itch.io

Thanks Lochar for the response

What I am saying is that no crewmember was able to be assigned to the reactor. I right clicked but no one changed to job, also wasnt highlighting like runabout or storage. I dont know if this was due to none of them having any skill in that field what so ever or a bug.

Let's tackle this first!

1. Start a new game
2. Construct & place a new module with a combustion plant
3. Wait for the module to finish building (you'll get an alert form saying so)
4. Left click a crewmember to select them
5. Mouse over the built combustion plant
6. Right click to assign the crew.

Just confirmed this worked on my end with the downloaded client. Do these steps not work for you? (character skill doesn't matter for assignment).

Hello Lochar, thank you for checking it out!!!

I did the hints part but unfortunately the runabout didnt have an experienced enough person to get anything from orbit.

He should have gained experience if you landed him on any planet (if he actually gets through the story). If not, you can always gain experience and go back scan the home planet later.

Also used combustions plant but no one was able to be assigned to it

It's surprising this wasn't working or clear... you select a crewmember and right-click the section and it assigns the person (to any section with beds or jobs). Pretty sure these steps are now written in multiple places in the GUI.  Does this not work for you?

Also had damage in plantand was leaking, no repair personnel.

You need to build a repair shop and assign someone to it. Was this not clear as well? Should be written down on an alert form.

Please let me know when you get a chance, because the game is perfectly playable for me --  getting 40 days in and have a lot of fun, and then the mid-game difficulty curve starts really ramping up and then it's just about efficiently managing time, people, and resources. But the issue here is that creators know how to play their own game, so really interested in what the disconnect is and why you aren't having the same experience!

Much appreciated you taking a look

-David

done :)

Do you mean update as in, what we're working on, or update the game files?

Hello Erwin,

Thank you for the question! The studio is currently resolving some internal issues that are apparently blocking the release of the product and having nothing to do with the game itself.

In the meantime, I have not stopped active development since there is always more to improve! I'm personally committed to seeing this project to launch.

I'll give you two examples as a personal update on my work:

Personal Log
(done-ish)

I added a personal log, where characters now record various thoughts (reasons for in-game behavior) which you can read.

Some background on this feature is that whenever the character has a morale event, a piece of text gets written which explains the reason for the morale change. This has been implemented since the beginning, but it's never been visualized -- there was nowhere this text was actually displayed. So you would play the game, and see characters' morale stat go up and down, but have no idea when or why it was happening.

So, I first changed all the text to be written in the first person using the procedural textgen, and then packaged the feature to be a "personal log" from the character's perspective where you can see all the morale events and reasons. Allowing you to actually identify and fix the problem the character is having. Morale events (and corresponding personal log update) are triggered both on the station and off the station (on a mission, on the ship, etc).

This is done-ish, because it ended up exposing some bugs which weren't detected until the morale events were actually viewable. I'm still playtesting it.

Personality-Job Interaction
(in progress)

Personality always affected job performance, and how this worked was never visualized either. In short, characters use a fibonacci based points system on their skill level + personality modifier vs task size to come up with how long it takes to do the task. If you work in an office environment that does any sort of Agile/Scrum/Lean development, then this should sound extremely familiar. Gameplay wise the fibonacci scale means a level 1 skill character takes forever to do a task that a level 5 skill can do in a short amount of time, with personality modifying the skill from -2 to +2 depending on the job fit.

There are three TODOs here:

1. Minor change to how the personality modifier is generated (just for consistency) -- done and in testing
2. When a positive or negative personality number is generated (meaning the character loves or hates his job due to personality fit) it triggers a morale event and the character writes it to his personal log. So with this improvement, you can actually see that the task will be faster or slower than normal and also what aspect of the character's personality causes this. -- in progress
3. Update to task tracker UI to show the task chart and expose the logic behind task times -- in design

Hope you are satisfied with this update, and I very much appreciate your patience.

Kind regards,

David

Hi everybody!

Here we go! The last beta update before launch!

It’s been a while since the last one so we’ve made a bunch of smaller changes and a couple of new features. The most important one allows those who need to, or just prefer to, use a different key layout to customize their key bindings.

As we mentioned in the release announcement blog post we have disabled sales of the game until release.

If you want to get the game, make sure that you have wishlisted Astrobase Command on Steam!

