We’re not sure about Beta or Release timelines. Those decisions are made in collaboration and require proper timing and planning.
In the meantime, we’ve been keeping our heads down and putting as much effort into Starmancer as we can.
We took a lot of feedback from the Demo and added many many new mechanics.
The first half of this post covers most of the more basic changes. The bottom half covers the really big changes. I’ve left small things out, like being able to rename colonists, bug fixes, balance changes, etc.
Visual Access Positions
When placing objects, it wasn’t clear to players which direction they should face. In our minds, it was obvious, because we’ve spent months and years staring at these objects, and we had to manually place every “access position” on every object.
So we added a visual representation of access positions to all objects
These are automatically placed at runtime, using the real access position data. This means that changing the real access positions will automatically update the visual access position displayed to the user. This is a good thing—it saves time and ensures that what the user sees is accurate.
For specifics, every object has 4 sides. We place up to 1 visual access position on each side, and we set the width of that access position to the width of the object. This is a pretty good solution, but it’s misleading, because objects technically are only accessible from very specific locations.
Repositioning Objects
Maybe something like 80% of players we talked to wished that you could move an object after you placed it…so you can now.
This is harder than it looks.
First, you have to provide almost the exact same placement rules as when you first create an object, but a repositioned object can be placed on top of itself, and it doesn’t require any build cost.
Second, you have to inform colonists that the object was moved if they’re currently walking towards it. We’re informing the colonist in a lazy way. A colonist will attempt to walk to where an object used to be, if the object isn’t there, they generate a new route to the object.
Third, you have to inform all objects that rely on the position of the moved object that its position has changed. Access positions, for example, are placed as separate objects relative to the position of their parent.
Competency
Colonists will now work even when morale is low, but it affects their competency.
Competency is used to determine if a colonist successfully performed their job. It’s a little bit like rolling a die in a board-game. By default, competency is 100%. As morale becomes negative, competency gets low.
Each activity has a different competency failure outcome:
Moving Items: Colonists will move items to a random floor
Inspecting/Fixing Objects: Colonist will break objects
Planting Crops: Crops will die
Additionally, there’s a chance that a colonist won’t work at all if competency is low.
Competency is also affected by drugs and alcohol, so that a drunk colonist will carry boxes aimlessly around the station.
Day Off
To make it easier for the player, we added a “give vacation” button to colonists. Colonists on vacation won’t work. This is useful for colonists with low morale (and to stop a drunk engineer from breaking everything)
You can give a colonist as much time off as you want
Morale UI
We added a real UI to display colonist morale. It displays all recent morale modifiers.
You can mouse over each morale category to get an explanation about what they mean.
Each morale category contributes to one third of the overall morale score. The intent is that the player has to address issues in each category instead of focusing on only 1 category (and ignoring the other 2).
Options Menu
We added an options menu with all the standard options.
Enabling free camera rotation allows you to hold middle mouse and rotate the camera. If you keep this option off, you’re forced to 90 degree rotation increments.
We turn this off by default because the colonist sprites are positioned very deliberately when interacting with 3D objects (like when a colonist is sleeping on a bed). When you use free rotate, it looks really bad, but I’m always a fan of allowing players choice and consent in their experience.
Storage Bin
The storage bin stores exactly 1 type of item, but it requires power. Stored items are not sold.
This is very useful if you want to store a certain amount of items, and sell the rest.
The item sprite and amount are displayed on the bin. In this case, I was storing Ore.
Crop Seeds
Crops now require seeds. Seeds are found in space and with the Reclamation Probe (I talk about it below)
When a crop reaches maturity, it has a 100% chance of producing a seed. There’s a 10-20% chance that it produces an extra seed.
If a crop dies, you lose the seed.
When combined with the Storage Bin, you can save a minimum number of seeds, and sell the rest (they’re somewhat valuable).
Garden Cosmetics
We added some new grass and sand cosmetics.
The sprites are randomly selected and randomly flipped.
Grass objects can only be placed on grass floors. Sand objects can only be placed on sand floors
Upgrade Module
We added a new currency type, Upgrade Modules.
They’re randomly found in space and used to upgrade your objects. Every star system is guaranteed to have at least 1 Upgrade Module
Most objects require a unique condition before they can be upgraded, like, “Produce 10 Biomass in 24 hours”
Ship Upgrades
The ship can be upgraded now
Ship upgrades cost both Upgrade Modules and credits.
The current upgrades are:
Increased Cargo Capacity (come back with more stuff)
Board Module (no longer need an engineer to use infested station and increased success chance at infested stations)
Radiation Shielding (increased mission success chance at all locations)
Mining Drill (allows mining at planets)
Improved Thrusters (decreases mission duration and allows missions at Gas Giants)
Improved Sensors (significantly increases success chance at anomalies)
The ship is visually changed when you select upgrades.
