Changed: New engine boost mechanic where if you hold down boost it will now regen up to 20% before starting to boost again. Initiating boost now requires 20% boost juice, but if you hold the boost button all the time, it will now do something each time the boost recharges to 20% instead of just staying drained until you release the boost button.
• Added Proving Grounds to all Arenas. This lets you test our your own mothership build vs the Arena ship you would usually pilot in a simulation.
• Fixed outdated hangar tutorial image from before the big v0.8 upgrade to the new strike craft system.
• The weapon group HUD now has text to show what the icons mean, so people can find battle wagon mode more easily if they missed it in the tutorial.
• Text and translation updates
• Reworked the objective coloring system so that green objectives are things to do, and grey ones are completed so it is consistent throughout the flow.
• Added new 110 territory hex based map called Hexor. Can be found in the sandbox options.
• The infection balls the zombies shoot now have warning effects on them to show bio hazard.
• Fixed the broken alpha mask on the zoom scope.
• The being chased line on the map is now more scary so it is harder to ignore.
• In VR mode, the cursors now lock to the slide bar they are sliding so you don't need to be a surgeon to use them.
• Fixed VR restore defaults button not saving settings.
• Improved method for adjusting the VR menu position with motion controls.

Hi All, Just a quick note, Traditional and Simplified Chinese are now active language options as of v1.001. There are no other changes in this new version aside from the addition of the two new languages. We are not able to read either of these new languages, so there may be a few translation issues at first, but please let us know if you find any, and we will collect them and have them fixed promptly. We are currently taking some personal time until January. We have finished up with the launch PR campaign and now have a bit of time to relax over the holidays and get our heads back on straight. Happy Holidays everyone! Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi All, Just a quick note, Traditional and Simplified Chinese are now active language options as of v1.001. There are no other changes in this new version aside from the addition of the two new languages. We are not able to read either of these new languages, so there may be a few translation issues at first, but please let us know if you find any, and we will collect them and have them fixed promptly. We are currently taking some personal time until January. We have finished up with the launch PR campaign and now have a bit of time to relax over the holidays and get our heads back on straight. Happy Holidays everyone! Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Space Pirates And Zombies 2 is Now Available on Steam!

Design and then improve the ultimate mothership. Explore a persistent living galaxy populated by 200 unique captains that can do everything you can do. Survive the zombie infection and then fight them back. Make allies and start your own faction. Build your empire. Also includes Sandbox Mode.

Hi All, Release day has finally arrived! Early Access has been a great learning experience for us and we are so thankful for all of you who came along with us for the ride, sharing your ideas and support. SPAZ 2 has been a long haul. 18 months in Early Access, and 18 months as Coming Soon prior to that. So 3 years now we have been on the Steam forums daily taking input on the game, sharing progress, and leaning on you all for support. We feel like we received a massive education in that time. All together SPAZ 2 was in development for 62 months. 62 crazy months. Going forward, we plan to continue to support SPAZ 2. In the short term, we have a Chinese translation almost ready as well as tools to allow players to localize SPAZ 2 themselves into their language of choice. We also want to create a system to make the sandbox tuning files conveniently sharable on workshop. Beyond that, we are hoping the community continues to grow and shares their ideas so we can continue to tune and tweak. So for the Early Access crew, thank you for letting us get to know you and for sharing your ideas. You helped keep us going. It was hard sometimes, but we always had you counting on us and believing in us. We couldn't have done this alone. For new players, thank you for joining us! We gave it our all with SPAZ 2. We worked harder than we ever thought we could and in the end we think we did it, by some miracle :) For those on the fence. We have added a robust demo that works on flat screen and VR. Give it a try. Your saves will carry over to the full game, and there are the first couple of hours of gameplay in there. Thank you all! Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi All, Release day has finally arrived! Early Access has been a great learning experience for us and we are so thankful for all of you who came along with us for the ride, sharing your ideas and support. SPAZ 2 has been a long haul. 18 months in Early Access, and 18 months as Coming Soon prior to that. So 3 years now we have been on the Steam forums daily taking input on the game, sharing progress, and leaning on you all for support. We feel like we received a massive education in that time. All together SPAZ 2 was in development for 62 months. 62 crazy months. Going forward, we plan to continue to support SPAZ 2. In the short term, we have a Chinese translation almost ready as well as tools to allow players to localize SPAZ 2 themselves into their language of choice. We also want to create a system to make the sandbox tuning files conveniently sharable on workshop. Beyond that, we are hoping the community continues to grow and shares their ideas so we can continue to tune and tweak. So for the Early Access crew, thank you for letting us get to know you and for sharing your ideas. You helped keep us going. It was hard sometimes, but we always had you counting on us and believing in us. We couldn't have done this alone. For new players, thank you for joining us! We gave it our all with SPAZ 2. We worked harder than we ever thought we could and in the end we think we did it, by some miracle :) For those on the fence. We have added a robust demo that works on flat screen and VR. Give it a try. Your saves will carry over to the full game, and there are the first couple of hours of gameplay in there. Thank you all! Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi Everyone, We just wanted to give you all a heads up that we will be leaving Early Access on November 7, 2017. Code lockdown has gone really well and the buglists for 1.0 are clear, so it is time to give SPAZ 2 its final 2 weeks in the oven before release. The release should simply be us changing the version number to 1.0 on Novermber 7th, assuming no more critical issues arise. Thanks for your patience with the lockdown. We feel it is the best practice for a clean release. We want to thank everyone who has been there with us over the last 17 months of Early Access. It has been great sharing ideas each day and SPAZ 2 is so much better for it. We really appreciate you all! Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi Everyone, We just wanted to give you all a heads up that we will be leaving Early Access on November 7, 2017. Code lockdown has gone really well and the buglists for 1.0 are clear, so it is time to give SPAZ 2 its final 2 weeks in the oven before release. The release should simply be us changing the version number to 1.0 on Novermber 7th, assuming no more critical issues arise. Thanks for your patience with the lockdown. We feel it is the best practice for a clean release. We want to thank everyone who has been there with us over the last 17 months of Early Access. It has been great sharing ideas each day and SPAZ 2 is so much better for it. We really appreciate you all! Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi All, We have spent the last month continuing our preparations for the 1.0 release. The month was all about removing those last few hard to find bugs and doing a bit of deeper optimization that was not possible while the codebase was in flux. We have also begun to work on the Mac and Linux builds in the hopes that they will be ready before for the Windows 1.0 release. So lets delve into what's been going on....

