Dev Log #1: I am working on Galactic Crew II
Galactic Crew Patch Notes — April 15, 2020
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Dear players,
Recap
Making video games was always a childhood dream of mine. I founded my own company in 2017 and worked for more than two years full-time on Galactic Crew. It was quite a journey. I experience a lot of things and although I could not create a sustainable business and went back to become an employer for another company last year, I enjoyed the ride.
The start of Galactic Crew was quite rough. I had to rush it, because I needed financial fundings to keep my business running and as a consequence the game lacked essential features in the beginning. First, I had weekly updates pushing new content every Saturday and I could see increasing player satisfaction in form of nice e-mails and also numbers: The chargebacks/refunds on Steam dropped dramatically in the first months. After the game was released last year, I was proud on one hand, because I could be a full-time game developer for two years and created a game that I personally love and that got me very nice feedback from players, but I knew that I could have done more with more time and money.
Galactic Crew II
Last summer, around four months after the game's release, I continued to work on my game engine. Despite the current trend to use Unity, I was always interested in game engine development and still use my own game engine for my projects. First, I had no specific game in mind. I just wanted to improve everything.
As time passed, I decided to work on Galactic Crew II. The idea is to use my existing game, but make everything better. Making things better does not necessarily mean to change everything. In some cases, it means increasing performance and in some cases it means to add or improve visual effects. In other cases, I have to redo the entire design of a feature. Although I put a lot of time into the game in past months, there is not much I can show you right now, because I mostly focused on the underlying game engine and the game's architecture. However, I can give you some numbers. Launching the game takes now 70% less time, starting a game from the main menu is down by at least 50% loading time, memory usage dropped, calculcations like pathfinding are faster and the entire complexity of the game shrank down massively. Because of the weekly updates in the beginning, I did not always had time to perfectly engineer a feature. Now, I have the experience of implementing all features and can refactor a lot of things. Stuff like network communications for multiplayer gaming is much more stable, trading items is completely bug-free, etc. I also completely changed the way terrain is handled enabling nice water scenes, etc.
One of the things I am currently working on is a complete overhaul of the user interface. Please check out the screenshots below to get an impression of how the game might look like. Please note, that any image I'll share with you shows a snapshot of the current state of development!
Main menu
Creating a new game
Game
Roadmap
As I wrote earlier, I am working full-time for another company, but I spend a certain amount of my spare time working on Galactic Crew II. I will give you updates here whenever I have reached another milestone to share my progress with you. The CoVid-19 virus currently haunts the world and I am in lockdown. I do not enjoy the time, but I take the opportunity to invest time and energy into the game. Therefore, I am quite pleased with my progress. However, it is impossible to say when the game will be finished.
I do not want to make just a remastered version of Galactic Crew, but also add a lot of new stuff. It will be announced once I am working on it. I am currently busy remastering the original game. I will soon hire artists to join me working on the game.
Be excited!
If you suggestions for new features, please comment down below. Since there is no specific release date and nothing is final yet, I am very open to your input. Like the first game, Galactic Crew II will start on Steam as Early Access title. This phase gave me a lot of great input and I do not want to miss this opportunity for the new game.
I could not have worked two years full-time as game developers without you, who bought the first game. I want to show my gratitude to you by providing everyone who owns Galactic Crew a free copy of Galactic Crew II once it is available - if I find a way to do this! Once I reach a points where I can share a first impression of the game with you, I will do research if there is a way to gift a game key to everyone who owns a certain game. I do not know, if it's possible directly in Steam, but be asure I will try to find a way to give you Galactic Crew II for free, if you own Galactic Crew!