Raw Matter
We added a third new currency, Raw Matter
Objects now cost both Credits and Raw Matter to be built.
Items are converted into each Raw Matter or Credits at the sell station. The player chooses. Items can never be converted into something worth more Raw Matter (Metal isn’t worth more Raw Matter than Ore, for example).
The intent is to give the player a place to dump all of their unwanted junk.
Cosmetics now cost Raw Matter, so if you want to decorate your station, you have to actually play a little bit (but the cost is so low, it’s basically free).
The overall hope is that Raw Matter encourages players to get out of their comfort zone and do things that they wouldn’t ordinarily do.
We also added a new item, Regolith, to asteroid and planet loot tables. It’s worth no credits but a lot of Raw Matter
(We’re also hiding items in the UI until they’ve been discovered)
Daily Stimulation
You can now stimulate your colonists once per day.
This game mechanic was introduced to solve one problem: “How can the player cure a colonist that has a madness without killing them?”
(By the way, we spend a lot of time trying to provide the players with non-murder solutions to their problems)
There’s no good reason to reprimand your colonist, but possibly it’s cathartic? (it’s mostly just there for the memes)
Hide Notifications
You can hide notifications now. This is nice if you don’t care about a room being cold or that an object doesn’t have power.
This is partly quality of life and partly necessary with the new room system (talked about below). It’s also good if you want to place an object for cosmetic purposes, and don’t want to see the ugly notifications.
K.A.T. Help
There’s a lot going on in the game, so we added a help pop-up to object windows.
The help pop-up is nice, because it allows us to add extra explanation for various game mechanics, without cluttering up the UI
Big Changes
We added a lot of new things to the game that fundamentally alter how it’s played (in a good way). We took the things that didn’t work, and made them better.
Missions and Star Systems
We’ve always struggled with the mission system.
The basic summary is:
Player is in a random Star System
Space objects, like asteroids, planets, ships, stations, and anomalies randomly spawn periodically.
Repeat forever
This system didn’t work well for things like quests or rare item spawns and it didn’t provide any sense of discovery.
If you needed a crop seed, for example, you would have to pray to the RNG gods. I don’t even know how a quest system would work.
How do planets fit into the system? Are they randomly generated each day? What does it even mean for a planet to appear randomly? What items does a planet have and how is it separate from an Asteroid?
Additionally, you don’t want a new player to be overwhelmed by placing too much stuff in the system.
Galaxy Map
To solve most of these problems, we added a Galaxy Map. The player can now travel between Star Systems, using Star Fuel. Each Star System is randomly generated, but it permanently has whatever it has. Some systems are better than others. If you’re looking for seeds, just travel around until you find one.
We also added a pop-up window for traveling to stars and visiting objects for missions
There are a few types of star systems, each with a unique spawn pool. Infested Star Systems have a way higher count of Infested Stations, for example.
The background color in both the Starmap and the skybox is based on the star’s color.
Both the star and the background are blue
Starfuel
To travel between Stars, you need Starfuel. Starfuel is extracted at any Star, by constructing a Starfuel Station. It requires a level 5 Engineer.
The Starfuel is deposited at your Warp Drive (located at your Core). The intent is to gate new players for a little bit, but not to inhibit experienced players.
Rare Items
The galaxy system makes it much easier to have unique item requirements, like seeds, upgrade modules, diamond-type resources, whatever.
Quests (not yet implemented) are much more manageable with this system too.
Ego
Morale penalties and boosts are very hard to balance. It’s not fun when you’re a new player, with no idea what you’re doing, and your station descends into chaos.
On the other hand, it is fun when you’re an experienced player and everything starts to snowball out of control.
The difficulty came in trying to create a system where new players could ease into the game, but experienced players were still challenged.
Ego Level
So we added Ego Level. Every colonist starts a level 1—drone. A drone doesn’t care about anything. You could feed it Biowaste and make it sleep on the floor forever—it doesn’t care.
As you level up your colonist, they desire increasingly better station conditions. If a high tier colonist sees a dead body, they’ll have a much more severe reaction than a low level colonists.
Each level has a unique requirement, like “Sleep in a bed”. The intent is to force the player to become familiar with a game mechanic before throwing everything at them. Establish that you can place a bed, and then you can start to worry about growing crops. (You can still grow crops before placing a bed, but you won’t be morale penalized for it).
Upgrades
At every level, you can choose 1 permanent upgrade for your colonists, like: reduced hunger, increased sell prices, and decreased fight chance.
