First week of Early Access complete, thanks everyone for playing the game!
The largest chunk of my time this past week has been reviewing and compiling player feedback, plus doing some additional analytics work with the game data.
As I mentioned in the last update, my plan for the very short term is to work on new content, and then revisit the consolidated feedback to see what items are the highest priorit in terms of bug fixes, QoL, etc. Player feedback (discussion forums, F8 submissions, Discord, etc.) has also helped inform what elements to put in the next content update.
The second biggest chunk of time was investigating the issue where for some small percentage of players, the game would freeze during load, just after the Wx3 / Wwise logos. After additional investigation it seems that it happens while loading the music banks, and only on Windows 7 or 8, but not for all users. If you are experiencing this issue OR you are on Windows 7 or 8 and are NOT experiencing this issue, let me know in the Known Issues discussion with your OS version and system specs.
Specific tasks since last Friday:
- Continue work on a piece of late game content that I started last week
- Started work on a bit of early/mid-game content
- Rewrite the game progression analytics report to handle the dramatically larger amount of player data
- Created a new ship AI agent (every enemy ship design is assigned an agent profile that defines how it behaves and attacks)
- Profiled the game preloader and investigated potential causes of the “freeze on game load” that effects some players (see above)
- Put together an alien art brief for Hardy, for future denizens of this universe
- Started work on refactoring the mission log details / goals for better tracking
- Option for controlling crew notification auto-dismiss time
- Sped up tech research time
As always, features and changes in these posts are works in progress and may change before actually being deployed to Steam.
Until next week, hope you all have (or are having) wonderful holidays!
— Kevin