Bug Fixes/Changes:

• Fixed hang when retreating from battle after destroying a starbase.
• Fixed case where is was possible for loading an autosave to force you into a battle instead of being on the starmap.
• Fixed rare case where bandit's demand surrender menu would appear at the start of battles.
• Removed Scrap and Loose Scrap text from the bandit hive attack menu since it was just confusing. Look at the values of the Rez,Goons,Scrap to see what the raid potential is. Bigger is better.
• Fixed scavenge node coloring updating when the owner is changed.
• Fixed scavenge nodes losing player ownership when a new node lands on top of it.
• Added code to detect and skip loading of corrupted settings/save files.
• Fixed case where XP rewards often returned 50 when late game when the player was much much higher threat than other enemies. Now XP rewards will continue to scale down appropriately even once the player is uber strong.
• Added Custom Order Parts Max Stars to the Sandbox options. Allows setting how good the custom order parts can be. Can also turn off custom order parts entirely with the slider.
• Motherships higher prioritize fighting other motherships in battle, about twice as much as before.
• Starbases much higher prioritize targeting other motherships in battle, about 3x as much as before. This is to prevent them wasting missiles and bombs on strike craft. Their local beam defenses will still target any strike craft that stray too close.
• Starbases are now priority targets in combat as well for motherships. Targeting weighting 2x higher than before.
• Added nice fade out to loading savegames, instead of a frozen screen.
• Fixed Kill Captain side objective to only count captains, not bandits or transports.
• Fixed special hot swap case when switching medium sized parts left to right sometimes the swap would fail.
• B button can now back out of the Tactics Panel in controller mode.
• If in escape pod on the starmap, territories are now discovered as you travel.
• Spelling fixed across all languages
• Bloom now has 4 intensity settings

Optimizations:

• Major starmap optimization, prevents rolling movement lag in large galaxy. Smooths out the map a lot. This will be a huge improvement on slower machines in big galaxies.
• Weapon mounts now cache their battle wagon targeting for 100ms instead of constantly re-thinking. This bought back about 8% cpu in battles.
• Weapons now don't rethink targeting while they are reloading, saves about 4% cpu in battles.
• Major fighter optimization at lower frame rates. When train wrecks happened, fighters were particularly impacted... Not anymore.

VR Stuff:

• In VR mode, the physics update was automatically being set super high by the SteamVR Vive plugin. This caused major slowdown in physics intensive battles. Now the VR updates at the same rate as the flat screen/Rift so big battles are nice and smooth. This will be a HUGE performance improvement on the Vive.
• Added display menu for VR to size the output window.

Mac and Linux Build Progress Update:

Going Forward:

Hi All, We have spent the last month continuing our preparations for the 1.0 release. The month was all about removing those last few hard to find bugs and doing a bit of deeper optimization that was not possible while the codebase was in flux. We have also begun to work on the Mac and Linux builds in the hopes that they will be ready before for the Windows 1.0 release. So lets delve into what's been going on....

Bug Fixes/Changes:

• Fixed hang when retreating from battle after destroying a starbase.
• Fixed case where is was possible for loading an autosave to force you into a battle instead of being on the starmap.
• Fixed rare case where bandit's demand surrender menu would appear at the start of battles.
• Removed Scrap and Loose Scrap text from the bandit hive attack menu since it was just confusing. Look at the values of the Rez,Goons,Scrap to see what the raid potential is. Bigger is better.
• Fixed scavenge node coloring updating when the owner is changed.
• Fixed scavenge nodes losing player ownership when a new node lands on top of it.
• Added code to detect and skip loading of corrupted settings/save files.
• Fixed case where XP rewards often returned 50 when late game when the player was much much higher threat than other enemies. Now XP rewards will continue to scale down appropriately even once the player is uber strong.
• Added Custom Order Parts Max Stars to the Sandbox options. Allows setting how good the custom order parts can be. Can also turn off custom order parts entirely with the slider.
• Motherships higher prioritize fighting other motherships in battle, about twice as much as before.
• Starbases much higher prioritize targeting other motherships in battle, about 3x as much as before. This is to prevent them wasting missiles and bombs on strike craft. Their local beam defenses will still target any strike craft that stray too close.
• Starbases are now priority targets in combat as well for motherships. Targeting weighting 2x higher than before.
• Added nice fade out to loading savegames, instead of a frozen screen.
• Fixed Kill Captain side objective to only count captains, not bandits or transports.
• Fixed special hot swap case when switching medium sized parts left to right sometimes the swap would fail.
• B button can now back out of the Tactics Panel in controller mode.
• If in escape pod on the starmap, territories are now discovered as you travel.
• Spelling fixed across all languages
• Bloom now has 4 intensity settings

Optimizations:

• Major starmap optimization, prevents rolling movement lag in large galaxy. Smooths out the map a lot. This will be a huge improvement on slower machines in big galaxies.
• Weapon mounts now cache their battle wagon targeting for 100ms instead of constantly re-thinking. This bought back about 8% cpu in battles.
• Weapons now don't rethink targeting while they are reloading, saves about 4% cpu in battles.
• Major fighter optimization at lower frame rates. When train wrecks happened, fighters were particularly impacted... Not anymore.

VR Stuff:

• In VR mode, the physics update was automatically being set super high by the SteamVR Vive plugin. This caused major slowdown in physics intensive battles. Now the VR updates at the same rate as the flat screen/Rift so big battles are nice and smooth. This will be a HUGE performance improvement on the Vive.
• Added display menu for VR to size the output window.

Mac and Linux Build Progress Update:

Going Forward:

Hi All, This version was all about completing the final deliverables for the 1.0 release. We are so close now. We have had a ton of great input over the last 14 months in Early Access, and we really appreciate you taking this journey with us!

Major additions:

Professional Voice Acting:

Localization to French, German, and Russian:

VR motion controller support:

Additional Fixes/Changes:

• Fixed issue where sometimes the camera could get caught flickering when toggle camera was selected right before pause.
• Made AI captains attack Bandit Hives longer so they try to destroy them more vs just raiding them for supplies.
• Fixed case where captains would raid bandit hives with bounties instead of trying to destroy them.
• Made local governors more likely to clear bandit hives from their territory.
• AI captains more likely to complete Starbase building tasks where they have to pay a portion of the cost themselves.
• Made the blocked port checker a little more forgiving to allow fitting parts in spots that look like they should allow parts to fit.
• Fixed bug where sniper cannons and mass drivers would cause a hitch in the enemy ship's movement when they hit.
• Fixed exploit where you could disband a starbase you own to get salavge access to the store inventory which you do not actually own.
• Fixed Starbases not dropping their Stockpile contents when disbanded.
• Fixed mouse over resource values disagreeing with Starmap values (Ceil/Round Conflict)
• Fixed Join faction button round off error, reporting relations too low when it is possible to join.
• Fixed issue where bombs on strike craft would impact the player ship when starting combat.
• Added Starmap Explored button to the Sandbox level setup options. This makes the starmap fully explored on start.
• Accessing Cheat menu easier for a variety of keyboards: (Left Alt or Right Alt or AltGr) + (F7 or 0)
• Starbase bounties are now checked vs the bounty taker's relation with the owner. So friends will no longer attack your bases.
• Bounty takers will now take into consideration their relations with the faction leader before taking on a bounty to destroy a starbase (So player friends won't attack the bases in the Player faction, even if the player does not own that base)
• Fixed issue where you could contextual target parts in the inventory level, causing Battle Wagon to attack them.
• Fixed issue where you could lock onto an ally outside of battlewagon mode, then switch to battlewagon mode and your ship would automatically fire at your ally.
• Fixed fighter docking issues on high speed motherships where they couldn't catch up.
• Increased Rez drop from zombie Starbases from a flat 200 to 400-1000 based on the size of the base.
• Fixed case where you could mark a part for hot swapping in the inventory level then attach it to your ship using the tractor instead, leaving the part in a weird state.
• Starbase threat level now properly updates when you level up.
• Starbase threat updates when transferred to a new owner to reflect their tech level
• Fixed knocked off enemy parts attached to player ship not consuming any capacitor power. In fact, it was stealing the power from the old ship.
• When the player rams a ship, the ship being rammed now takes it as a hostile act. Especially so if they are an ally and there are not hostile ships left in the region. Allies now react to being rammed to death for free parts after battles conclude.
• Fixed case where after player lost a battle and player continued instead of loading that the winning ships did not recover their strike craft and their health was not updated to the proper post battle health.
• Taught Motherships not to avoid Strike Craft and since they will rarely collide due to being at different Y heights. (Also taught strike craft not to avoid motherships)
• New AI flight system that attempts to de-clump the ships and keep ships at optimal range with each other. Also smooths out their decision making so they stick with ideas longer and don't criss cross each other so much while re evaluating.
• New weapon analyzer that weights damage potential of all equipped weapons and decides the best combat range based on that.
• AI ships better at deciding when to boost engines.
• When clicking “Fight” on a station, you need to click the button a second time within 3 seconds to prevent accidental fights.
• On Easy and Normal difficulties the max stars for AI strike craft are 4 for larges, and 5 for mediums and smalls. Hard and Insane unchanged.
• Fix for case where ship parts could not reattach sometimes when they were knocked by enemy captains.
• Fixed issue where zombie strike craft spawned from eggs were much higher in Y than regular strike craft.

Going Forward:

Hi All, This version was all about completing the final deliverables for the 1.0 release. We are so close now. We have had a ton of great input over the last 14 months in Early Access, and we really appreciate you taking this journey with us!

Major additions:

Professional Voice Acting:

Localization to French, German, and Russian:

VR motion controller support:

Additional Fixes/Changes:

• Fixed issue where sometimes the camera could get caught flickering when toggle camera was selected right before pause.
• Made AI captains attack Bandit Hives longer so they try to destroy them more vs just raiding them for supplies.
• Fixed case where captains would raid bandit hives with bounties instead of trying to destroy them.
• Made local governors more likely to clear bandit hives from their territory.
• AI captains more likely to complete Starbase building tasks where they have to pay a portion of the cost themselves.
• Made the blocked port checker a little more forgiving to allow fitting parts in spots that look like they should allow parts to fit.
• Fixed bug where sniper cannons and mass drivers would cause a hitch in the enemy ship's movement when they hit.
• Fixed exploit where you could disband a starbase you own to get salavge access to the store inventory which you do not actually own.
• Fixed Starbases not dropping their Stockpile contents when disbanded.
• Fixed mouse over resource values disagreeing with Starmap values (Ceil/Round Conflict)
• Fixed Join faction button round off error, reporting relations too low when it is possible to join.
• Fixed issue where bombs on strike craft would impact the player ship when starting combat.
• Added Starmap Explored button to the Sandbox level setup options. This makes the starmap fully explored on start.
• Accessing Cheat menu easier for a variety of keyboards: (Left Alt or Right Alt or AltGr) + (F7 or 0)
• Starbase bounties are now checked vs the bounty taker's relation with the owner. So friends will no longer attack your bases.
• Bounty takers will now take into consideration their relations with the faction leader before taking on a bounty to destroy a starbase (So player friends won't attack the bases in the Player faction, even if the player does not own that base)
• Fixed issue where you could contextual target parts in the inventory level, causing Battle Wagon to attack them.
• Fixed issue where you could lock onto an ally outside of battlewagon mode, then switch to battlewagon mode and your ship would automatically fire at your ally.
• Fixed fighter docking issues on high speed motherships where they couldn't catch up.
• Increased Rez drop from zombie Starbases from a flat 200 to 400-1000 based on the size of the base.
• Fixed case where you could mark a part for hot swapping in the inventory level then attach it to your ship using the tractor instead, leaving the part in a weird state.
• Starbase threat level now properly updates when you level up.
• Starbase threat updates when transferred to a new owner to reflect their tech level
• Fixed knocked off enemy parts attached to player ship not consuming any capacitor power. In fact, it was stealing the power from the old ship.
• When the player rams a ship, the ship being rammed now takes it as a hostile act. Especially so if they are an ally and there are not hostile ships left in the region. Allies now react to being rammed to death for free parts after battles conclude.
• Fixed case where after player lost a battle and player continued instead of loading that the winning ships did not recover their strike craft and their health was not updated to the proper post battle health.
• Taught Motherships not to avoid Strike Craft and since they will rarely collide due to being at different Y heights. (Also taught strike craft not to avoid motherships)
• New AI flight system that attempts to de-clump the ships and keep ships at optimal range with each other. Also smooths out their decision making so they stick with ideas longer and don't criss cross each other so much while re evaluating.
• New weapon analyzer that weights damage potential of all equipped weapons and decides the best combat range based on that.
• AI ships better at deciding when to boost engines.
• When clicking Fight on a station, you need to click the button a second time within 3 seconds to prevent accidental fights.
• On Easy and Normal difficulties the max stars for AI strike craft are 4 for larges, and 5 for mediums and smalls. Hard and Insane unchanged.
• Fix for case where ship parts could not reattach sometimes when they were knocked by enemy captains.
• Fixed issue where zombie strike craft spawned from eggs were much higher in Y than regular strike craft.

