Hey everyone, it’s been far too long since our last post!
We’re adding asteroids and stations around the player’s base! These asteroids have all the resources, monsters, entities, and random events that previously spawned on the player’s base.
This is The Wilderness Update*
*This update is currently under development. As such, some things might change or be removed. We might release this update in small “chunks” or hold off and release it all at once, in a bigger update
(Also, please remember that Starmancer is developed by a 2-person development team and it’s currently in Early Access)
Bugs and QA
Before I get started with The Wilderness, I’d like to mention that we’ve dramatically improved our QA process. We now have a much better system in place for finding, curating, and tracking bugs. We also improved our internal testing systems so that we can catch bugs before they make it to players. User reports automatically include a save file now too.
We really really thank Chucklefish for this. We don’t often mention them, but they provide so much professional mentorship--they really helped us out here.
Victor and I are just 2 guys who always wanted to make video games, we don’t have any prior professional experience. We’re learning and getting better.
We’re much happier with the current state of Starmancer. There are far fewer bugs and we can finally start focusing on making new content again.
Okay, that’s out of the way.
Immersion
Games are immersive experiences. The degree of immersion correlates very strongly with a game’s enjoyability.
Someone trying a VR headset might exclaim, “Whoa, I can see and touch everything! It’s so immersive!”. VR certainly is immersive—it’s the closest to “first person” ever achieved.
But first person isn’t required for an immersive experience.
This feeling of real is what an immersive video game captures. Our screens become a looking glass to a real place.
Super Mario World is immersive in spite of the fact that it tells the tale of a demon plumber who collects coins, routinely morphs into a more violent and destructive form, and kills anything in his path. This isn’t even remotely realistic. And yet, Mario must defeat Bowser, and we’d be sad if he didn’t!
Super Mario World’s essential experience could be: “You are Mario. A plumber who will stop at nothing to rescue Princess Peach and defeat Bowser”
Starmancer’s essential experience could be: “You are a Starmancer. An AI doing it’s best to keep its station operational”
We abstracted that experience into 2 core gameplay loops:
1.) Acquire Resources (“Outside” gameplay)
2.) Do something with those resources (station gameplay)
We decided that “doing something with those resources” was more inline with the core experience. So that’s what we focused all development time on. But we’re finally happy with the station gameplay, and are moving on towards the “outside” gameplay.
On the Problems with Rabbit Holes
We stubbed resource acquisition with an offscreen, rabbit hole type mission system. Think jobs in The Sims, where your sims leave their lot and drive to work, but you never actually get to “see” your sim at work
This system can be totally fine, but it becomes very difficult to add “immersive” elements, such as:
Rare Rewards, like upgrade modules
Entities, like zombies and slimes
Pirates, and other “faction” type entities that can attack the player’s base
Hard to find resources, like Diamonds in Minecraft
Rare Objects, like a “Pirates Chem table”
Silly Things, like the Pizza Portal (turns nearby colonists into pizza). I also love oddly specific, quirky gameplay elements and I want a gameplay system that benefits from them
A huge problem with our old Starmap was that there was no good system in place for having infrequent, special resources—like upgrade modules.
If upgrade modules are rare, maybe we could spawn them at 1% of all planets. If the player wanted to acquire upgrade modules they would have to warp from system to system, and cross their fingers for good luck. Once they found an upgrade module, they would send a ship to it, and the module would be theirs nearly instantly.
This isn’t particularly fun, and the same loop was present for all resources. It’s also why there was an arbitrary cooldown of 24 hours between warps (removed now).
Additionally, mechanics like gear, armor, and weapons have much more value in a system where your colonists have to physically wipe out a zombie nest.
Asteroids
We prototyped several versions of “physical” terrain until we found something that played the best. Here it is!
The player’s base now has a limited sized (explained more later). Then, we pick a random number of asteroids to spawn, and we spawn them in a randomized “circle” around the player’s base. We try to get the asteroids as close as possible to the player’s border, so that colonists spend less time walking back and forth.
Every asteroid is a self-contained “island” which can spawn:
Resources (Ice, Ore, Goo)
Crystals (the new form of currency)
Monsters (zombies, slimes)
Random Events (alien probe, pizza portal)
Treasures (Upgrade Modules, Recipe Caches)
Item Caches (this replaces the Reclamation Probe, which is removed in The Wilderness Update)
Space Colonists (these are regular colonists that you can keep forever)
“Space” Objects (these are special variants of existing objects)
Internally, the asteroids are generated using Perlin Noise. It gives the asteroids a more “natural” shape.
Walkways
The player connects their base to the asteroids using “walkways”. These are basically the same thing as regular floors, but they’re cheaper to build and construction is faster, which is good, because you’ll have to build a lot of them.
Once your station is hooked up to an asteroid, your colonists disperse and do whatever it is you ordered them to do. Typically you’ll order them to mine crystal or ice, but you’ll also frequently find supply caches that contain even more resources.
There’s a nice “order and forget” flow with the asteroids. Where you just have to connect all the asteroids together, and then wait for your colonists to finish up.
