Game Updates, Creator Tool, Player Survey & Future Plans

First, as previously mentioned, the game is now officially Steam Deck Verified! Through the help of players, I've been gradually improving controller and Deck support since 1.0 launch. The last mile from "Deck Playable" to "Deck Verified" took some time, mostly because the game has a number of screens with a fair amount of text. The Deck has a resolution of 1280 x 800 and Steam has a minimum font size requirement. Getting all text instances to always display at a minimum size involved going through many UIs and manually tweaking some values and positions.

Starcom Creator

Also, I've made the Creator Tool publicly available. This is an experimental version of the tool that I used to author the game's anomalies, missions, stories, etc. My hope is that some interested players will create content using it. It does not require any programming background, but having some technical background helps. It's also a bit rougher around the edges than the actual game.

You can read more about the tool here as well as how to install it.

Steam post image Example of editing a conversation in the tool

Survey & Future Plans

I (and I think most players) have been very happy with how Starcom: Unknown Space has turned out. Almost of the changes from Starcom: Nexus are clear improvements. But that's not to say that there's no room for improvement. If I do end up making another game in the series, I have some ideas on ways that things could be made even better. I'd also like to hear from you, the player, on what you'd like to see in another Starcom game. Toward that, I hope you'll fill out this player survey:

Player Survey (Google Forms)

Some of the questions relate to my thoughts below.

Note the following is kind of a mini-postmortem on some of the game systems in Starcom: Unknown Space and may contain some spoilers! These represent ideas and possible improvements to a (potential) future Starcom game. I want to stress that they may not actually be implemented.

Mission Guidance / Hints

One of the biggest changes from Starcom: Nexus is that the missions became a much larger part of the game structure both in amount of content and complexity. More of the story progressed as a direct result of player actions. But sometimes due to the open-world nature of the game, players would find themselves at a lost of what to do to move forward.

Keeping players from getting stuck and providing just the right amount of guidance has been one of the hardest challenges of Starcom: Unknown Space. As a game of exploration and discovery, it's important for players to have an opportunity to find stuff on their own rather than just visit a continuous series of map markers. At the same time, it's not good if a player's experience grinds to halt because they've missed one thing.

The issues that have blocked players largely haven't been the result of the mission system's technical design (which I've talked at length about before), but rather my failure to envision and/or test all the paths a player might progress through the game.

To give a concrete example from the game, there is a Polyhedral artifact a few sectors away from Celaeno. The player can find it on their own, but most players discover it as a result of a mission to search for the Aletheia. Once they pass within a certain large radius of the artifact, one of their officers notices a strange gravitational disturbance. The player can investigate this on their own initiative, but if not, eventually a crew member will put a pin on it.

A small percentage of players had gone out and explored in a way that they discovered a gateway on the other side of the artifact. So when they were given the Aletheia mission, the path they took to it did not pass close enough to the Polyhedra to trigger the notification. I think this happened to maybe 1% of players, but players can't report not finding something they don't know about, they just find themselves stuck. And not every player will report getting stuck. So it took several hundred players before I was aware of this issue.

Once I learned about it, I added some additional story elements to ensure the player came within range. But the underlying issue is a combination of "how to minimize the chance of these sorts of mission guidance issues happening in the first place" and "how to identify them more quickly".

Possible solutions:

• AdjustedDesign ExperienceAs the game's creator, it's hard to know what will be obvious to all players and what won't be. But as I've developed the game and seen where players got stuck, my instincts on where I need to put "fail-safes" has improved. Still not perfect, but better.
• AdjustedMission Goals as "first class" objectsThis is an area where the technical design could have been improved, if mission goals were full game objects with their own data structure. This would have made it easier for me to tie other logic like hints to whether and how long a player had a goal open.

• Mission Goal analytics: Relatedly, the game's anonymous analytics have helped enormously in fixing bugs, getting feedback, etc., but an obvious omission is that they don't automatically track mission goal progress.

