[Design] Unending Galaxy 1.3 Roadmap

Hi there!

With 1.2 being quite stable now (low/high surrogate bug aside, I will get back to that point further down), it’s time to talk about the next major update. But before going into it and given that I am now talking to hundreds of people instead of a few dozens, it’s time to explain a few things again:

Unending Galaxy version numbers are more akin to software than to games. The game will keep getting updates for as long as it’s possible for me to afford it. The main goal of future game projects is to keep funding UG. All updates will be free, however I don’t discard the option to release mods and maps as optional DLC.

Our next major update, aka 1.3, will be taking care of the military side of the game. The main goal is to make the different factions and ships more unique, make the military and diplomatic bits more interesting, while adding new features and missions to spice up the game when not playing as a faction.

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[devlog] 1.0 Release Inbound

rtitle06Hey !

This is likely the last big devlog before the 1.0 release, which is planned for around June the 15th. Hey, I am only 3-4 months late on what was supposed to be a one year project, that’s not bad. While we are checking the general news, you can now buy Unending Galaxy at the Indie Game Stand (they accept Bitcoins and Amazon virtual currencies, alongside the usual CC and paypal). Also, the SpaceGameJunkie website published a very long let’s play of the beta 5. There’s a couple of mistakes in the video that I corrected in the comments, but all things considered it was good feedback and I will improve a few things in the UI according to it. I still have to make a decent trailer on my side.

Anyway, back to the game itself ! This is full crunch time, and I barely do anything but code and drink energy drinks (I should have asked for a sponsorship to Monster), it’s a good thing that what’s left isn’t that complicated code wise. This is still a tricky devlog to write as one of the major addition is also a pretty big spoiler, so we’ll get to that part last.

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Devlog: Territorial expansion

Snap1418Hey there,

Sorry for the delay. As this week has been mostly about testing and balancing, it’s going to be a fairly unusual devlog format (I also apologize in advance for the mostly unrelated screenshots alongside the article). The seemingly small change of assigning sector ownership to whoever hold the most factories in the area, or to the first one to drop a military base, had extremely large repercussions in many, many parts of the game. As there’s really no accurate way to “speed up” the game to test said feature, I basically had to let the game run itself days and nights while occasionally monitoring and tuning the effects. Let’s see what happened.

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Devlog: Swarm, shipyards, and diplomacy

Snap729Hi there, it’s time for our usual devlog !

Despite what has been a really bad week IRL, I still managed to make quite a lot of progress on Unending Galaxy. A bit unfocussed, but progress nonetheless. I am more or less done with the diplomatic portion of the game that I explained in the previous post.  I also implement the new Swarm baddies featured in the screenshot. More importantly I added a proper shipyard component and menu with the ability to queue ships to build and so on. There’s also a bunch of misc optimizations, rebalancing, and fixes.

As usual, those changes will be detailed in the article.

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Design: Diplomacy in Unending Galaxy

Snap726I am writing the diplomatic part of UG right now, which is a nice change from the last week spent pinpointing the crash on more or less random machines. So, instead of talking about bugs, let’s talk about diplomacy in games and more particularly in Unending Galaxy.

As with all design documents I post, not everything I am writing about here is finalized. Some of it may be changed, improved or even scrapped altogether.

Enjoy 🙂

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State of the Development

Snap693I think it’s a good time to summarize what has been done and what’s left to do regarding Unending Galaxy. This is going to be a long post, but hopefully more interesting than usual, that will go through all aspects of the game. Note that this is about the current in-house build and not the 0.5.5 demo. If it’s your first time on the website, you may want to check the product page first to know what I am talking about.

Feel free to comment and post ideas before we are out of the stage at which I still may consider new features and major changes. You don’t need to register to do so, I know most people don’t like Disqus but that was either that or wasting my time erasing loads of spam every day.

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Devlog: User Interface and Faction AI

Snap665Hey, here’s another weekly devlog !

This week some progress has been made regarding the user interface as I went around and redesigned most of the “lists” you can see in the various windows. And while at it, I also implemented a fleet manager (still a work in progress) and the fullscreen option. Not all changes were cosmetic, though. I also made some good progress regarding the diplomatic system and how wars are handled by the game.

As usual the full article will explain things into more details.
Enjoy 🙂

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