Astrobase Command 0.4.9 Closed Beta Patch Notes

New Features

• Players can now customize keybindings in the Pause Menu during gameplay.
• Characters on away missions can now write research papers about the alien civilizations they discover.

Improvements

• New planet and star icons and images in Astrofleet.
• Trinkets, the default station, pets, and character stats now have descriptions.
• Improved the side panel switching in Astrofleet.
• The sector map of Astrofleet now shows constellation suffixes.
• The constellation icons in Astrofleet have been toned down.
• Stars should be less encroaching on text and borders in the sector map.
• Ship balance has been tweaked.
• The memory usage has been improved.
• Setting the diversity slider to maximum in species creation now gives equal chances of appearance.
• Custom uniforms now save properly.
• A rare bug where papers ended up under the desk has been fixed.
• Highlighting of characters should now stay on when selected while switching between spacesuit and uniform, and back.
• Metallic surfaces on charcters should now up properly when “xray-mode” is turned on.
• Conversation drones spawned on top of lights should no longer cast funny shadows.
• Building a ship no longer triggers the dock notice.
• Quantum encounters no longer block off planets.
• Multiple ships should no longer be able to interact with the same planet at the same time.
• The numbers on the Astrobase info tab in Astrofleet are now displaying correctly.
• An rare crash when loading stations has been fixed.
• Other fixes, tweaks, and balance improvements.

Want to chat with us or other players about the game? Come join us at discord.gg/jellyfishgames

Interested in supporting the work we’re doing on an ongoing basis? Check out our patreon.com/jellyfishgames

Remember to Wishlist Astrobase Command on Steam if you haven’t already!

Hi Everybody!

As we’re approaching the holidays we’re, as usual, putting out a new update to the game to make sure you guys have the most up to date and stable version available to you through the holidays.

As we put out a new build in November the amount of changes aren’t as many as they usually are.

Thank you for staying up to date with us and the game.
We hope you have a great holiday!

Improvements

• Ships should no longer bug out and think the crew on board is dead when they are not.
• Improved consistency in health/damage reporting.
• Resupply Forms should now stay on the desk after loading a saved game.
• Resupply Forms now use the appropriate fonts and has a slightly improved layout.
• Balanced Air/smog.
• Less Alert Forms should be spammed when fires happen.
• Fires can now spread vertically.
• Base Metal rebalanced, you can now get more by scanning the local planet.
• Added Hint to get you to scan the local planet.
• Various Bugfixes.

Want to chat with us or other players about the game? Come join us at discord.gg/jellyfishgames

Interested in supporting the work we’re doing on an ongoing basis? Check out our patreon.com/jellyfishgames

Remember to Wishlist Astrobase Command on Steam if you haven’t already!

Hi Everybody!

We're happy to present, the fall beta update of Astrobase Command. It contains a few small feature additions and a metric ton of bugfixes and polish.

Get the update from Itch, as usual.

Feel free to drop by our discord server to chat about the game or if you have any questions or suggestions!

And stay tuned, we're looking at some big news in not too long!

New Features

• Added the Event Log, shows a running log of events happening in the game.
• Added Action Icons, helps you at a glance see what type of activity a character is doing.
• Added Desk Trinket Picking, you can now pick what trinket to have on the desk when creating your species.
• Added Beacons, this allows you to warp ships to them.

Improvements

• Many Upgrades to Astro Fleet Missions.
• Reworked Most Icons.
• Randomize Button in Species Creation.
• Deleting a Save now prompts for confirmation.
• Double clicking on a character description now focuses the camera on the character.
• Focus on Disasters, when a disaster happens on the station, the camera will move over to them to show you what is going on.
• Omnitablet UIs now use colored highlighting behind select words to help with ease of access to information.
• Species creation now starts with all points distributed.
• The Hyperlane now has different ships shown depending on if you're starting a new game or if you're loading a saved game.
• The Conversation UI is now using colored polaroids for the portraits.
• The Conversation Drone is now more obviously signalling that it's there and wants to be clicked.
• Bug Fixes.
• Tweaks.
• Improved Game Balance.

Hi Everybody!

We’re happy to bring you a Summer Beta Update!
Update it as usual from Itch.io to get the latest version.

As you see from the change list there are quite a few new things in this patch. The two biggest of which are the top bar and the fast forward. These let you easily access key information at any time and speed the game up when needed, respectively.

