STARDROP - Content Update August

Another Content Update

Hi there, fellow operatives! I'm fairly certain a few of you guys have noticed the updates coming in from Steam and I wanted to address them in this new update. Most of these are cosmetic. I went through pretty much every level and have populated them with more, smaller props to add more detail to these areas as well as making them feel lived in. I won't point them all out but I'll show a few that I believe to illustrate what I'm talking about best.

Performance Update

An important topic I want to discus before going over the visual aspects is that I been able to optimize the game in an important factor. The game runs smooth on medium settings but now it will run smooth on high end epic as well.

On higher settings performance dips would occur when you would turn on the flash light for instance, or at certain areas where there's a lot of bright lights. This has been tweaked to a great extend and I am now able to run the game on max settings with a consistent 60 FPS. It'll dip down here and there to 50 but overall it seems to have greatly improved performance. Please let me know if you guys experience the same increase in performance, so I know I did my job!

New Plant Life

I always felt that the plants found in the game were not the quality I liked them to be but I couldn't find any proper replacements, until now. While I won't replace every single plant on board the STARDROP, I have replaced them where I think it counts.

Now, these new plants are replacing the old "alien" plants that I used previously and I think they look really cool. As with every asset pack I use, I modify them to suit what I need. Luckily I didn't have to go to any crazy lengths for these ones, but I did have to alter some textures and I believe it paid off.

You'll have to find out for yourself exactly where they can be found but that's the fun of having a game in Early Access. Finding the new cool stuff. They're not easy to miss either, so there's that.

More Props

As I mentioned I have populated areas with new and altered props. I have gone over some of the older, existing models and materials and customized them further. For instance the shelves on board the SD-01 were so empty as well as a bunch of areas on board the STARDROP itself.

While I'm not done with every level in the game at least for now it just makes things much more alive and fleshed out. Consider this a mini-polish.

New Airlock (SD-01)

I also completely remade the airlock of the SD-01. The old one was simply too outdated and I felt I could do better.

I won't show too much here, you'll just have to see it for yourself.

New "Wait" System

So, yeah, I implemented a new system that deals with certain scenes playing in places that players could skip accidentally. I know some of the scenes in the game tend to be a bit long-ish and some people would change level or walk into another area triggering another scene by accident. I blame myself for that because I chose to keep everything in-game. While I don't regret this decision, it's a very tough one to implement in a natural way. I've thought a lot about how to deal with this and I think I found a solution that, while slightly immersion breaking, it does its job and people should not be able to skip stuff anymore. This feature is only used in places where dialog is important enough for me to use it. I myself choose when and where this system kicks in so it's not automated. I don't want to annoy you guys every time someone says something. Sometimes it locks an elevator button, while other times it locks and/or closes a door when a scene is playing out. After it's done, everything goes back to normal and you may continue on your journey.

Final Words

This is the end of this update. I hope you guys like the new changes and I'm making proper progress on chapter 4 as well. I'll keep polishing old stuff here and there as I move forward and will make sure to post another update when it's relevant. For now take care and thank you all for the massive support! Joure & Team V