Going Forward:

It has been a hard month upgrading from Unity 5.0.4 to 5.4.4 and there have been some really unexpected road bumps. We still aren't fully 5.4.4 ready, but one thing has become clear, the Arena multiplayer isn't going to work. Between Unity 4 and 5.1 Unity's multiplayer backend fundamentally changed, but we always thought we could transpose our multiplayer code into the new system without too much difficulty. But we can tell you after 4 weeks hard at it, we have made no progress... at all. We have tried four new multiplayer solutions as well as made a good try to resuscitate the legacy networking from Unity 4 but at this point we feel that the mounting wasted time and dead ends are really hurting development progress. There has been considerable interest in a coop multiplayer mode. In the past we have posted why that would not be possible, as it would be like running a 300 player server on a local machine. So coop multiplayer wasn't part of the plan, but Arena was... The Arena multiplayer which we had hoped to deliver was at least something, but so far it has received very limited interest on the forums. So now we have hit this multiplayer upgrade road block and we need to make a hard decision. Do we keep pressing ahead on Arena multiplayer which likely will only have a small following and will take many more months than expected, or do we spend that time making the single player better. We think it is more important to make the game better. We have tried to make it very clear on the store page that in its current form SPAZ 2 is a single player game and we requested that people not purchase the game for multiplayer features not yet implemented, but we know many of you are still going to be quite disappointed. First of all, we are very sorry and embarrassed at this failure to deliver on our part. We let our enthusiasm get ahead of us. Secondly, we have contacted Steam and have asked them remove the two week since purchase time requirement for refunds. We are still waiting to hear back from Steam about this, but it should be possible. So if you picked up SPAZ 2 early and sat on it waiting for multiplayer, and didn't elapse the two hour playtime limit, you should be able to refund it soon. EDIT: Update from Steam: Their system is unable to remove the automated 2 week ownership time limit, but our Steam contact has kindly offered to handle the refund requests by hand. If you meet the refund requirements above and want a refund, please contact us at contact@spazgame.com with a link to your Steam profile, and we will forward your link to our contact for a manual refund. Above Refund Offer Available Until July 16 2017, need an end date else we will be pinging our Steam contact forever. Thirdly, we plan to use the time we recover to double down on content and replayability. We can get to these features sooner now and make them bigger. We are going to build new maps for the sandbox mode, release an greatly expanded set of sandbox gameplay mutators, add a much more difficult insane difficulty level, and we will focus on making the end game more challenging once you have that massive battleship. We hope that this will in some way make up for our failure with the multiplayer Arena mode. Currently we are still working on the upgrade to Unity 5.4.4 and it will feature DirectX 11 support as well as quite a bit of rendering optimization. Removal of the legacy networking hooks should also lead to CPU performance recovery. Once that is ready, we will dive back into work on the single player campaign at full speed to make SPAZ 2 the best it can be. Thank you for your support and understanding Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi All, The goal of this update was to sneak in a couple final features before 1.0 code lockdown as well as to get a start on our remaining Early Access goals, voice acting and localization. We need to get the build as solid as we can for the v1.0 release, so going forward we will be focusing on tuning and bug fixing to ensure a great 1.0 release. After 1.0 we will again be able to look at new features, and we will hopefully see a lot of new faces joining the community with great ideas. In this update we have added a new 100 territory map “The Clockwork Void,” as well as the “Dark Cycle,” a system of rebounding ever increasing zombie infection for the sandbox mode. Behind the scenes, we have now cast our voice actors and begun localization. Now for the details!

The Clockwork Void:

The Dark Cycle:

Localization Begins:

Voice Acting Casting:

Additional Fixes/Changes:

• Changed minimum armor repair rate to 0.1% for Sandbox mode. Setting 0% was causing armor break-off updates to be skipped, preventing parts from ever breaking off.
• When ramming, less of the damage is transmitted through the skeleton of the ship so fewer parts will break off that weren't directly impacted by the ram. So your engine won't break off when you ram with your nose anymore.
• Lowered the reflected back damage to the rammer when ramming by 20%
• Fixed connection helper arrows remaining on when the part being connected is destroyed due to being used to smack other ships.
• Made tractored parts less likely to be destroyed when they hit enemy ships while being tractored.
• Fixed VR zooming on the starmap when pressing RB with the controller
• Added Vertical menu offset slider for VR
• Added menu distance slider for VR
• Reversed combat zooming in VR mode with the controller
• Custom part price multiplier slider for sandbox mode.
• Fixed the auto deploy button on the tactics panel so it wouldn't be disabled when a strike craft is currently active.
• Fixed controller not being able to advance dialogue in the final mission.
• Fixed case where the level set dressing asteroids could get too close to the play area and look like intractable asteroids.

Going Forward:

Hi All, The goal of this update was to sneak in a couple final features before 1.0 code lockdown as well as to get a start on our remaining Early Access goals, voice acting and localization. We need to get the build as solid as we can for the v1.0 release, so going forward we will be focusing on tuning and bug fixing to ensure a great 1.0 release. After 1.0 we will again be able to look at new features, and we will hopefully see a lot of new faces joining the community with great ideas. In this update we have added a new 100 territory map The Clockwork Void, as well as the Dark Cycle, a system of rebounding ever increasing zombie infection for the sandbox mode. Behind the scenes, we have now cast our voice actors and begun localization. Now for the details!

The Clockwork Void:

The Dark Cycle:

Localization Begins:

Voice Acting Casting:

Additional Fixes/Changes:

• Changed minimum armor repair rate to 0.1% for Sandbox mode. Setting 0% was causing armor break-off updates to be skipped, preventing parts from ever breaking off.
• When ramming, less of the damage is transmitted through the skeleton of the ship so fewer parts will break off that weren't directly impacted by the ram. So your engine won't break off when you ram with your nose anymore.
• Lowered the reflected back damage to the rammer when ramming by 20%
• Fixed connection helper arrows remaining on when the part being connected is destroyed due to being used to smack other ships.
• Made tractored parts less likely to be destroyed when they hit enemy ships while being tractored.
• Fixed VR zooming on the starmap when pressing RB with the controller
• Added Vertical menu offset slider for VR
• Added menu distance slider for VR
• Reversed combat zooming in VR mode with the controller
• Custom part price multiplier slider for sandbox mode.
• Fixed the auto deploy button on the tactics panel so it wouldn't be disabled when a strike craft is currently active.
• Fixed controller not being able to advance dialogue in the final mission.
• Fixed case where the level set dressing asteroids could get too close to the play area and look like intractable asteroids.

Going Forward:

Hi all, This update is centered around further expanding the sandbox gameplay as well as tackling many of the larger player tuning requests. There is a lot of stuff to cover, so lets dig right in!

At a high level, here are the major features/changes:

• Deadspace Territory! (A way to set galaxy generation options that change its layout)
• New higher starbase threat levels. (starbase threat works a lot more like captain threat now)
• Missiles got a tuning boost (the continuing effort to make them relevant)
• Personality based AI retreating (they tend to flee less often now)
• Better in combat part attachment (fix your ship in battle hopefully with less fumbling)
• Large strike craft health tuned to be less tanky. (6 star larges are less insane)
• Ship Construction Undo (in construction level, back out changes when experimenting)
• Zombies worth hunting (parts now have stars, they drop a lot more rez)
• VR Beta (our first crack at a public VR build)

Deadspace Territory:

Starbase Threat Changes:

Missile Tuning:

• Damage increased 25%
• Reload 20% faster
• Range increased 33%
• Speed 33% faster
• MUCH more agile and has 10x the thrust. (its faaast)

Personality based AI retreating:

• Cowardly = Retreat very likely (even more likely than before)
• Timid = Retreat likely (about as likely as pre v0.9.5 was for all captains)
• Normal = Less likely retreat than before v0.9.5
• Courageous = much less likely retreating.
• Fearless = almost never retreats.