• Improved hint timings: Currently, most of the time the crew waits for a fairly long timer to elapse before chiming in with a hint, but if the player has few "actionable" mission items, this timer gets sped up. I think this a decent system, but could benefit from some refinement.

Crew Skill System

In Starcom: Nexus you had a first officer who could give in-game notifications, as well as a "crew" that helped with repairs and allowed you to conduct surveys. They were nameless, faceless, and interchangeable. Essentially the equivalent to a resource.

In Unknown Space, based on player demand, I added a command crew. The initial purpose was to provide more narrative depth and an opportunity for a more RPG-like skill/progression system. To give their progression an in-game impact, I added a skill check system to anomalies.

I came up with what I thought was clever skill check system with two novel features: One, the player always had a chance of any outcome, but the higher their skill rating, the more likely they were to get better outcomes. And two, skill checks could have more than two outcomes, allowing not only for "pass/fail" but "critical success/success/mediocre/fail/critical failure" or any other permutation.

This all worked well from a math/balance standpoint: I got good distributions of results and skill advancement gave real advantages without ever becoming unbalanced.

But overall players hated the system. They wanted to see numbers presented in a recognizable convention like dice rolls and probabilities so they could see how their skills interacted with difficulty and luck to cause them to succeed or fail. The pseudo-sigmoid function behind the "always a chance" results couldn't easily be communicated to players the same way that "Skill - Difficulty + Dice = Result" could.

Steam post image The original skill check interface had a slider that converged on the eventual result, but the formula was non-linear and hard to depict. It was eventually abandoned for the current version.

So I reluctantly scrapped the sigmoid function and moved to a more traditional linear solution where I could show the values. I kept the multiple-outcomes, which still causes some confusion, particularly in cases with repeat anomalies where outcomes that the player has seen before can be removed.

Another issue with the skill system is that every crew member has all six stats. This was baked in from an early design decision where I envisioned more crew customization, but ended up not having a meaningful impact. There was little benefit from not concentrating your skill points on a per-expert basis. I did eventually add "officer training" techs which gave gameplay perks for diverse skills.

The thing players most liked about crew wasn't related to gameplay, but just having them be able to comment on what's happening in the game, give suggestions, and have back-and-forth banter while cruising through the void.

So I would definitely keep some kind of command crew in the future, but maybe redesign the progression/skill system and its gameplay effects:

• Possibly redesign/replace the anomaly skill check system

• Amplify gameplay impacts from different skills depending on player focus, such as increased sensor range, better combat stats, mining boosts, etc.

Artifacts

In Starcom: Nexus, there were "artifacts" you could buy in some exchanges, like the Citadel, but these were really just Discoveries hidden behind dialogue choices. The artifacts did not actually exist in the game's data: there was no inventory system beyond resources.

In Unknown Space, artifacts serve a similar purpose: one-time sources of purchasable discoveries and part-time MacGuffins. But they've been promoted to more formal "objects" with unique images and analyze interface.

Steam post image Artifacts can be a source of lore, research points, mission objectives, and trade items.

I'm not sure artifacts need improvement, but I can imagine some. For one, there's kind of an add-hoc crafting system where finding all the items in the same set unlocks a tech. This system could be formalized into the game logic and be visible in the UI (as opposed to having to having an officer explain this every time). I've also considered other possible changes to the item system:

• More trade opportunities. In Unknown Space items can be sold by multiple traders, but only one is allowed to buy them. This doesn't have to be the case. Perhaps some factions desire certain artifacts more than others do, allowing the player to exploit price differences.

• Non-unique items. As possible trade objects / reward, maybe some items could be more commodity-like.

• Visible rarities. Technically, any item that can be dropped already has something like a rarity value.

• Other crafting. I'm not a huge fan of crafting in general, but perhaps could be persuaded.

