After a long time, I'm thrilled to announce a new patch! I've incorporated all the valuable feedback you've provided. The camera behavior has been improved to feel more dynamic and engaging. The early stages of the game have been adjusted to offer a gentler learning experience for new players. The in-game text has been carefully reviewed and refined for better clarity and flow. As always, your feedback and bug reports are highly appreciated! Feel free to share them on the forums.

Version 1.7

• Updated unity to fix scrolling issues for linux version.
• Improved camera for singleplayer. In settings you can now set camera rotation, camera zoom and move depending on ship speed.
• Polished most of the texts for missions and tutorial.
• Correction module is now build into the ship.
• Decreased price of the correction module.
• Medium and hard difficulty now have FTL failure event at the end of the first level.
• Fixed blurry text in multiplayer lobby.
• Adjusted camera zoom for multiplayer modes.

[ 2024-04-29 10:32:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Version 1.6 - Fixed camera shuttering for multiplayer games.

[ 2021-08-05 06:54:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

Version 1.5 - Crew members with immortality special upgrade can now have children at any age (as if they were 20 years old)

[ 2021-03-16 16:55:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

Version 1.4 - Fixed dying from old age with immortality special upgrade

[ 2021-03-13 08:30:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello guys. Because of your useful feedback, I am happy to announce newest patch with many changes to make your adventure trough the space more enjoyable. Thanks for everyone's feedback and feel free to write to the forums anytime you encounter an issue or bug. It really helps to improve the game. Version 1.3

• Added manual landing gear options to bridge module, default hotkey set to E.
• Lowered jets power down to 1 while the landing gear is opened to discourage flying with opened landing gear all the time, this change will also help more precise ship rotation correction while landing.
• Lowered mass of the massive asteroid mission from 100 to 90 to help taking off with non-upgraded engines.
• Fixed ships lift off bug where the ship would lost its connection during mission resource collection.
• Mass of the black hole lowered from 5000 to 3000 to decrease difficulty of landing on the base asteroid.
• Solar flare mission moved to tier 2 missions (later in the game) because of its higher difficulty.
• Added navigation hotkey (default Q) to show ship movement when Navigation module is installed.
• Lowered corrections price for easy difficulty from (170, 160, 1, 1) to (60, 50) to allow new players get to the corrections sooner to help with landing.
• Work speed of a crew members is now improved depending on amount of time worked after each successful work.
• After 5 minutes of game play, warning about game progress loss to the last FTL jump is shown on exiting or quitting the game.
• You can now FTL jump without mission stories and technologies with warning given. Lost technologies will have a chance to appear after specimen research.

[ 2021-03-10 14:58:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Controls screen in settings is now recreated to allow players configure their controls for singleplayer mouse and keyboard. PS: Except mouse wheel for trigger switch. Mouse wheel does not want to listen. I tried to talk to him. I really did.

[ 2021-03-07 16:53:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

Version 1.1 - Added possibility to switch off camera rotation for singleplayer in settings. - Fixed bug where you could found story that couldn't be taken.

[ 2021-03-06 08:57:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

I am happy to announce, that after two ears of development, I am finally ready to launch my first game. Towards The Stars is coming out on March 4th. I would like to thanks everybody who helped with the game development. You are remembered in the credits of the game.

[ 2021-02-19 09:07:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

You already now about ship modules and crew management. Today I'd like to show you how to upgrade them. Only way to get upgrades for your ship is to research specimens you'll find during mining or as a reward for finishing the quests. So how do you upgrade your ship?
First you have to find a specimen. Mining it will create a new research possibility in your science section. Depending on amount of time to complete the research and work speed of a assigned scientist, the research will take some time to finish. Working crew members consumes double the life support so I would recommend to always assign fastest one. After the research is finished, a new upgrade possibility for your ship modules or your crew members will appear in your engineering section. From there, to build the upgrade, you need to mine the resources, assign engineer or medic for a job (depending on type of an upgrade) and wait. After the work is done, your module or crew member is now upgraded.
Most of the upgrades will improve system or resource consumption. Some of them will improve module main operations like engine speed or telescope range, and there are few special upgrades that can even add a new functionality to the modules. Researching unknown extraterrestrial specimens is dangerous and in some cases you will end up with damaged modules or injured crew. So be careful, if you are not prepared, sudden accident like this may spiral into unrecoverable system depletion and dead of your crew.

[ 2021-02-12 10:00:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

Last time for singleplayer I was writing about your crew management. Today I would like to write something about managing your ship systems. There are three main ship systems. Fuel, energy and life support.
Most of the fuel is used on engines and jets, but some of the fuel is also necessary for secondary modules to work. Main producer of fuel is the refinery. This module is responsible for producing fuel from oil resourcethat you can gather mining asteroids. If you run out of fuel your engines and jets stop working and you may find yourself stranded in space waiting to run out of resources. The next main system is energy. Most of the modules are using energy either continually or on trigger. If the energy levels are depleted, modules dependent on energy will stop working. Some of the modules that use energy continually are responsible to keep your life support levels up so make sure your reactor has always enough uranium. Third one is a life support. If this one goes down, your crew will start dying. Make sure to always keep your life support levels as high as possible. As you could figure crew members are depleting your life support. The less crew members you have awake, less life support you consume, but also your crew will age without any offspring. You need to find balance. To keep your life support system up, there are two modules. Botanics that use carbon resources and filtration that use fuel system. Both of these modules are also dependent on energy system.
There is a safe guard for every system. It is called system transfer. In three main modules responsible for your systems, you may activate system transfer. It will consume three times more of another system to help stabilize system you are losing. In a refinery you can transfer three units of life support to produce one unit of fuel. In a reactor you may produce energy from fuel and in botanics you may produce life support from energy. As you can see it is quite a wasteful way to preserve your systems, but in an emergency situation it may buy you some time and save your crew.