Note: There is a known bug where some audio can get stuck playing continuously. If this happens to you, you can remedy it by simply exiting to the main menu and loading the save. If this happens we would appreciate a bug report on our discord server.

New Features

• Added the Top Bar, shows key information at all times in the top left of the screen.
• Added Game Speed Controls, you can now fast forward the game by pressing the icon in the top left corner of the game or by pressing your Space bar.
• Added Groovy Effects while fast forwarding.
• Added new Tooltips for crew/inspect nodes/books.
• Added new Overview Panel
• Added new H.I.N.T.S. Panel.
• Added Crew Numbering to help keep track of who’s who.
• More Music.
• More Sound Effects.

Improvements

• Slimmed down the Omnipad meshes.
• You can now skip splash screens by pressing Escape.
• Fixed Rolodex Interactions.
• Many Audio updates and fixes.
• Improvements to AstroFleet and away missions.
• Various balancing fixes.
• Improved how the game handles different aspect ratios.
• A ton of bugfixes and improvements!

Want to chat with us or other players about the game? Come join us at discord.gg/jellyfishgames
Interested in supporting the work we’re doing on an ongoing basis? Check out our patreon.com/jellyfishgames
Remember to Wishlist Astrobase Command on Steam if you haven’t already!

Hello Lochar,

Sorry to hear that you're running into these bugs in 0.4.5.

We're constantly fixing and improving the game and have just put out a new build. If these bugs still persist with the 0.4.6 version, please get in touch so we can chase them down and fix them.

We're definitely looking at how to best introduce players to the game. It's a very different game from most so there are a bunch of novel concepts for the player to get a handle on before being able to play it fully.

Thanks you for helping us better Astrobase Command.

Hey everybody!

This one also took a bit longer to get to you than the beta releases have in the past.
The reason is because we’ve added the ability to add sections and subsystems to already existing modules with available space.

This has big impacts on the game so we needed a bit more time to make sure everything was working well before subjecting you guys to it.

It’s now in a good initial state and should work well. But as always, if you run into any bugs with additive construction (or bugs with anything else for that matter) please drop by our discord server, get your backer access, and let us know about the bugs.

Astrobase Command 0.4.5 Closed Beta Patch Notes

–Can now build additions to existing modules.
–You can now land on habitable planets that don’t already have alien settlements or ruins.
–Can start a new game with a pet on the station.
–New music and audio.
–Task tracker tasks can be sorted again.
–Many bug fixes.

Hey Everyone!

It’s been a bit longer than usual in our Beta Cycle since the last update.

This is because we’ve been hard at work wrapping up a big chunk of work. Replacing all the placeholder info-panels (the things that show up when you click a module or section or similar to show you the relevant info) with something that looks much more in line with the rest of the game.

Note: Saves from previous versions will no longer work with this new version of the game.

Along side it we’ve also worked on a lot of different things as you can read below:

New Features
– Can now zoom rolodex cards
– Audio Improvements
– New Info Panels
– Datapad UI overhaul
– Performance improvements
– Mission changes
– More Music
– And many bug fixes

We have now released the second (non-hotfix) beta update.

Also, this week we put out an upgrade path for Kickstarter backers who want to get to play the beta.
If that’s you, check the updates on Kickstarter!

Anyway, here’s the patch notes for Astrobase Command 0.4.3 Closed Beta:

New Features
— Can now pin desk objects closer to the camera.
— Font upgrade in progress.
— Smog should no longer build up as fast.
— Many bug fixes.

A new week and a new beta for our lovely players!
Last weekend we put out a hotfix to address some issues that caused UI to not show up for a small group of players.

Now we’re putting out our first real update to the Closed Beta of Astrobase Command.
The largest addition in it is the ability to rename Modules, Sections, Shuttles, and Characters!

New Features:
— Can now rename ships, modules, and sections. Can also give characters nicknames.
— Various modules no longer become inactive when the resources they produce hit their cap.
— Rolodex card for selected character now affected by UI Scale.
— Many bug fixes.

Hello again.

Just to make sure. Is it a technical issue that makes Discord not work for you? If so we're happy to help you sort it out as much as we can.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand. You'll be a able to find your save files and player logs in  %appdata%

AppData\LocalLow\Jellyfish Games\Astrobase Command

The save files are in folders, that are numbered, so you'll have to figure out what save to look for if you have created new saves since.