Each asteroid has a slightly different feel to it, depending on the colonists, monsters, and loot that spawns. One of my asteroids had a highly skilled doctor trapped near a zombie spawner. I rushed to attach my walkways, but, alas, I wasn’t fast enough, and the doctor was eaten (later, I killed that zombie and retrieved the head—allowing me to regrow the doctor).
The asteroids fit right into the game as if they’ve always been there. It’s very exciting!
Space Colonists
Colonists now randomly spawn outside on Asteroids (don’t worry, they have helmets). This is one of the most exciting additions in The Wilderness.
Space Colonists are regular colonists, so you can adopt them and bring them on to your crew. It’s really fun, because you never know who you might find out in the wilderness. Sometimes you’ll find a maniac and other times you’ll find a highly skilled Engineer with good perks.
Space colonists spawn with all the same perks as regular colonists, and then a few more, such as: Space Madness, Cannibal, Maniac, Alcoholic, Space Rock User, and Spacephobia.
They also spawn with diseases, skills, and a randomized inventory.
Space Objects
The Wilderness update also brings several new “space” type objects. These objects spawn randomly in the wilderness, and you can move them to your base once you find them. You are unable to acquire these objects in any other way, so if they get destroyed you’ll have to find new ones.
Here are 2 examples:
Pirates Chem Table: Has all the recipes of a regular chem station, but with a few “banned” recipes: space rock, explosives, zombie syringe
Space Toilet: Regular toilet. Looks like an outhouse. One heck of a view
This is not a space object. This is the new, smaller refinery. There isn’t art for the new space objects, but this is still pretty cool, right?
Depending on implementation, we might slowly add additional space objects or we’ll batch them and release them all at the same time.
Money Troubles
The ability to indefinitely sell any item creates weird gameplay loops where the player hordes a massive amount of resources that they aren’t particularly interested in.
This leads to infrastructure issues on the player’s station, because they’re acquiring and processing more resources than their station can keep up with. It’s not even particularly difficult to accidentally overwhelm your colonists.
In the old system, resources were acquired automatically and effortlessly--the player always had more raw material to process. This immediately clogged up the supply chain at the lowest level. And because the player’s only interest in items was their monetary value, they would try to acquire more and more and more raw material (because more raw material is more money).
Another problem is that early-game players need a way to get enough money so that they can afford to play the rest of the game.
Crystals
To solve these problems, The Wilderness Update adds *crystals* as the new and only form of currency. Crystals are found on Asteroids.
This means you can no longer sit idly by on your station and slowly accrue money. You’ll have to go out and fight zombies for good crystal spots—at least early game.
Crystal patches are always nice to find because they’re free money.
You can still sell every item in the game (and you’re encouraged to do this as the main gameplay loop), but now you have to go outside and find the raw materials.
Base Limit
The player’s base now has a max size, indicated by the “extent flooring” placed in a square around the base—with your core right in the middle.
Anything outside of this limit is left behind when you warp to a new system—even colonists! This means you can still build as big as you want, but anything outside is lost when you warp.
Performance is also much better with a smaller station.
We’re making several objects smaller, so that your smaller station can be used more efficiently.
For asteroid spawning purposes it really helps us so that we can spawn asteroids that aren’t too close to the player’s base, but also not too far away. It also helps to prevent asteroids that spawn right in the middle of the player’s base (this could be implemented without static base size limits, but I’m not convinced that a constrained player base size is a bad thing).
Save Wipe Rip
This patch will come with a save wipe. The new gameplay is just too different. We’ve resized many objects, completely removed missions, and placed a very big limit on the player’s max base size.
My goal is to add a warning pop-up when you load an old save. Something like, “Warning. This save was created before The Wilderness Update. You can still play on it, but things might get…weird”.
But When, Though
The Wilderness is a core gameplay system. We’ll keep expanding on it even after the implementation is ”finished”. We might release it in small “chunks” of playable systems. Or we might wait until the entire thing is finished before releasing it.
We’re currently working on procedurally generated space stations that you can explore.
This was the very first station generated! The newest stations look a lot better, but this was the one that started it all!
We’d also love to add many more “biomes”, like Infested Ruins, Alien wreckage and an Anomalous zone.
Bye Bye
There’s so much to cover in this update. I went into a lot of detail but I still left out so much! Join the weekly development streams to see more!
You can directly influence The Wilderness development by joining our Stream every Friday at 11:00 eastern (GMT-5). This is the same time zone as New York City. We usually stream for a few hours, so you can hop in late and still join in!
Farewell!
We’re actively working on this update, so right now is the best time to get your wilderness ideas added to the game. Streams are also the best way to interact with us. Join and tell us your ideas. We try to be as transparent as possible.
Don’t forget to buy Starmancer on Steam! You can also play through PC Game Pass! If you want to wait to purchase, you can still wishlist! Wishlisting helps us gain exposure, and you’ll be notified of any sales.
Thanks!
- Tyler
