STARDATE 2023.10.23
Exactly one Earth-year ago (that's 365 Earth-days ago for you non-Earthlings), Cosmoteer launched in Early Access on Steam!
Cosmoteer has been a huge success, and I want to take this moment to thank all of you for supporting Cosmoteer over this past year. So here's a brief video message from me to you:
https://youtu.be/AXJA8Vasrgs
A year ago feels like yesterday, and yet so much has happened in the Cosmoverse! Like you, I wish that development of big new features had been able to start sooner and progress faster, and yet I'm still proud of the many accomplishments our little team has pulled off so far! Let's take a brief look back at some of the many improvements made to Cosmoteer this past year:
- Hundreds of bugs fixed (too many to count!), including crashes, multiplayer desyncs, and various gameplay bugs. (Please keep reporting all the bugs you run into! The #1 way to get a bug fixed is to report it, ideally with a saved game that demonstrates the bug.)
- Hundreds of quality-of-life improvements, like ship-wide resource limits and building new ships from scratch in Career mode.
- A couple hundred new built-in ships (219 if my count is correct) across all four factions.
- Major improvements to performance and multiplayer connection reliability. Although there's still plenty of room for improvement, the performance of late-game Career mode has been greatly improved over the past year. And multiplayer connections are also much more reliable and less likely to disconnect than they were at launch.
- Over a dozen new ship parts, including the Chaingun, the Resource Collector, the Hyper-Jump Beacon, and a handful of aesthetic-focused parts such as roof lights and armor/structure hybrids.
- Improvements to the non-English language translations, including a complete re-translation of Simplified Chinese.
- "Crew Construction", a major new game mechanic where crew perform all ship construction and repairs by manually delivering resources and zapping ship parts into existence. This creates a more immersive experience and allows for more creative and emergent strategies.
And the best is yet to come! I'm excited to announce that work on "Career 2.0" is now fully underway, which we are actually planning to split into *two* big updates:
- "Career 2.0": This first update will focus on creating a much greater variety of content, including many new types of misions and new types of environments such as black holes and nebulas that will affect how you design and play. We're hoping to release this update early-ish next year (2024).
- "Career 2.5": This update will focus on faction-vs-faction conflicts, allowing you to enlist with a faction and help them conquer the galaxy. (We're also of course thinking about letting you create your own faction, though we can't promise support for that in 2.5 at this time.) We're hoping this update will launch a few months after Career 2.0.
I'm *also* excited to announce that we're simultaneously working on a new PvP multiplayer mode, tentatively called "Build & Battle". Played over several rounds, competitors build or upgrade their ship using a randomly limited selection of parts and then battle against the other players. We're expecting to launch this mode *before* Career 2.0, hopefully before the end of the year!
Peering further into the future beyond Career 2.0/2.5, you can look forward to awesome new features like drone/fighter carriers, crew boarding, transforming ships, and a variety of additional new weapons and other ship parts. You can read about much of that on the roadmap.
Thank you again for supporting Cosmoteer. Without your support, Cosmoteer's future wouldn't be nearly so bright.
Over and out,
Walt