Also, the player log gets overwritten when you start a new game, so you'll want to just have played a game session where the issues occur to have something to send to us.

Just send those to info@jellyfish.games and we will have a look at it. Remember to describe the issue you're having in the email so we have an easier time tracking the bug report across the different media.

Regarding waste being a resource. Yeah, having the ability to destroy resources would be useful but it also comes with trade-offs and is something we've debated through the years. We'll take our feedback into consideration on the issue moving forward, thanks.

Cheers,

Daniel

Station Features
— You can now Salvage modules on the station after building a Repair Shop.
— Modules now blow up better.

Engine
— Upgraded the game engine, this allows us to more easily deliver a higher quality game with a longer shelf-life.
— Reworked procedural textures to be compatible with the new engine version.

Audio
— Upgraded the sound engine to create a higher quality soundscape with more powerful tools.
— Entirely replaced all audio with much better and more well suited sounds.

Astrofleet Features
— Mission content has been greatly upgraded, with many more choices for characters to make, and the ability for players to interact with those choices.
— Find Cryosleepers to add to your station crew, or Killbot Probes to blow up by scanning planets.
— Cryopassengers on ships are now displayed.
— Having all of a spaceship’s crew die will now send the spaceship back to base.

Misc
— Crew will now change into spacesuits when going into a module without air
— Task Tracker entries can now be sorted
— Video resolutions can now be changed from settings menu
— Shadows can now be disabled from settings menu
— Many, many, bug fixes, balance tweaks, and polish items

Hot Fix
– UI Scale should never be 0.
– Playing with rolodex cards should no longer mess up desk interactions.
– Fixed bug with modules having some code run twice when it shouldn’t.

Hey again,

The previous reply was a bit rushed. Let me try to give you a better answer.

First off, well played to get that far and have that many crew, especially this early on in the beta.

Waste is a resource, it can be moved to another storage by using the storage datapad app. And it can be used in things like reactors.

The dual storage bays making things grind to a halt is a bit hard to diagnose from this. It could be a bug and it could be just the circumstances of your station. In order for us to investigate  properly we will need your logs and potentially your save game from this session.

Unassigned check-in tasks are a bug that we have thought we had gotten rid of. If your version (as it will say in the lower right corner) is 0.4.0 or higher then we would very much like to get our hands on the game logs and possibly the save game from this session.

Hope this helps,

Daniel

Hello, Aushi!

This  sounds a bit strange. 

Please drop by our Discord and join our beta community and we can look into this further.

Cheers, 

Daniel

Hot Fix:

    -Fixed bug with multiple construction jobs causing crashes on viewing characters,
    -Fix for loading game with construction tasks not properly assigned to a job.
    -Fixed brain bug with queueing.
    -Can now assign  crew to construction jobs by right clicking an under construction section.

Major Features:

Social Areas
* Characters will now go relax and socialize in certain sections when not working
Ship Building
* Docks and additional ships can now be constructed in the build app
* Ships can be reassigned to their docks for logistical purposes
* Building a dock will restict additional modules from being built along that axis
Check Ins
* Characters now must physically check-in to their job at its section before working on tasks 

Enhancements:

 Astrobase
* Construction info panel will now switch to module info panel once construction is done.
* Construction tasks now take actions.
* Vertical tube movement has been upgraded, and characters use it more like an elevator
* Squatting has a new animation
* Starter crew NCO now properly spawns with 2 traits
* Shielding renamed to scrubbers
* "Toaster" bots now roam the station
* Curtains now close when crew sleep in quarters
* Clicking inspectable nodes now shows the section panel.
* Characters should no longer stand in other characters
* Relationships are visualized with lines between characters
* Character destination is visualized when pathing

Astrofleet
* Numerous Mission Updates
* Added more player choices to the generic missions (will be getting much more moving forward!)
* Added a mission to the home planet
* Added space/ship combat
* Upgraded the intro mission
* Characters now eat from ships 

General
* Time now passes slower, and everything has been rebalanced!
* Main menu eats less cpu.
* Better handling of character death, visually and in code
* Corpses have chalk outlines
* "Nonmetals" renamed to "Carboxite"

Fixes;
* Fixed numerous crashes
* Fixed numerous brain bugs
* Fixed save bug with module building forms.
* Save crashes will no longer produce broken save files.
* No longer require positive resource flow resources to build sections.
* Module builder should no longer count items contained in ships.
* Insufficient resources on build order now only shows resources that are lacking.
* Cargo tasks should no longer be done faster by people working construction jobs
* Characters should now recover from starvation properly.