Better in combat part attachment:

Strike Craft Tuning:

Ship Construction Undo:

Zombies Worth Hunting:

The VR Beta:

Additional Fixes/Changes:

• Strike craft quick deployment hotkeys: F1, F2, F3, F4
• Galactic Colossus costs less to fund new starbases so building large empires is not so expensive. Was +500 scrap per base, now is +250.
• Added Blueprint Drop Rate Multiplier to sandbox sliders
• Fix for replacing an allied captain in battle, then reloading the game causing a non interactable battle.
• Removed the limit of max zombie thralls on Hard. So zombies can take over the whole galaxy just like on insane.
• Bandit strike craft get half the stars compared to captains of the same level. This is more in keeping with their junk part but large fleet theme.
• Lowered strike craft threat calculation strength by 50%. They were making fleets seem much more powerful than they were, this lead to wild changes in threat level based on the number of strike craft in a fleet.
• Bandit threat calculation takes 33% less threat from strike craft to better represent that their strike craft are not an issue if you kill the mothership (weak point)
• Flak cannon chance to hit targets in cloud increased from 50% to 67%.
• Fixed issue where initial threat level calculation for strike craft was too high, but reset on load which would have lead to early game threat level confusion.
• Fix for too many spawn crates causing bandit hive to fail to become red.
• Prevent levelup exploit when using a single core to cheese battles. max levelups now capped to 4 per battle.
• Added special Alert_EnemyAttack autosave for when the AI attacks the player to prevent loss of regular autosave progress.
• Fixed case where zombies would attack while player's level was still below the player ignore level when the player was harvesting resources.
• Fixed a rare bug where you could join a fight against an ally when a captain from a different faction was also aiding your ally.
• Updated Unity 5.4.4 to Unity 5.4.5 (Tried Unity 5.6.0f3 but it still contains a bug that needs fixing before we can use it (issue: 899009)
• Fixed bug where faction relations were not being properly capped between -100 and 100.
• Fixed bug whereby executing captains could increase overall faction relations beyond what losing that captain from the faction should have caused.
• add base construction hint on create faction that other faction leaders will not be happy.
• add base construction hint on build rebel starbase that other faction leaders will not be happy.
• On easy mode, only allow one war on the player at a time.
• Leech Beams now work on large strikecraft and battlewagon knows how to target them with leech beams properly.
• Distance numbers now also show on the currently locked target as well as the current contextual action target for strike craft and drones.
• Added starmap distance number to the enemy bounty list in the captain info page.
• Fixed starbase tip to report the right unlock level for building when the unlocking is changed for sandbox mode.
• Wingmen won't trade Rez at stations because the player may have given it to them to help them keep up.
• Fixed a possible case where it was possible for wingmen to ignore a player battle and not join.
• Made wars more likely between factions when they run out of space to expand.
• Fix for having to move that 1 pixel after battle to reach the scavenge field.
• Captain info on mouse over was not reporting the relations values that took into consideration faction standing. This meant you could see someone with -5 relations being friendly instead of neutral. This is now fixed and shows the final relations which are used for hostility calculations. (Derived Relations)
• Added gamplay option Toggle Combat Zoom (instead of right mouse hold)
• Added combat zoom Controller and Mouse sensitivity slider to gameplay options.
• Only display mouse sensitivity sliders for mouse mode and controller sensitivity sliders for controller mode, less menu pollution.
• Added Invert Y selector for the combat scope separate from the 3rd person cam to gameplay options.
• Fixed AI captain joining player faction request text so that when they offer 0 scrap it doesn't show “0 Scrap” as if that was something being received.

Going Forward:

Hi all, This update is centered around further expanding the sandbox gameplay as well as tackling many of the larger player tuning requests. There is a lot of stuff to cover, so lets dig right in!

At a high level, here are the major features/changes:

• Deadspace Territory! (A way to set galaxy generation options that change its layout)
• New higher starbase threat levels. (starbase threat works a lot more like captain threat now)
• Missiles got a tuning boost (the continuing effort to make them relevant)
• Personality based AI retreating (they tend to flee less often now)
• Better in combat part attachment (fix your ship in battle hopefully with less fumbling)
• Large strike craft health tuned to be less tanky. (6 star larges are less insane)
• Ship Construction Undo (in construction level, back out changes when experimenting)
• Zombies worth hunting (parts now have stars, they drop a lot more rez)
• VR Beta (our first crack at a public VR build)

Deadspace Territory:

Starbase Threat Changes:

Missile Tuning:

• Damage increased 25%
• Reload 20% faster
• Range increased 33%
• Speed 33% faster
• MUCH more agile and has 10x the thrust. (its faaast)

Personality based AI retreating:

• Cowardly = Retreat very likely (even more likely than before)
• Timid = Retreat likely (about as likely as pre v0.9.5 was for all captains)
• Normal = Less likely retreat than before v0.9.5
• Courageous = much less likely retreating.
• Fearless = almost never retreats.

Better in combat part attachment:

Strike Craft Tuning:

Ship Construction Undo:

Zombies Worth Hunting:

The VR Beta:

Additional Fixes/Changes:

• Strike craft quick deployment hotkeys: F1, F2, F3, F4
• Galactic Colossus costs less to fund new starbases so building large empires is not so expensive. Was +500 scrap per base, now is +250.
• Added Blueprint Drop Rate Multiplier to sandbox sliders
• Fix for replacing an allied captain in battle, then reloading the game causing a non interactable battle.
• Removed the limit of max zombie thralls on Hard. So zombies can take over the whole galaxy just like on insane.
• Bandit strike craft get half the stars compared to captains of the same level. This is more in keeping with their junk part but large fleet theme.
• Lowered strike craft threat calculation strength by 50%. They were making fleets seem much more powerful than they were, this lead to wild changes in threat level based on the number of strike craft in a fleet.
• Bandit threat calculation takes 33% less threat from strike craft to better represent that their strike craft are not an issue if you kill the mothership (weak point)
• Flak cannon chance to hit targets in cloud increased from 50% to 67%.
• Fixed issue where initial threat level calculation for strike craft was too high, but reset on load which would have lead to early game threat level confusion.
• Fix for too many spawn crates causing bandit hive to fail to become red.
• Prevent levelup exploit when using a single core to cheese battles. max levelups now capped to 4 per battle.
• Added special Alert_EnemyAttack autosave for when the AI attacks the player to prevent loss of regular autosave progress.
• Fixed case where zombies would attack while player's level was still below the player ignore level when the player was harvesting resources.
• Fixed a rare bug where you could join a fight against an ally when a captain from a different faction was also aiding your ally.
• Updated Unity 5.4.4 to Unity 5.4.5 (Tried Unity 5.6.0f3 but it still contains a bug that needs fixing before we can use it (issue: 899009)
• Fixed bug where faction relations were not being properly capped between -100 and 100.
• Fixed bug whereby executing captains could increase overall faction relations beyond what losing that captain from the faction should have caused.
• add base construction hint on create faction that other faction leaders will not be happy.
• add base construction hint on build rebel starbase that other faction leaders will not be happy.
• On easy mode, only allow one war on the player at a time.
• Leech Beams now work on large strikecraft and battlewagon knows how to target them with leech beams properly.
• Distance numbers now also show on the currently locked target as well as the current contextual action target for strike craft and drones.
• Added starmap distance number to the enemy bounty list in the captain info page.
• Fixed starbase tip to report the right unlock level for building when the unlocking is changed for sandbox mode.
• Wingmen won't trade Rez at stations because the player may have given it to them to help them keep up.
• Fixed a possible case where it was possible for wingmen to ignore a player battle and not join.
• Made wars more likely between factions when they run out of space to expand.
• Fix for having to move that 1 pixel after battle to reach the scavenge field.
• Captain info on mouse over was not reporting the relations values that took into consideration faction standing. This meant you could see someone with -5 relations being friendly instead of neutral. This is now fixed and shows the final relations which are used for hostility calculations. (Derived Relations)
• Added gamplay option Toggle Combat Zoom (instead of right mouse hold)
• Added combat zoom Controller and Mouse sensitivity slider to gameplay options.
• Only display mouse sensitivity sliders for mouse mode and controller sensitivity sliders for controller mode, less menu pollution.
• Added Invert Y selector for the combat scope separate from the 3rd person cam to gameplay options.
• Fixed AI captain joining player faction request text so that when they offer 0 scrap it doesn't show 0 Scrap as if that was something being received.

