Tyler (the programmer) had to move last weekend (on the 7th), so he didn't have internet for a few days. He also doesn't have a smart phone.
Anyway, that's why he was a bit quiet this past week.
Surveys
We sent out the BackerKit surveys. Starmancer won't be coming out until 2019, so there isn't much of a deadline for the surveys. Just don't procrastinate it too much.
We're completely new to BackerKit, so bear with us if there's any issues. Please contact us if you have any questions or issues.
If you still haven't received your survey, you can go here and request one:
https://starmancer.backerkit.com/
DRM-Free
We received many, many questions about all things DRM-Free related. We don't plan on having any DRM in Starmancer, but it's possible that we can't control some of Steam's DRM.
Our goal is to allow you to play Starmancer without Steam installed or any internet connection. We've never released a game on Steam, so we don't know all of the specifics, and we won't prematurely promise anything.
If you buy Starmancer you should be able to play it however you want. We won't make you pay extra just to get a DRM-Free copy.
If we can't have a completely DRM-Free version through Steam, we'll release on GOG (in addition to Steam).
If we have to, we'll just email everyone an exe (or equivalent). BackerKit actually makes it extremely simple to distribute digital content to all of you.
The point is, don't worry about getting a DRM-Free copy.
Everyone gets a Steam key, by the way, regardless of how you feel about DRM. If we have to give you both a Steam key and a GOG key, that's fine by us. Do whatever you want with the extra key: give it to an orphan, write it on a bathroom wall, sell it.
Roadmap
We spent (arguably) too much time this past week creating the roadmap. Victor did a very nice job with the images. Evan implemented the meats of "clicking on things".
This is just a tentative roadmap. It will probably change over time. Our goal was to give you people a better understanding of what we'll be working on, and how far away release is.
You can view it here:
https://www.playstarmancer.com/roadmap
It's not very mobile friendly at the moment. We'll look into fixing it for mobile.
Discord
If you're not in the Discord yet, here's a link:
We can't promise that we'll always be active in it. We could easily spend our entire day talking to people. Please be nice to each other.
Music
We spent more time talking to various composers and figuring out exactly what we want. If you emailed us about music, don't worry, we haven't forgotten you. We just have a lot of composers to get through. We don't care too much about how "prestigious" you are or anything like that. We're just very busy.
Evan
Evan finally did some big-boy programming this week. Tyler had to spend some time getting him acquainted with how things work and that sort of thing.
Basically, Tyler couldn't get too much done while Evan was learning. Ideally, by this time next week we'll have at least 1.5 programming power available (but we'll see). It takes a little bit to became productive in an entirely new project.
Modding Overhaul
Internally, Evan and Tyler are cooking up some crazy things to try and integrate modding as easily as possible. We can't tell you too much about it, because we're still trying it out.
It might amount to nothing, or it might be awesome.
We'll see.
In any case, this is eating up some development time.
Bye Bye
That's about all of the exciting things.
If you have any questions or constructive compliments, you can email us or contact us on Discord.
Thanks everyone