Changes:

Alert Forms
-- Added alert forms for starvation deaths and battery charge levels
-- Alert forms now have descriptive titles
-- Alert forms and other sheets now drop into the inbox

Astrofleet
-- GOTO mode on ships is now indicated with a specific goto-cursor
-- Improved planet generation for better distribution
-- Now showing potential resources on unscanned planets
-- Increased resource yield from missions
-- Mission notes are now colorized and formatted
-- Lots of new content for Missions and numerous bugfixes

Comlink
-- New Datapad App added
-- You can now find your way to our Discord Community from the COMLINK app.

Datapad
-- Clicking on "assignee:none" in Tasks datapad program now tells you the section required to assign someone
-- Crew datapad program now shows characters psychological and social details
-- Reactors and Power Plants are sorted in Build program by their level
-- Moving the cursor across the datapad now changes the cursor to a datapad cursor

Station
-- Crew will now use the enlisted quarters for relaxation
-- Crew no longer tilt in odd directions when talking to each other
-- Resource holders with positive flow will no longer be full after construction

Balance
-- Storage size has been increased, and more starting resources added
-- Garden is much easier to build
-- Battery life has been increased
-- Crew will now die if stat totals are penalized down to zero
-- Crew members are now smarter when looking for places to squat

Changes:

-Old saves will no longer work.
-Batteries have been added to the game.
-New games will start the station with a battery instead of a power station.
-Flight plan now has a Notify option which will drop an alert when you hit that point.
-Ships cargo space is now considered separate  from the stations and items must be unloaded to be used by the station.
-Landing on the home planet should be more interesting.

Improvements:
-Help Updated.
-Ships are now selectable.
-Various bug fixes.

Changes:

-Emblems have been added to the game,
-More planet missions added.
-Cancel options added to Module builder.
-New loading screen added.
-Crew will now look around the station.
-Game intro and tutorial has been changed.

Hello!

Trying to get to the bottom of this, as I'm definitely not having this problem. I'm thinking maybe it's a bug you are hitting that I am not. What does your task tracker look like right before you blow up? Is the reactor guy completing any of his tasks?

Changes

- More alerts added to the game.
- Fixed a bug with loading games.
- Replaced the popup at the start of Species Visuals Customization in the Species Creation flow with a handy '?' in the top right corner to give contextual information related to the currently active tab.
- Added verification step in cases where custom uniforms have been set up (or left) in a manner that might be confusing when playing the game.

I understand this is still early alpha and you guys are really just putting pieces together for testing but i really hope the early game undergoes some serious "iteration". I like a challenge but it seems overly hard to even survive the first 3 days, you shouldn't need a miracle for your best scientist to not blow up the station every game, also makes it difficult to test anything.

Completely agree with this! Wanted to add that systems are designed to make balance quite easy to tweak. Just haven't gotten around to figuring out the optimal fix -- whether it's lowering the reactor points, or the task time multiplier, etc :) We're definitely looking at the new player experience in the near future in general and perfecting the balance is very central to this.

Thanks for the feedback!

-Dave

Astrobase Command 0.3.5 Closed Alpha Patch Notes

Changes
-Uniform sets and uniform customization is now in.  Feel free to customize your crews uniforms to your desires.

Hey Lochar,

First let me thank you for being the guinea pig on this and thanks for taking the time to post the feedback! The early game balance is still pretty rough, for a number of unrelated reasons including user feedback. I can usually get through it myself, but I'm kind of at an advantage here for obvious reasons.

It's hard to say reading your post what exactly what went wrong but let me outline some steps so we can get to the bottom of it. I will be duplicating information you might already know, just want to be complete!

So first thing to do is assign someone to the starting reactor. You're looking for a crewmember with a Physics skill because the reactor jobs all use that. You can get to the character sheets from the Crew app and see who has what skills. Likewise  if you click on the reactor section an info panel should pop up, and somewhere in there it should tell you the job uses Physics.