Going Forward:

Hi All, This update was all about replayability. We are going to get right into the guts of the update because there is a lot to read!

At a high level, here are the major upgrades:

• Flight physics got a big upgrade, which also lead to a 20% CPU savings.
• Improved missiles to make them a more viable choice.
• Added ability to hot swap the root core in the inventory level.
• Changed Fighter energy consumption to be on attack only.
• Added an Insane difficulty mode for experts who hate themselves.
• Added Extended core modes (now have up to 21 cores)
• Upgraded the sandbox mode with 73 sliders and new pre-defined game modes.
• Added the Milky Colossus (a huge 200 sector map!)

Flight Physics Improvements:

Missile Upgrades:

Root Core Hot Swap:

Fighter Energy Consumption:

Insane Difficulty:

• AI does 2X damage.
• You do 0.5X damage.
• AI levels MUCH more quickly. You can still out pace them, but barely. They get a base of 97.5% of your experience. Expect the AI to stay ahead of you for a good long while.
• Zombie provinces can now have 2X as many zombies. They will vacuum factions to death.
• Zombies will do 2X damage (that is 4X total... there's some hard zombies)
• Outside of the difficulty slider there are 73 other sliders which are not connected that you can use to inflict pain on yourself.

Extended Core Modes:

• Default: normal progression (15 cores total)
• 3 Early: Your starter ship will now have 6 cores instead of 3, normal progression. (18 total)
• 3 Late: This extends the end game allowing cores to be added further along in the level tree (18 total)
• 6 Early: Start with a 9 core ship. (21 total)
• 6 Late: Greatly extend the end game core perk hunt. (21 total)
• 3 Early and 3 Late: This one starts you bigger and ends you bigger, and is quite fun. (21 total)

Super Sandbox Sliders:

• Default: Good old default. This is what the story uses.
• All Unlocked: If you want it all and you want it now, well this is for you.
• Epic War: Brutal marathon conquest.
• Rising Star: Carve out an Empire... Somehow.
• Hidden Menace: While bandits rule, dankness looms...

Advanced Mode:

Tuning Categories:

Important notes:

The Milky Colossus:

Other Fixes and Changes:

• Fixed issue with controller input scaling with frame rate. Now rates are constant like with the mouse.
• Fixed issue where if you press escape on the select difficulty menu while already in a game it would revert to the galaxy creation screen.
• Zombies should respawn with a full compliment of 0 star parts. on hard zombies do 33% bonus damage now (offsets their poor parts) on insane 2x.
• Fixed a bug where in rare cases a save could become corrupted due to a loading timing issue and subsequent save. Sprung up in V 0.9.0.
• Fixed sound persistence issue where too many looping audio sounds were active on the starmap after loading from a combat instance. Got some CPU back on starmap.
• Ai captains start with more real parts.
• In inventory level the firing arcs are now easier to test since guns will always fire instead of only firing if they can hit something.
• Zombies get strike craft at zombie starbases. Keeps them threat relevant.
• Zombies levelup more aggressively. To keep them closer to the top of the heap.
• Zombies wont attack transports on easy and normal, but will on hard and insane.
• Fixed capital transports returning to parent station after they are attacked.
• Fixed Join my faction and kick from faction not appearing when an Ai captain is in battle
• Bandit hive interaction text show when they are blocked by battle to avoid confusion as to why the fight button is inactive.
• Fixed demand surrender not showing why the option is disabled in some cases.
• Fix for beeping warning sound going off when a missile wants to fire in battlwagon mode.
• Added a frame limiter for then Vsync off. 30,60,90,120,144 selectable.
• Fixed it such that games with zombies deactivated will not spawn zombie roids in missions.

Going Forward:

Hi All, We have finished upgrading from Unity 5.0.4 to Unity 5.4.4. The last time we upgraded the engine was before we entered early access. This is a huge change and is the first major SPAZ 2 engine update that you will have been exposed to. The main reason to upgrade the engine was to stay compliant with the ever changing operating systems and technology. The last engine version was already two years old, and we feel it is critical to stay up to date to ensure SPAZ 2 continues to work for years to come. We tested the build as best as two people can, but there may be issues here and there. Please keep your eyes out for bugs and weird issues, and if you see them, please report them on the bug forums here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/252470/discussions/2/ So this update isn't about new stuff, in fact ideally the game looks and plays identically to v 0.8.8. The goal was to get everything working as it was in v0.8.8 and then build on that foundation for the rest of the project. Since gameplay didn't change between v 0.8.8 and v0.9.0 we can roll back to v0.8.8 without breaking saves. We want to ensure that we don't disrupt peoples' progress.

First a note about dual monitor setups:

Loading/Spawning Performance Improvements:

DirectX11 Support:

Camera input standardized:

The Starmap Background:

Going Forward:

Hi All, Well we have been back at it for the last couple of weeks and it is time to push a new build :) It was great to have a little time with our families over the holidays, and thanks very much to you all for being understanding about that too. We appreciate it! The goal of 0.8.6 was to tie up the smaller loose ends before we did our big 0.9 engine and multiplayer push. 0.8.6 is by no means the end of work on the single player, but for the next little while our focus will be on getting the engine upgraded to Unity 5.5+ (we are running v5.01 right now) and then to start on the multiplayer game modes. So single player will likely not change for a couple of months as we delve into these new major tasks. There may end up being an experimental build to opt into as we do the engine changes and very likely for the multiplayer changes so stay tuned for that too.