Base Building

In prior surveys, players often suggest "base building" as a feature they'd like to see. I'm not positive I know what this would look like. Presumably since we have a ship design mechanic, the player could use resources to design stations and then put them somewhere. But there needs to be a gameplay reason, particularly if they consume valuable resources:

Some possibilities:

• Resource production. Like repairing the refinery in Unknown Space, perhaps well-placed bases would provide a gradual stream of resources that took a while to pay for themselves, but then would become a steady stream of income. This poses a balance challenge, but not an insurmountable one.

• Combat assist. As players doubtlessly have noticed, combat is a lot easier near a friendly base that can take some of the damage and provide fire support. If there is a region where the player has some repeated need to return and also is under threat, adding a base would be helpful.

• Mission objective. As an exploration game, building Starcom outposts seems aligned with the game's theme, so having at least some missions for the player to build outposts in or near particular resources makes sense.

Ship Building

I think the new shipbuilding system is an unalloyed improvement over the one from Nexus. Ships look better and players have more control over their design. In the future, I would not change too much in how shipbuilding functions, but maybe even more module types and behaviors, along with some of the requested QoL shipyard improvements that I never got to, such as allowing for "temporary orphans" during building, or automatic mirroring.

Spheres of Influence

Many players requested Spheres of Influence indicators on the map. I can think of two good reasons to have them: one, as a way to help players find factions they've previously interacted with, and two, to help players feel like their actions are having an impact on the universe.

They present some technical and design challenges, but are worth considering.

Procedural / Endless Mode

Various players have at points requested some kind of "endless mode": either an infinite (or effectively infinite) region of procedural space with limitless star systems and enemies to fight, or alternately, some finite region which endless waves of enemies of increasing difficulty. I'm still not really sure how to implement these in a way that would be fun. It wouldn't be too technically challenging to build a massive procedurally generated galaxy, but populating it with enough different anomalies and enemies to retain players' interest is a challenge.

The Story Intro

A few players complained that the opening to Unknown Space felt nearly identical to Nexus. And I can definitely see that perspective: the player starts as a novice commander, is given a "milk run" mission and on the way they blow up some debris before they are suddenly pulled into an unknown universe.

Part of the reason for this is that the kind of game I want to make revolves around the player feeling like they are truly on some mysterious new frontier. It also revolves around a feeling of gradually becoming more and more powerful through exploration.

Another part of the reason is that this turned out to be a good pattern for teaching the player the basic mechanics of the game while at the same time not feeling like an explicit tutorial. So I did follow a similar blueprint for opening Unknown Space as Nexus. Perhaps in a sequel I will try harder to make the intro feel more unique.

Less Likely Features

I'm not promising to implement any of the above features, but they are at least high on the "investigate" list. There are a few suggestions that I probably won't implement, but have been suggested enough time that I feel they warrant a response:

Multiplayer

Multiplayer is really hard to do right, not merely from a technical perspective, but also a design standpoint. In terms of time/cost, it's likely at least double. I think most players would prefer the game have twice as much polishing, twice as much content, or be ready in half the time, than to have multiplayer.

Planet Surface Exploration

The main game loop is explore space, fight enemies, discover interesting artifacts and anomalies, and improve your ship. The idea behind anomalies is that they are kind of like rewards for having found a new star system and dealt with any threats. The player can see a cool new image with some lore with a chance of some resources, discovery or new missions. Importantly, it doesn't add a lot of friction to the experience.

I've played a number of space exploration games that have a detailed planet landing mechanic. In my personal opinion, unless that mechanic is the focus of the game, it doesn't make the game better, it just makes it longer. I might consider changes to the anomaly interface to allow for some alternate interactions or mini-games, but having an entire simulated ground environment for all anomalies would be a lot of development time for something that could make the game worse (if you read the Starcom: Nexus post-mortem you'll know that I ended up scrapping a lander mini-game during its development).

Thanks for reading! Again, I hope you'll take a moment to complete this survey on a possible future game, and/or sign-up for the game's mailing list:

Player Survey (Google Forms)

Until next time, thanks for reading!