Ganymede was promoted to default build on Wednesday, and I’m going to keep an eye on player feedback, particularly first-time players.
One of my priorities for the next few updates is to continue improving mission tracking to ensure players do not find themselves stuck, at least on the main storyline. I’m also curious to see from the analytics data how long new players are typically taking to finish the game: while Ganymede adds a fair amount of new content relative to Draconis, several changes may also streamline play, like various clarifications to missions and the new ability to review mission logs, crew skills, etc. during autopilot.
As I mentioned last week, I spent the first half of this week working offline. I’m fortunate to have access to a cabin that my parents built before I was born. The cabin has neither Internet access nor cell service. It turns out the handicap of not being able to look stuff up on the Internet is canceled out by the productivity boost of not being distracted by the Internet. I still lose a day in travel time, but I suspect the offline time also adds some longer buffs to focus.
What I worked on in the past week:
- Change to crew progression: instead of crew advancing individually with one fixed point in their expertise and one free point, the crew will advance together with one fixed point in each members expertise and six free points that can be distributed among all crew.
- NPC ships now remember where they spawned and will return their if they ever have nothing else to do. This is to prevent situations like NPCs chasing an enemy into the void and getting “stranded” when there’s nothing within their evaluation radius.
- Traders will now remember the highest price they have recently paid for a resource and not sell it for less than that, to prevent wash sale exploits.
- Three new anomalies.
- Experiments with some weapon variants.
- Shader experiments for a potential new feature.
- Investigated various player feedback issues.
Thanks for playing, until next week!
Kevin