Fighter Changes

Disbanding Starbases

Capital Transports for All!

Protecting The Loot

War and Peace

And the Rest...

On to v0.9.0!

Hi all, Here's what we have been working on for the last couple of weeks. We have been trying to tie up as many loose ends as possible before we make the engine upgrade to support multiplayer in v0.9.0. We hope you like it!

Escape Pod Interactions:

Faction Neutralization:

Starbase Bounty Increase:

The Chipper!

The Disinfector

Battle Wagon Logic Upgrade:

The Fighter Swarm:

Mining Op Upgrades

Threat Levels and Strike Craft

Final Battle Readiness:

Prestige Command Points

Other Tweaks and Fixes:

Moving Forward

Hi Everyone, We have just released v0.8.0 and it is our biggest one yet. There are quite a few major changes in this update. Lets dig into the details.

The Video

Configurable Strike Craft and Hangar System

The Blueprint System

New Strike Craft Sizes/Features

8 New Strike Craft!

Combat Hangar Management

Lots of New Weapons

CUSTOM ORDER PARTS

Final Thoughts

Note: v0.8.2 now released to tune the large strike craft, also syngeries.

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In SPAZ 2 you must survive in an evolving post apocalyptic Galaxy. The zombie threat is defeated, infrastructure has collapsed, fuel is scarce, and scavenging means survival.

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Hi Everyone, It has been a busy month since the big synergy update. Richard and I both took a staggered week off before the end of summer to get some much needed rest/family time. It was great to recharge, and we are right back at it full force now. It has already been 4 months since our initial Early Access release and there have been huge improvements thanks to your suggestions and support. The latest patch was all about tuning and fixing high priority quality of life issues. Thanks very much for your understanding on letting us prioritize this vs new features for this push. That being said, a couple of fairly major improvements happened so we decided to call them out.

Fighter Upgrade:

Ramming Upgrade:

Build Notes:

Custom Portraits:

Moving Forward:

Hi All,

Expanded Synergies

Death to the Freeze Bug!

Hotfixes

We have been hard at work over the last couple weeks and we are hoping this patch will be a real crowd pleaser for all you veteran players out there. We have heard your suggestions and here is what we have come up with to address them.

Badass Bandits:

Synergies:

Cloaking:

Moving Forward:

Starmap Cloaking:

Cheat Mode:

Moving Forward:

Current Design/Implementation Goals #2

The Rogue Mining Op: There have been quite a few requests to get some SPAZ 1 style rock picking into SPAZ 2. We spent some time and think we have come up with a good way to handle this. We now have Rogue Mining Ops. They appear over time on the Starmap and will also expire. This expiry and limited nature is meant to make them feel special when you find one, since it is a free source of a limited supply of Rez. You also cannot grind them endlessly, which was a big problem in SPAZ 1. We want people to use all of the tools we created to survive in the Galaxy, and not to grind one event, so Mining Ops will expire over time. So here's how they work. You will find a pretty dense asteroid field filled with a new asteroid type. They are purplish and veiny and have little bits of Rez inside them. Blow them up, and you can go collect the Rez. You are free to do this and none of the miners in the level will care. But... There are also crates littered around the asteroid field (they are hard to find on purpose) These crates have large amounts of Rez inside them. If you steal from these crates, then the miners will get very angry. They will then call their friends and maintain a certain population that will pummel your ship until all their reinforcements are used up. If you survive, you can simply warp out as normal (if things get too tense, there is a warp gate too) If you decide to keep pushing it, stealing from more crates, the alert level will rise and a larger fleet will warp in. If you survive that, then you can warp out. If you are really nuts, you can go for the last few crates and an even larger fleet will warp in. It is up to you to only steal as much as you feel comfortable with and pay the price if you are too greedy. Side Objectives (Little Blue Missions) We have added a side objective system to help teach players the intricacies of the game. Each objective has a little brain that runs and evaluates if it is a good time to teach a certain game mechanic. Some preconditions are simple, like being level 12 or having zombies in the galaxy, while others are more unusual like having 3 loose junk parts triggering a quest to get rid of the garbage weighing you down. The real goal here is to provide the kind of advice that you would get if one of us was standing next to you providing hints on different ways to tackle problems and pointing out less used systems. Some objectives will come and go as the brain detects and then undetects good situations for completing that objective. Objectives can also be postponed if you don't want to complete them right now and want to free up another slot for a different objective to become active. Not to worry, postponed objectives will come back after a while. Here is a list of the objectives we have now: Bounty a Captain Bounty a Starbase Bounty a Zombie Starbase Collect your Stockpile Extort a Captain Fund a Starbase Expansion Hire a Wingman Attack a Captain Destroy a Starbase Attack a Zombie Do a Mining Op Pay a Tribute Start a Raid Try the Arena Pay Reparations Duel a captain Recruit a Captain to your Faction Use a build Incentive Join a Fight Jettison unused Junk We are hoping the objectives help to get people to try all of these things at least once to see how they poke the simulation in new ways. Additionally: (Better building tutorials) We have revised the intro building tutorial to make it hopefully more bullet proof when it comes to learning how to add and remove parts on ships. We still teach the old tractor beam method here since you need to know how to use this if you are ever in battle. The tractor beam method is the basic fallback construction method. We also added a tutorial for the new method that will trigger the first time that you enter the inventory level from the Starmap on your own. So this update was mainly about getting people playing the game a little better/deeper with a little extra ambient mining op flavor for those who already know how to play :) We hope you enjoy! Andrew(Blorf) and Richard(Narlak)