Skills
When they die, colonists lose all skills that exceed their ego level. So if their ego level is 4 and their mining skill is 6, they will revert to a mining level of 4 upon death.
Skill levels that exceed ego level have reduced experience gain, but skill levels lower than ego have increased experience gain.
The overall intent is to encourage the player to level up their colonists.
Room System
We didn’t like that every player’s station basically felt the exact same. So we added a room system where objects must be placed in specific rooms.
So toilets must be placed in a bathroom (although you can still place a toilet in a bedroom, if you want a private toilet).
Room Types
Room types are automatically determined based on the objects that are in the room.
The current room types are:
Industrial Room
Bay (bedroom for multiple colonists)
Bedroom
Bathroom
Workshop (where crafting stations go)
Mess Hall (where colonists eat)
Rec Room (colonists go here in free time)
Room Ownership
Rooms can be assigned owners. Only an owner can use the room. A room can have multiple owners.
If you wanted to keep a mean colonist away from everyone, you could build a rec room and assign ownership to only the nice colonists. This would keep the mean colonist away from the nice colonists (at least during free-time)
Atmosphere UI
The room window displays atmosphere data that was previously hidden
We also added “suggestions” to room warnings, to teach players how to solve the specific problem
Gameplay Change
The room system fundamentally changes how the game is played (for the better). It encourages the player to have a completely unique station.
You can’t place an Ore Refinery in a bedroom, which is limiting, but you could build a tiny bedroom next to the Ore Refinery, and achieve almost the same result.
You could do this, for example
There are some cons, but overall it’s a better system.
Reclamation Probe
Your core now has a “Reclamation Probe”. Once per day, it returns with 1 of 3 items. It can return with just about anything: seeds, upgrade modules, new colonists, recipe caches, money, etc.
Mechanically, this provides a very good system for adding new content to the game, like animals, without figuring out where in the galaxy they would spawn.
Ignore the biomass
Research Tree
We converted the research window into a tree, because trees are more fun.
A tree gives us more more room to grow as we add new objects. This was a fair amount of work, because we had to figure out where to place everything, and then actually provide the raw data internally.
A tree provides a much better understanding of requirements object purpose. A Fungus Collector leads to a Waste Recycler, so intuitively you’ll understand that the Fungus Collector is creating something that the Waste Recycler wants to use.
Colonist Schedule
The player can now assign schedules to each colonist. This is useful if you want to ensure that someone is always working. Or if you want to prevent 2 colonists from interacting with each other.
You could make your Chef start working a few hours early so that breakfast is ready for everyone when they wake up.
New Objects
We added some new objects so that the player can have better control over previously automated or hidden systems:
Battery (stores power)
Treadmill (creates power)
CO2 Scrubber (creates oxygen passively, requires no power)
Thermo Exchanger (exchanges heat between rooms)
Fungus Collector (passively collects edible Space Fungus)
Ice Rod (passively collects Ice)
Waste Recycler (converts items into Biomass)
Thermo Emitter (converts electricity into heat)
Cryptominer (converts electricity into money)
The overall intent is to provide the player with better control of their station. If you need more Ice, place more Ice Rods. The Oxygen Recycler machine is now unlocked much later.
Germs and Food Decay
We added a germ system, where Biowaste creates germs. Germs are spread in a radius around Biowaste. Colonists store germs and spread them to any area of the station that they go to.
As germ count increases, colonists have a chance to get sick. The current diseases are:
Fever (colonist gets hot, and must be placed in a cold room)
The Chills (colonist gets cold, and must be placed in a hot room)
The Runs (colonist has severely increased urinate need)
Food Decay
Ice decays into Water, and cools off rooms. Ice does not decay in cold rooms.
Food decays in non-cold rooms. The decay is faster in the presence of germs. So storing your food in the bathroom is a bad idea.
Colonists receive a big dose of germs if they eat rotten food (and the “I ate something nasty” memory).
All germs are killed if you increase a room’s temperature sufficiently high.
Current Work
We’re currently working on a better job system. Right now we’re looking at a task based system, where colonists are assigned and prioritized tasks, instead of jobs. This would allow the player to create a dedicated “Dead Body Remover” (a level 1 drone would be a good choice).
We might add a new object, Sterilizer, that sterilizes all floors in a radius. It requires bleach, crafted at the Chemistry Station with Ammonia (found in space).
We might refine the Doctor so that it has more purpose too.
That’s It
We cannot make any commitments about dates, but we’re making the best of it and putting as much effort into Starmancer as we can. The project certainly hasn’t been abandoned.
Thanks for staying with us.
