#Starmancer beta testing update#
#Starmancer beta testing upgrade#
#Starmancer beta testing code#

His name is Evan and you've probably seen him on the Discord (he's currently a moderator).

We've had to familiarize him with how the game is setup and give him an overview of our plans for development. This has taken up the majority of our time since the Kickstarter ended. We've added a new programmer to the team! So that zooming in will provide you with extra visual and audio detail.

Our idea is that we'll play more sound effects the more zoomed in you are. We obviously can't play all of the ambient noises for everything that you can see, because your ears would bleed. There's also the issue of playing sound effects when you have a bird's eye view of the game. We would like some machines to have ambient noises, for example, but we had to test out how various sounds would combine together. We've also been testing out which types of sound effects will have. Ideally, the music would serve to enhance the overall experience instead of being 'background noise'. We've also been figuring out exactly what type of music we want in the game, including the feasibility of changing music based on in-game events. It's one of those things that you can't take a screenshot of and show off on Twitter. This has taken some time, but it's mostly finished now. 0167 seconds.Īnyway, I've been converting the unit tests to run in a 3rd party tester. We have over 2500 unit tests, so the unit tests are taking over 40 seconds to run (this is a long time when you're running them once every 10 minutes).Įven a blank test takes around. Specifically, they seem to perform around 60 tests per second, regardless of which computer we're on. Unit tests in Unity take a long long time.

#Starmancer beta testing code#

Unit tests are an automated way of testing our code and ensuring that nothing breaks (to be brief). I said that I'd tell you everything, so here you go. We're trying to figure out the best way to visually display it. It will (maybe) be finished sometime this week. We'll sometimes re-prioritize or completely remove features. The roadmap will probably change occasionally. This will show you exactly which features we're working on and which features (we hope) will make it into the Alpha, Beta, and Release. We're in the process of adding a roadmap to our website. We'll also post everything important on social media, so don't worry too much about subscribing. We'll use the mailing list whenever something important comes up, like Alpha release. You can subscribe to it directly from our website, here. Several of you asked about a mailing list, so we created one. You'll always be able to pre-order the base game, though. You can use either PayPal or a credit card. We've reduced the prices of some items for Kickstarter Backers, so just wait until we send out the surveys to buy anything. We've also been setting up a late-backing store. We want to wait until you have all of the customization options. 'Design a colonist' isn't included in the survey, because we're still adding new hair styles.

#Starmancer beta testing upgrade#

You'll be able to upgrade your pledge, select extra add-ons (nothing too exciting), and use excess Kickstarter funds (if you overpledged).

#Starmancer beta testing update#

We'll post an update on Kickstarter before we send them out. Once it's finished, we'll be sending out the surveys. Our page is currently being reviewed by BackerKit.

We'll be using BackerKit to actually handle the surveys, so don't mark them as spam if you see a message from them. We've created all of the survey questions. The intent of these posts are to answer, 'what have you people been doing these past X weeks?'. This will keep everyone in the loop (who wants to be) and it won't take too much time away from Starmancer development. Instead of that, we've decided that we'll do weekly or bi-weekly blog updates right here. In all, it probably takes around an hour or more to do each post

And then stick around and engage with whomever responds. You have to come up with something interesting to post. Posting on social media takes a lot of time. Sorry that we've been so quiet on social media.