Hi Everyone, Well it has been a very busy two weeks since the Shopping Update, and we think you are going to really appreciate these changes. We reworked the entire ship construction system based on extensive user feedback, and here is what we came up with. The TL;DR is, you don't need the tractor beam to build anymore. Important note: The initial building tutorial is not yet aware of these changes, and we plan to change its flow to teach the new methods listed below. We figured that people would want to get their hands on this new tech right away though, so we are releasing it now. Also, there may be some bumps with this new system. There was a titanic amount of code and rework to get this new building method in there and unlike the old tractor version which had almost 4 years of testing, this has had about 5 hours of testing. As we find problems we will hotfix as usual. Also the old tractor construction method is still intact and can be used as a fallback. Here we go! (this is pulled directly out of the ship building tips button in the inventory level) SET COMPARE MODE: Click any part with the Right Mouse Button/Right Click Stick. The part will glow green showing that it is selected as the compare part. When in compare mode, if you hover your mouse over any other part, it will show how the stats compare. CLEAR COMPARE MODE: To clear compare mode, Click empty space with the Right Mouse Button/Right Click Stick. SWAPPING IN A PART: Find a loose part that has the desired stats. Set that part into compare mode. Hover the pointer over the part in the current ship design that you wish to replace. Click the Right Mouse Button/Right Click Stick. The compare part will swap places with the selected ship part. SWAPPING OUT A PART: Set a part on your ship to be in compare mode Hover the pointer over loose parts. Click the Right Mouse Button/Right Click Stick. The compare part will swap places with the selected loose part. SWAPPING SIZES: It is possible to swap a large part for a small part and vice versa if space is available. SWAPPING TYPES: In some cases it will be legal to swap an engine or a wing for example into the same position. Swapping supports this. HOT SWAPPING: Compare parts can be swapped with other parts currently attached to your ship. INSTA-SNAPPING PARTS: When selecting a compare part that is floating in space, arrows will appear in all locations where that part can attach. Move the pointer to the desired attach location, and the compare part will snap to this position. Click the Right Mouse Button/Right Click Stick to confirm the new position. INSTA-MOVING PARTS: When selecting a compare part that is attached to your ship, arrows will show all valid locations where that part can be moved instantly. This is a great way to quickly reconfigure ship spine shapes. SMART BREAKING: Instead of removing parts one by one with the tractor beam, if you select a part to remove using the tractor button, all parts that rely on that part will be automatically removed as you hold it. Selecting the mothership root core will cause all attached parts to be removed in a cascade. CLEANUP AREA: Pressing this button will reset all the positions of all loose parts in the current level. AUTO FILL SPINE: Pressing this button will fit the best loose parts into empty slots on your current ship spine. This is very useful to snap on the remaining parts once you have placed your key components. The auto fill algorithm tries its best by weighting 192 different construction variations and is usually able to find spots for all your parts, but not always. CLEAR TO SPINE: Pressing this button will remove all noses, wings, and engines as well as causing a cleanup area. This is useful for quickly adjusting spine shapes for your ship. CLEAR SHIP: Pressing this button removes all parts from your ship and causes a cleanup area. We hope you all enjoy this new update, and thanks very much for all the feedback! It has given us the clarity we needed on issues like the building system being too unwieldy as well as the need for the catalog. Please stick with us, we are committed to making SPAZ 2 better and better. Here's a list of what is next on the agenda: https://steamcommunity.com/app/252470/discussions/0/364042262889515926/

Hi All, We have just released our first big feature based on player feedback. As such we are incrementing the build number to 0.2.0 from 0.1.20. The catalog allows players to set a large set of search criteria to scour all the starbases in the galaxy for just the right part, or the closest facsimile that the current factions are able to produce. You have two options once you search the parts. #1: Set in a course to that starbase and hope the part is still there when you arrive. Store restocking as well as other captain's purchasing the part may mean the part will not be there when you arrive. #2 Hire a courier to send the part to your mothership. This guarantees you the part, but you have to pay a premium of +50% of the part's price for delivery. Since this update was all about shopping, we also added the ability to remotely view starbase inventories. So say you don't know exactly what you want, but you want to do some window shopping. Now you can click on any starbase and see what they currently have available to trade. We prioritized this feature due to player feedback wanting more control over how their build their mothership and the desire to get the parts they want. We think that the catalog is a great addition because it will really show players how the territory a faction controls will directly dictate what a faction can build. The catalog also empowers the player to much more readily find those juicy high tier parts. The Catalog button is the shopping cart on the starmap's lower hud. Now on to hotfixes. We have been quite busy since the last update and here is a list of all the tweaks and fixes. HOTFIXES: v 0.2.0 - Fixed demands coming from factions without provinces causing empty trade menu - Cap info page now shows perk levels properly for the infinite perks - AI no more bounties on members of your own faction , even if you hate em - Fix for skirmishes not transferring their owner when their owner is zombified - Raid reward callout on starmap - Bandit Hive reward callout on starmap - Fixed tractored parts hitting player ship sometimes breaking - Added a province under attack warning callout - Fixed damage sometimes piercing shields - Fixed spamming continue on death spawning multiple wreckage nodes. - Fixed Projectile Pool bug that has been hiding for 3 years. Fixes projectiles being reset mid flight. No more warping pulsars, - Pile of spelling fixes - Bandits won't interrupt a hive attack unless they can win - Can now quit the Arena while a ship is in the process of exploding. - Added tip to levelup and return later when player fails the Arena - Fix for when pay reparations the relations setting goes to 0 if already positive. - Standardized starbase threat levels for base expansions. - If part breaks off a ship, missile should de-lock that part and go after new current ship lock instead - Fix for odd “Is Helping you” case when AI is actually attacking you. - In campaign mode, Zombie faction respects the player faction's ability to get a start (3 provinces) Zombies get same benefit so it is fair. In sandbox, no story safety net. - Zombies will never cheat to win sim battles vs player faction when getting first few zombie converts. - No “chronological inevitability warnings,” when the zombies are turned off in sandbox - Bounties on bandit hives will now reward properly and clear. - Bandit hives take twice as long to regenerate themselves after destruction - Can sort and view captains by threat level in faction viewer menu - 3rd person and sniper camera invert option in Options/Gameplay - AI captains and zombies will not intercept wingman. It is annoying. Wingman is considered part of player fleet. - Friendly (Green) captains will not steal from friend's resource nodes or wrecks. - Bounties much more damaging to relations, especially on starbases - Bounties on allies extra extra bad. - Faction leader gets angry is any bounty is placed on any base in their faction. - Faction leader much less likely to take over the player base if they lose their capital and player is a member of their faction. - Added captain info button to the hud, players sometimes missed clicking on their own ship to get access to this menu. - Save/Load game menu now shows the date and time for the save games. So this was a big patch as you can all see, and we are rolling it out quickly so there maaaaay be issues with some of the fixes breaking thinks elsewhere. SPAZ 2 is a highly emergent game, so poking it in one place sometimes has weird results in other systems. There is a lot of butterfly effect potential in a game like this :). We will be monitoring the bug forum in case we inadvertently broke something somewhere else, and if we did, you can expect a counter hotfix to that to come quickly.

- Flying in reverse is back! Hold X to Stop, Release, and Hold X again to reverse - Added a non-throttle flight mode for ship relative controls (now default) can be changed in options/gameplay. So you have to hold W to move forward instead of just to throttle up. - EXPERIMENTAL: Double core mode added to Sandbox setup (requires a beast of a computer) - NOTE: Removed in v0.1.18 due to major tuning issues/causing invalid bugs. New solution in the works for a later date. - EXPERIMENTAL: Selecting starting level 0..20 for sandbox mode. - Current captain action is now visible on mouse over. In Transit, Fighting etc... - A live updating threat level is show if you mouse over mothership core in builder level - Fix for the threat level 1 bandit bug. - Raid and Bandit base now warn about being solo encounters - Remove all parts button is now scary yellow! - When a captain join's a new faction, their bounties on that faction's members are cleared - Clarity work on the build starbase menu - Follow renamed to Move To to help people identify that they are not in contact with a captain - In builder level, junk parts are shown as junk on the scan viewer