Hi everyone,
Since the last dev diary post two big things happened:
Hi everyone,
The Alpha 3 Skirmish galaxy has just launched and all Alpha players can join it right now. The Skirmish galaxy is a faster game so join as soon as you can and don’t get left behind!
The launch of the Skirmish galaxy coincides with the release of Alpha patch 0.93. This patch introduces 2 changes, both apply to the new Skirmish galaxy only and not the ongoing Alpha 3 main galaxy (see below for details).
Updating the game client: the game should be automatically updated via Steam. Please check here if the download doesn’t automatically start when you launch Steam.
And it’s ready for Alpha players to join right now!
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Hi everyone,
There’s a lot going on at the moment. In the week to come we’ll be releasing a new patch (hopefully Monday) and then on Thursday the experimental Alpha 3 Skirmish galaxy will launch. Are you as excited as we are?
The wait for a new patch has been much longer than usual (the scope of the new patch was ambitious and on top of that one of the devs was ill). But the wait is almost over. We’re expecting to release it on Monday and it’s going to be the busiest patch of Alpha 3 so far:
You’ll be able to see full details of all new features and changes in the release notes we’ll post when the patch is released.
In case you missed Friday’s announcement – we’re launching an Alpha 3 Skirmish galaxy on Thursday April 4th at 15:00 UTC (if there are any significant issues with the new patch we may have to push the start date back a bit).
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Hi everyone,
On Tuesday we asked if the Alpha players wanted us to launch a second galaxy. The response was a definite YES from most players so we’re busy getting it ready.
We didn’t want to keep players waiting long so set a launch date less than a week away – Thursday April 4th at 15:00 UTC (we’re planning to release the next patch on Monday, if there are any significant issues around this we may have to delay the launch).
The galaxy will be called the ‘Alpha 3 Skirmish’ galaxy (A3 Skirmish) and all current Alpha players will be able to join. A3 Skirmish will run until one player wins!
The Alpha 3 main galaxy: remains the mainstay galaxy, will run alongside the experimental A3 Skirmish galaxy, and will continue after the A3 Skirmish galaxy has ended. So don’t neglect your existing games in the main galaxy!
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Hi everyone,
We’re thinking of launching a second galaxy but first want to make sure that it’s something players want?
We believe it’s possible to launch a second galaxy that would be fun, a different experience to the current galaxy, AND would only briefly distract the devs from their current roadmap tasks.
The other galaxy would carry on as normal – both galaxies running at the same time – and players wouldn’t have to join the second galaxy if they didn’t want to.
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Hi everyone,
In last Sunday’s dev diary post we revealed that the next patch would include the ability ‘to give a fleet or planet to another player’, but didn’t provide any details. Understandably players had questions and concerns on how it would work, which we’ll go over now in today’s dev diary post.
The first thing we should clarify is that although we used the term ‘give’, ‘allowing another player to take ownership’ is more accurate as the other player is under no obligation to accept the fleet or planet that you offer to them – much like a trade.
These features are an early form of trade mechanics that would eventually be integrated into something more comprehensive e.g. being able to propose, negotiate and complete a deal. They’re also social mechanics and tie-in to alliances e.g. being able to transfer control of a fleet to an alliance member (a temporary loan if they transfer control back over).
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Hi everyone,
Hope you’ve all had a good week! We were hoping to have been able to release a patch this week, but there are a couple of tasks we’re still in the middle of and can’t do so until they are done. Some of the features that should be in the next patch include the nearby player scanner, smart merging for fleet management, being able to give a fleet or planet to another player, and the settings panel for automated colony development. We’ll update you on the status of the next patch as soon as we can.
In our ‘Current Priorities & Role of the Community‘ post we mentioned that the game is suffering a ‘usability crisis’, particularly from a new player perspective. In this post we wanted to provide a couple of examples of the sort of issue we need to address, and ask that you share with us on the forum any similar issues that you’re aware of.
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Hi everyone,
No patch went out this week but the next one isn’t too far away! On Monday we put out a post on the Current Priorities & Role of the Community which a number of players appreciated – so take a look if you’d like to find out more 🙂
In Outscape, new players spawn near each other. Their planetary scanners aren’t close enough to detect each other, and it can be a while until a new player orders a fleet outside of their home system. While their fleets remain in their home system, they aren’t visible to other players (fleets in a system aren’t visible to scanners outside that system, likewise, fleets in orbit of a planet aren’t visible to scanners outside that planet’s orbit).
Which means when a new player joins the galaxy, it can be more than a few hours until they discover the other players nearby. In the meantime, they assume they’re alone in that part of the galaxy and are disappointed – it’s not very exciting to play an MMO and not see any other players – and their early game experience suffers as a result.
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tl;dr: The community is super important in developing Outscape. We need to focus on usability for new players to make Outscape successful due to a ‘usability crisis’, but this must not be at the expense of strategic depth. Because we are working on usability plus some very large items (e.g. Alliances) where we can’t show incremental progress, it may make the community wonder where we are going. We understand this is a difficult phase for the community, but all will be solved (details within).
The past few weeks have been quite hectic for the Outscape team with a lot of intense development on new core gameplay features. Based on some of the recent community feedback, we thought we should make the current development priorities clear and clarify the important role the community is playing and can play during the current winter/spring seasons.
In early January we published the core of our roadmap detailing what we will be working on over the coming months. The truth is that important features such as alliances and social elements such as the ability to trade/give fleets and planets to other players, chat and player profiles/achievements had their development pushed back in 2017/2018, mainly because these are all classed as ‘Extra Large’ items in terms of engineering effort – meaning it’s hard to focus on much else whilst these items are in progress. In Early ’19 we decided to bite the bullet and begin working on these, knowing it will be hard to do the smaller more incremental things community members are used to.
What we perhaps didn’t do a great job of explaining was the ‘usability crisis’ we have been facing for new players. We noted briefly in the roadmap blog post:
The game is not newbie friendly… 60% of players drop off very quickly because of this, however those that persevere through the first few sessions tend to find a rewarding experience.
Let us illustrate this with a chart of # Daily Active Users when we started the Alpha 2 and Alpha 3 Galaxies:
Hi everyone,
It’s been another ‘fleet management’ themed week… A patch went out on Tuesday which included rolling back the ‘ships must be within 600m of each other’ mechanic and reintroduced the ‘ships must be in a circle’ mechanic.
But what wasn’t included in that patch was the new smart fleet merging we’re still working on. So right now, merging fleets involves plonking new ships next to each other in a line outside of the fleet circle (as do auto-formations).
Before the recent updates to fleet management, merging fleets via the context menu worked by adding the new ships to the existing fleet and then applying the circle auto-formation. This avoided having to algorithmically find space for each ship, but meant any changes made by the player to ship positions were undone with each merge.
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