Release notes here.
This one has a lot of little UI improvements, many of which center around hotkeys.
- Some of the sidebar hotkeys are more natural now (F for fleets, etc).
- A number of the controls in the controls configuration menu have been recategorized or clarified.
- You can now hold the R key while looking at ship stats in order to see either the strengths or weaknesses of that ship type versus other ship types. This is a preliminary sort of thing, but it's something a lot of people have been wanting and getting started with it is good. Big thanks to Asteroid for that!
- The mercenaries have been renamed to Outguard instead, and coming up before too long we're going to be changing how they work. Basically to make them both more thematic (end of the world for humans we'd see more natural cooperation, seems like), and something that people use more frequently.
- Ships should hopefully no longer wiggle back and forth when they're doing slight kiting movements.
- You can now tell if an AI has a warp gate adjacent to a planet of yours based on the thickness of the line between your planet and theirs.
Overall this was a pretty small release, but it lays the groundwork for more stuff coming soon.
Repeat Notice: Tutorial and Scenario Designers Wanted!
We're going to be working on our own tutorials based on this system, but I'd definitely love to see a really robust number of scenarios from other folks, too.
Everybody has a different perspective, and maybe you want to teach some specific tactic or even set up kind of a small contained puzzle-like challenge cage-match with 5 planets against the dark spire and nanocaust with a quest you design with unusual victory conditions.
I think that sort of thing is just super fun, and it's a way to play the game in a more bite-sized fashion. Some of those sorts of things aren't even really tutorials, they're more advanced challenges or puzzles.
But anyway, the tutorials system is a pretty robust framework that allows for all sorts of different scenario designs that I'd love to see people really lean into. I've been explicitly trying to make this as easy as possible for non-coders to do -- all you need is a text editor -- and the idea of seeing what creative things people come up with to both teach and test players is exciting.
It's more or less the same idea behind modding, where people add various map types or ship types or whatever else, except this time it's custom scenarios for teaching or testing.
Other Fixes And Improvements
There are a number of bugfixes and balance tweaks that seemed to be the highest-priority items that people had brought to our attention. Thanks to Badger on the bulk of those. And the build menu now has icons thanks to Asteroid!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
Problem With The Latest Build?
If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.
The Usual Reminders
Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.
Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.
Enjoy!
Chris