Something else that's going on behind the scenes is that when a worker executes his tasks it matches each task against one of the aspects of his personality. This represents people being naturally inclined to like their work or not. If a crewmember starts the game with the Physics skill then he already has the associated personality aspect within his starting trait (he has the Physics skill because his personality has the aspect that makes him interested). If nobody has a Physics skill, then you could look at the personality traits of the crew and find someone whose personality sounds like he might do a good job. We've planned another pass on the trait definitions which should make this more clear, but for now give it your best shot. Just don't pick someone that sounds like they have a negative personality and you should be alright.

Second thing to consider is that Physics uses the Mind stat, so to execute tasks the reactor operator will be using M. So another thing you could do is pick someone with a high Mind. Sleeping regenerates BMS, and if he's squatting somewhere then he won't get a good night's sleep. Conversations can add or subtract to BMS -- this is like you get in an argument and it totally drains you, or you see a friend and he gives you some encouragement and boosts your energy. So if your reactor operator gets in spats with some other crew (you can check his conversations) you might stick the person your reactor operator is fighting with  on the shuttle and send the hated person off to do missions to keep the two separated. (On a larger station you could assign them to be far apart from each other). Just so they aren't constantly exhausting each other with arguing.

Next thing is if you click on the info panel for the reactor section again, it should tell you the resource that the given reactor consumes. If the resource is a liquid then it will get refueled via a conduit (the conduit will just move the liquid from the cargo hold, since that is what conduits do). If there is no conduit, then some custodian will need to do the refueling manually so you'll want to build a custodial facilities in this case, and also assign someone to the cargo hold to pack and transport the resource to the reactor.

Let me know if that helps!

Astrobase Command 0.3.4 Closed Alpha Patch Notes

Changes:
- Teleporters have been added to the Astrobase!
- The wheel when setting the Median Species Appearance in the Species Creation should be easier to interact with.
- Your crew should now start with someone who has the physics skill.
- You should no longer start with a reactor that is too hard for your crew to possibly manage.

Astrobase Command 0.3.3 Closed Alpha Patch Notes

Changes
- Loading saves with missions in progress should no longer cause missions to break.
- Nebulae fallback/safe mode added. This will allow everyone to play the game without crashing their GPU driver in cases of older GPUs.

Astrobase Command 0.3.2 Closed Alpha Patch Notes

Changes
- You should no longer be able to land a ship on the local planet without undocking first.
- Datapad Applications should now be prettier and more like as if actually displayed on a CRT monitor.
- Flightplan printouts location fields now print out the actual location instead of "LOCATION".
- Fixed a bunch of text bugs.

Got it! Thanks, I'll keep an eye out for that one too.

If look to the tabs to the right there is a "ship" selection window... are you familiar with that screen?

Hello, 

Dave here!

>Kept having characters get stuck in storage in constant walk motion.

Thanks, I'll have a look see if I can reproduce it.

>Not sure how detailed flightplan needs to be, but got them to scan the planet and land, at first the updates for log stopped, then a new log showed up with their journey on planet, but this disappeared and then was back to just the basic log of scanning planet and that was it.

FYI you can also use the buttons on the ship window to the right to do all the actions. As for the text disappearing, there is a bug in the log window that is visual... sometimes you have click backward/forward on the arrows in the upper window to get to the current entry. It's not auto-advancing properly. This might be what you're talking about? Let me know if this helps.

>Other game failed after 6 days due to no power but wasnt sure what happened as couldnt look at task logs but did have someone assigned to power.

Yeah he can fail his tasks, basically if he's bad at the skill or exhausted or bored... we absolutely need to communicate this better and its on my personal list. 

>Lots of glitches with character cards sometimes showing and other times not, same with station stats. Also player cards looked like was something behind it, but couldnt figure out how to access it.

I've experienced the ID cards breaking, what what do you mean with station stats? 

>But with all the new additions of air pump and purifiers, and needing personnel now to get supplies, bit overwhelming trying to figure out what to do with just 4 starting crew.

Yeah! So you can get crew out of various encounters on planets. But not sure how balanced this is right now tbh I'll have to play myself a bit more  (it's easy to turn the knob up or down). 

Hey Lochar!

It's great you made it as far as you did. Thank you for playing!

