A famous musician once said; "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans". We've all experienced a setback or two this year in our own ways, and Starcross Arena's production has unfortunately suffered a bit for it. The project, though a bit dormant, is most certainly not dead. We are continuing production of Starcross Arena, as well as other titles we've elected not to put out as Early Access for reasons that must seem all too obvious. We don't have many customers, but as long as we even have 1, and we do, we're going to deliver them a finished product. Because our customers rock. So, while we do hate to ask for further patience from our existing customers, there it is. Now then, to the future! If you haven't seen the tech demo for Unreal Engine 5, I highly suggest you check it out. Exciting things that are directly applicable to a project such as Starcross Arena are coming, and we're looking at ways to achieve the maximum benefit of Ray Tracing techniques, and some planetary volumetrics added in recent UE4 iterations are very exciting, if a bit tricky to implement in their youth. Through some code-level adaptations we've gotten a reasonable flight pathfinding AI prototype working, that we're weighing against spline-based navigation for AI ships in the "overworld" portion of the game (gotta have a life outside the arena, right?). So, there are plans, they are in motion, they're just crawling in regard to results we can publish and expect our customers to be able to enjoy. Crawling is not stopping though.

One year ago we released Alpha 0.1 of Starcross Arena. Since then we've rebuilt the core mechanics of the game, resulting in a base we can expand upon with greater confidence, and exhibiting far superior performance. Now we get to do the fun stuff. There's a lot of fun stuff planned, and we'll be rolling into the next year bringing you more frequent updates.

Strap yourself in and prepare for standard rhetoric that'll blow your mind! We're bringing you action that rivals watching curling linoleum on a humid day. Feel the total lack of g-force pressing you into your seat* because it's a computer game and you're not really in the ship. Master controls laid out for either keyboard/mouse play or 360 compatible gamepad play in solo play or splitscreen for 4 players (gamepads required for splitscreen). Connect to personalized dedicated servers and join friends around the world to share the epic whelming. Curse the bugs and imperfections as you turn and burn your way to glory. I used the word glory. This rhetoric has to be doing it for you in a big way by now. Before you get too excited by all the standard claims, there's more. Support for DXR/RTX has been added as a secondary launch option. The movement of ships is now based solely on physics for a much smoother control experience, as well as far more accurate collision. The trail that ships emit is now continuous and performs far better than the trail mechanic of 0.1. We're in the process of cleaning up assets that won't yet be released and ensuring stability in preparation for the 0.2 release on Saturday, November 23rd. Following the release of Alpha 0.2 we plan to implement a more frequent update plan, so stay tuned for more information on that as well. With great thanks to the fan, The Starcross Arena Team *Your local gravity may override the lack of g-force.

One year ago today we hatched our brain-child; Starcross Arena. Since then we have learned much about what it means to be game developers. One of those things we had to learn a bit suddenly, but it's all valuable experience. The most important thing we learned is that there is indeed some interest in our game. That's a good thing to learn. The initial hit of having our game turned out by the pirate scene before it could even earn enough to pay for a loaf of bread was jarring. We got over it. We're glad there's interest. It's important to us. So, now what? Now we forgive this. It's that simple. Nobody got hurt, and we got some free unexpected advertising. Certain large companies might call it a "surprise discount". Yeah. Sure. Let's go with that. So, moving forward, we're recommitting to the cause of making our game so good you'll want to buy it just to keep us making games. Pirate copies. Not exactly cool that it happened with the very first copy, but we can understand. We're not swimming in money like a certain cartoon duck either. We won't try to prevent it. We won't go out of our way to add DRM. We won't over-complicate it with some sort of authentication system. We ask that if you do play our game, from whatever source you acquired it, please do buy it if you really enjoy it. If we sell enough copies to at least cover better development equipment, we will look at putting up a torrent to keep players that cannot afford the game a bit more safe. On the subject of buying it vs torrenting: Please don't use key reseller sites. You can purchase the game legitimately here or on our website. If you can't afford it or don't think the game is worth the listed price but still feel you must play, please be safe about it. Now then. On to the future! We have much in store for Alpha 0.2. During our discussion about our project we've decided to push Alpha 0.2 sooner. This will mean that some features we're a bit proud of will not make it into the next update, but what is going to make it into the next update is a significant improvement. Alpha 0.1k Was a proof of concept. We've taken that concept and refined the functionality. Alpha 0.2 will provide a far superior visual and competitive experience to Alpha 0.1k, while maintaining similar flow and gameplay. Major changes are being implemented:

• Continuous trails rather than blocks.
• Physics based movement and handling.
• Total UI overhaul.
• Accurate collision.
• More usable pop-up items.
• Cool things that would only sound like technical mumbo-jumbo unless you were a programmer.
• More. We're not tellin' everything yet.

• The beginnings of the single player story.
• Large space stations / Arena locations for both multiplayer and single player purposes.
• Multiplayer ships (these totally work already, but we have to create somewhere to go with them).

Starcross Arena Alpha 01.k

Starcross Arena has been updated to Alpha 0.1k