[ 2021-02-05 15:06:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

"Free for all" and "Deathmatch" multiplayer modes are full of action, and for that you will need weapons and defense systems. Let's learn about them in this article. Difference between these two modes is that in FFA you may respawn right after your death where in deathmatch or team deathmatch it is last ship/team standing.

Minigun

Good old minigun should not miss in on any battle ship and it doesn't change in space either. It is very versatile gun. It has medium projectile speed and medium damage with high cadency. This weapon can be fired just by holding it, but it will overheat very quickly so be careful or you'll have to wait for the weapon to cool down.

Laser

Laser is similar to the minigun, but it will hit instantly. Its damage is a bit lower, but it will take to overheat a bit longer. It is a best weapon for shutting down projectile weapons like missiles and canon shells. Because of its accuracy it is also very good for finishing ships with low health.

Missile

Missiles are very easy to use and will follow the target until they are destroyed. Because of their potency, this weapon has longest time to reload. It is the only weapon you don't have to aim with, but be careful to not hit an asteroid before it is activated.

Canon

Canon is second projectile weapon similar to missiles that can be shot down. Difference is that its reload time is much faster but it will not follow the target. Even thought projectile speed is slower their explosions can throw enemy ships into the asteroids. You can even use the explosions to slow yourself down and prevent collision with asteroids.

Plasmagun

Plasmagun is something between canon and minigun. It has higher damage then minigun, but lower cadency. It will never overheat, but you have to manually fire every shot similar to canon. Projectile speed is also lower but it cannot be shot down.

Railgun

Railgun has highest damage from every weapon, but it is hardest to use. The bullet speed is instant similar to laser, but it will hit only once so you have to be very accurate. In addition it will destroy any ship in its path until it hits asteroid or ship's shield defense system. Reload time is one of the slower ones. In skilled hands this is probably the most deadly weapon.

Shield

Shield is one of the two ships defense systems. While active it will stop any weapon or even asteroid collision from damaging your ship, but it only lasts very short time so you have to time it just before the impact.

Fade

Fade defense system will shift your ship to another dimension. You cannot be hit by projectiles and you can pass thought other ships and asteroids unharmed. It will stay active a little bit longer than shield, but if you materialize inside another ship or asteroid, you will die instantly.

[ 2021-01-29 15:48:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Even thought singleplayer campaign is main part of the game and I spent majority of time developing it, you may have noticed that there is also the local multiplayer part. That means that you can play it with your friends only locally on one computer. If the multiplayer part will be popular enough, it may get an online patch in future. If you are locked down alone in your house, there is also multiplayer mode that you can practice by yourself. Race mode. Every good race game should have a ghost mode. That means that you can race against your own best time. This way practice by your own is much more fun and it will help you to beat your friends next time you meet. And last but not least, the replay feature shouldn't be missing as well. Here is the gameplay video featuring me racing against my ghost from a months ago. It took me some time to beat it. [previewyoutube=XUd4T26-cKA;leftthumb][/previewyoutube]

[ 2021-01-22 11:14:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

One of the problems you encounter on your journey trough space is that your crew is getting older every interstellar jump. Even thought you are flying much faster then light, every 1000 light years will take your engine to make in one year. You can notice that your crew has tree parameters. One of them is age. Every time you come out of the ftl your crew gets older. So how to prevent your crew to die out before you find your new home?
In your first level you will find the cryogenics module. Using it, you can put your crew members to sleep. Sleeping crew members will not age during travel and they do not consume any life support. But someone will always needs to stay awake to manage the ship. There is a second option. In a bridge you can allow your crew to make children while traveling.
How many children will be born depends on the number of awake crew members, their age, gender balance, time that passed from last ftl jump and also chance. If you put too many crew members to sleep, no children will be born, but if you let your crew awake, they will get older and consume more life support. You need to find balance.

[ 2021-01-15 10:33:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

In many games, you probably encountered steam achievements to be something like finish the first level or complete the main story quest. Achievements that you will receive just by playing a game. So when steam recommended to me that I should have achievements in my game, I didn't want to have these kind of achievements. I made a decision to made them a little bit more fun. There is one achievement for every level. They are more of a playful challenges. For example, in one of the levels you jump out of the hyperdrive right next to an unstable star that is producing solar flares. The first one hits you very soon, so you have to run. After the flare is over, you should return to nearby base and recover the necessary technology. You may try to land on the base and discover the technology before the first flare hits you. In this case, most probably you will not have enough time to get out and you'll get incinerated, but the achievement will be yours.

[ 2021-01-08 09:23:11 CET ] [ Original post ]