Hello managers!

After months of hard work we put into our upcoming 0.9 update, we finally have a decent amount of stuff to show you in this dev diary. We hope you like them.

General Info

The 0.9 update is the last major update before the full release so it is extremely important to us. We want to give you the smoothest and most complete Space Station Tycoon experience we can, and just focus on refinements and content for the 1.0 release update. The 0.9 update will focus on the strategic depth of the game and will make more use of the galaxy map. It will also have a lot of QoL changes, graphical improvements, and new content. Now let's take a look at some of the main changes coming with this huge update.

The game will now support building more than one station on the galaxy map. You will be able to build smaller and so-called "Substations" across the galaxy to aid you with certain needs. Each one of these outpost stations function basically nearly the same as your main station with some restrictions such as a smaller maximum corridor size.
With this new update, we will also be introducing fuel management. All those various docking bays you can build will now require you to have fuel in order to refuel customer ships. If you don't have enough fuel you'll still get the minimum landing fee. To get the fuel you either need to set up a monthly purchase order or start producing your own.
We think that the electricity system in its current form is way too basic and simple. So we decided to rework the entire system to make it more strategic and engaging. Now when you build an energy source you'll need to connect it to the desired buildings manually. You can also build energy distributors and batteries for even more strategic opportunities. For example, you can now choose to safeguard the exact power sources or batteries that power up your most important buildings. And thanks to the addition of batteries, their connected buildings will still keep having power for a while even after the power sources are destroyed or disabled.
The amount of micro-management in Space Station Tycoon was always slightly (or more than slightly) too much for the majority of the players. We took big and important steps to remove the most tedious parts of the game and replace them with more fun mechanics. With this update, you'll see the removal of the inventory and upgrading systems. Instead of an inventory, you will now have a set of resources you need to keep track of, like the fuel resource we mentioned previously. And instead of upgrading each individual building, you now have to build a more overall attractive station so that you can charge more for your services.
We are working on many different systems to make the galaxy map more engaging and useful. One of those systems we can talk about in this dev diary is the location perks. Now every single location/hex on the galaxy map has various perks which can be negative or positive, depending on where that hex is. For example, hexes that are adjacent to a star will now receive a solar power generation bonus. Another huge change is the fully simulated visitors. The way your station receives visitors has always been a little mysterious but with the 0.9 update, the visitors will be fully simulated. Meaning they will leave their home, use the jump gates, and go to your station in a fully visible and trackable manner. These visitors will be represented with a beam of light on the map so you can see exactly where the visitors come from and which routes they take.
And lastly, we would like to thank everyone who supported us by providing feedback and constructive criticism. Every single improvement we do is mostly thanks to you. This upcoming update will be the last major content update before the 1.0 full launch update. After the full launch, we will keep doing some small and big content updates but probably at a slower pace. We hope you love this update as much as we do when it releases sometime next month. Until next time.

[ 2022-11-06 16:05:17 CET ] [ Original post ]