Absolutely a lot more is planned to go in before we go to Early Access.

To explain a bit, the game right now is a platform or foundation for content. For example: you recruit characters, give them task-driven jobs (which keep the station running); character lifecycles with eating, sleeping and using the toilet; stats, skills, skill growth, ranks, promotions, personalities, personality growth, relationships, conversations;  also resources. resource management, station building; datapad, desk gui, etc. It all adds up to a stable character life-sim base builder, which has the hooks for planned story content.

The next step is adding "stuff happening," which you might be calling the meat and potatoes. These are procedural stories which interact with the current simulation, and hook into existing character and station systems listed above. This work is a major focus of work from now until release.  Examples include: space weather (micrometeorites/asteroids, solar flares, gamma bursts), anomalies, viruses, combat with aliens, theft, riots, murders, trials, visitors. Not all of these will necessarily be in the launch version (the list is to give you an idea), and we're prioritizing based on time-to-make/fun-to-play. You can think of the current build as the platform or foundation for the story content.

Also if you have any interesting scenarios or story templates you'd like to see in game, now is the time for the community to help shape the direction of the game. For example, is it more fun to deal with character relationship problems, or viruses spreading, work accidents causing things to blow up, aliens invading, etc. In short, what direction/tone of the sci-fi episodes you would like to see for Astrobase Command. Let us know!

Hey everybody! New alpha build is up! This week, we've got a bunch of improvements to scenery! Tell us what you think!

Here are the patch notes for version 0.2.13:

Improvements
  - Changed home star category distribution for improved variety
  - Improved star visuals
  - Improved gas planet visuals
  - Added terrestrial planet
  - Added planetary rings
  - Reduced scenery load time by 50+%
  - Updated species creation color scheme
  - Updated audio for Asteroid Shooter

Fixes
  - Fixed moon crater rendering
  - Fixed home star scaling according to star category

Hey folks! I only just realized I haven't been posting our patch notes here for a while! Sorry about that! 

Enjoy some added variety in crew uniforms!

Here are the patch notes for version 0.2.12:

Improvements

- Added uniform distinction between Enlisted, NCOs and Officers
- Added rank pins on uniforms
- Added crew body types
- Updated female crew animation
- Allowed starlight to hit characters

Fixes

- Fixed female models having claw hands in certain animations
- Fixed appearance updates when promoted
- Fixed crew uniforms changing when new recruit applications appear in the inbox 

Sorry for the late reply. A new build went up last Friday.

If you've been following along, you know by now that we have a Patreon to help support our team as we explore expanded creativity. 

Our first initiative is the production of an Astrobse Command novel. We're releasing a new draft chapter monthly to our 5$ patrons, letting you follow along as the adventure develops.

 Swing by and check it out.

Hi everyone,

We'll be suspending our weekly builds for the Holidays to focus our efforts on implementing save game.

The save game feature is a monumental task given the numerous procedural variables that all rely upon each other for things to work on the station and in characters' head. Each has to be saved and re-loaded without breaking anything. It's not the best of times to be adding

This will let Adam concentrate while Dave, Daniel, and I rotate through the patented Jellyfish lash to keep him motivated. Gotta keep that lashing arm fresh for maximum motivational effectiveness.

That will give us the opportunity to deliver a bunch of smaller shiny bits and bobs for you to gleefully tear into in January.

On a different note, we'd like to know where you first heard of Astrobase. We're continually working to expand the community, so we'd like to reinforce where we've been successful, and improve where we've been hard to find.

http://www.strawpoll.me/14563661

Daniel – @Polygonatron

Hi Everyone! This week I worked on little project that I’ll hopefully be able to talk about soon. Nothing to see here, uhm, bye!

Dave – @Dave_Astrobase

Hi everyone! Since Adam continues to be well fed on design, this week I spent capturing footage and working with Max on a new marketing campaign!

Max – @Max_Shields

Hey all,

I finally wrapped up a 1st pass on that design notice I’ve been working on for a while. I also spent a bunch of time with Dave doing the Mad Men thang.

Adam – @adam_blahuta

Hey Space-Friends!

On top of the ongoing efforts with Construction and Save Files, I ninja’d in some bug fixes for the most egregious ones. It was nice to see all our efforts on character appearance in the rolodex card portraits not get messed up by the highlighting system turn them into yellow blobs!