Dev Log #9: It´s all coming together
Galactic Crew News — November 7, 2020
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Dear players,
If you follow me on Twitter, you already know that I worked on basically any feature of Galactic Crew II over the past few weeks.
Level Editor
I replaced the user interface design with the same design elements I use for the game itself, making the level edior visually more attractive.
I also added a new feature that let's you group models. You can then insert the model on any planet you are designing making new planets an easy and fast process.
Colonization
I completed the management code for planetary outposts and added the first user interface elements enabling you to transfer goods and items between your spaceship and your outpost.
I am currently waiting for an artist to complete my order of new models, but I wanted to share a preview of some buildings that will find their way into the game soon.
Game engine
I invested two weeks to improve the underlying game engine. My focus was to remove dependencies between components and the way highlighting is managed. It does not have an effect on the gaming experience itself, but it will improve stability and reduce memory and processor usage. I took the opportunity to make these large changes before I started testing the current state of the game.
Quests
I re-wrote the way quests are handled and I was finally able to include more than 50 brand new space events written by a professional writer!
Testing
I did a lot of testing. I found many issues that I could resolve quite easily. Since I re-wrote basically everything from scratch, it was expected to find bugs. I will continue testing the game every week to make sure I find all bugs, before I hand it out to you. I also found several features that needed some tweaking which I immediately optimized. I also used some time to resolve things that went wrong in the first game, like the collectable minerals that resulted in crew members picking up stuff from outside the rooms. Now, there are more resources to gather and they are gathered correctly.
What's left?
Before I can start a Closed Alpha with you, I need to do:
- Re-write pathfinding for characters and AI on planets
- Procedural content creation for planets
- Adding some planets to the game
- Resolving an issue with transparency
- Resolving an issue with fullscreen windows
- More testing
As you can see, the list is not that long any more and I hope to complete many open topics this month! I will soon reach out to Valve to check, if I can easily provide a key to Galactic Crew II to anyone who owns the first game.
Multiplayer and campaigns won't be part of the initial version of the Closed Alpha, but they will be added later. Multiplayer only needs a lot of testing and I will create new campaigns while you test play the Closed Alpha.