Hello everyone,
I would like to extend my and the whole dev team's gratitude to all Alpha players! We have an amazing community that helps us make Starbase the game we've been envisioning!
When we started this journey in May, we didn't know what to expect. Would we get players past the login screen? Would the servers crash once 'real' users logged on? How would the gameplay work, is there enough content yet to even start an Alpha? We have been pleased to see that for the most part things have worked just fine. The game is still in its infancy but we keep working on it and adding new features and fixing bugs, and every week we see good progress.
And not only the stuff that we work on internally, but also the stuff we see from the community. It's been wonderful to watch you embrace Starbase as your own, and we've been so happy to see how things have progressed. The fansites, videos, streams, modelling and fan art, and other projects (ISAN!), the community has been amazing. Your enthusiasm is fueling our development on a daily basis! Personally, for me, seeing all the community-made ships being submitted and accepted into the Ship Shop always makes me smile, that was one of the early goals of Starbase to have player-made ships be a big part of the game. We're still a long way from the final vision of Starbase but seeing those ships is like glimpsing into the future!
Speaking of the vision, Starbase has been in the works for over 7 years now, and is our company's biggest project ever by far. It's always been the "impossible game", the one that needs pure faith instead of cold game development logic - something on this scale with so many players with this level of technology is quite epic and hasn't really been seen in games ever. We'll try our hardest to make it work, and after the first 100 days Alpha, I remain hopeful!
Our approach to Starbase has been to be as open as possible since day 1. We try to answer questions on Discord and elsewhere, and we will keep this up as we continue development. Of course, such openness comes with a disclaimer that things may change, but I feel it's still the best approach. That said, we are purposefully staying away from speculating too much on features or having a public roadmap, as things change so often and fast. There's a couple of features I'm looking forward to in the next couple of months and if you've been on Discord you may know what these are. We're making good progress on some of the features I consider super important, and it's one of the most exciting times in my game development career!
Many of you keep a close eye on our Alpha invites, and I'd just like to reiterate that inviting new players is a highly ad-hoc process. We have almost 20k players signed up through our survey/signup, it's crazy! I feel a bit sad that we can't invite everybody at once, because the wait can be grueling. But we have to do what's best for the game in the long run - we'll invite new players when we feel it makes sense for the game - often this happens after a big update (or a few in succession), for example. Right now we're still in the early stages and wouldn't benefit from a huge influx of new players, who would most likely run into the same issues as many of you have already seen or keep seeing regularly. We're aware of so many issues that we've got our work cut out for us for the months to come! That said, our eye remains on the big features, the main gameplay loop, which is still far from finished. We'll remain in Closed Alpha for the foreseeable future.
Early Access release - it's still 2020. We won't know the final date until much closer. We don't want to launch Starbase into Early Access until we are absolutely sure it's ready and will offer fun gameplay to players old and new! We'll do our best to meet your expectations for the final game, thanks for being on the journey with us!
Until next time, yours sincerely,
Lauri
I would like to extend my and the whole dev team's gratitude to all Alpha players! We have an amazing community that helps us make Starbase the game we've been envisioning!
When we started this journey in May, we didn't know what to expect. Would we get players past the login screen? Would the servers crash once 'real' users logged on? How would the gameplay work, is there enough content yet to even start an Alpha? We have been pleased to see that for the most part things have worked just fine. The game is still in its infancy but we keep working on it and adding new features and fixing bugs, and every week we see good progress.
And not only the stuff that we work on internally, but also the stuff we see from the community. It's been wonderful to watch you embrace Starbase as your own, and we've been so happy to see how things have progressed. The fansites, videos, streams, modelling and fan art, and other projects (ISAN!), the community has been amazing. Your enthusiasm is fueling our development on a daily basis! Personally, for me, seeing all the community-made ships being submitted and accepted into the Ship Shop always makes me smile, that was one of the early goals of Starbase to have player-made ships be a big part of the game. We're still a long way from the final vision of Starbase but seeing those ships is like glimpsing into the future!
Speaking of the vision, Starbase has been in the works for over 7 years now, and is our company's biggest project ever by far. It's always been the "impossible game", the one that needs pure faith instead of cold game development logic - something on this scale with so many players with this level of technology is quite epic and hasn't really been seen in games ever. We'll try our hardest to make it work, and after the first 100 days Alpha, I remain hopeful!
Our approach to Starbase has been to be as open as possible since day 1. We try to answer questions on Discord and elsewhere, and we will keep this up as we continue development. Of course, such openness comes with a disclaimer that things may change, but I feel it's still the best approach. That said, we are purposefully staying away from speculating too much on features or having a public roadmap, as things change so often and fast. There's a couple of features I'm looking forward to in the next couple of months and if you've been on Discord you may know what these are. We're making good progress on some of the features I consider super important, and it's one of the most exciting times in my game development career!
Many of you keep a close eye on our Alpha invites, and I'd just like to reiterate that inviting new players is a highly ad-hoc process. We have almost 20k players signed up through our survey/signup, it's crazy! I feel a bit sad that we can't invite everybody at once, because the wait can be grueling. But we have to do what's best for the game in the long run - we'll invite new players when we feel it makes sense for the game - often this happens after a big update (or a few in succession), for example. Right now we're still in the early stages and wouldn't benefit from a huge influx of new players, who would most likely run into the same issues as many of you have already seen or keep seeing regularly. We're aware of so many issues that we've got our work cut out for us for the months to come! That said, our eye remains on the big features, the main gameplay loop, which is still far from finished. We'll remain in Closed Alpha for the foreseeable future.
Early Access release - it's still 2020. We won't know the final date until much closer. We don't want to launch Starbase into Early Access until we are absolutely sure it's ready and will offer fun gameplay to players old and new! We'll do our best to meet your expectations for the final game, thanks for being on the journey with us!
Until next time, yours sincerely,
Lauri
![[QS] Combustible](/data/avatars/m/0/356.jpg?1599435891){kind=avatar}
