As I mentioned last week, one of our players has worked very hard to fully translate the game into German. If you’re a native German speaker and want to give the translated version a try (as opposed to the Google Translate version that’s available on the default branch), you can try it out on the Beta branch. To make the switch, right-click on the game in your Steam library, choose “Properties,” go to the Beta tab and select releaese_1_0_11_preview. When the game starts, choose “German” from the language drop down on the main screen. If you have suggestions or issues with this version, please let me know in the Steam discussion forum!
In other news: I’ve spent a good chunk of time in the past two weeks starting to seriously evaluate and plan a potential sequel. It’s obviously very early in the process, but here’s what my current thoughts are:
- Based on player feedback and responses to the Starcom Sequel Survey, I think the primary goal is to not change the core game mechanics too much, but improve them.
- As you’ll eventually read when I finish the postmortem, one of my development pain points is that with Unity (the game’s engine), projects get slower as they get bigger. This created a drag on content creation late in the process. One of my goals is to create separate tools for creating content. This is a big endeavor but has several major potential benefits:
- First, with content outside of the asset path, both feature development and content creation will (hopefully) be faster on the iteration level.
- Two, separating content and features should make source control easier.
- Three, it would allow me to ship the content creation tools with the game.
- Unity is currently in a state of rapid flux with several major changes in a preview “not quite ready for production” state. In the immediate term I want to focus my efforts on development that isn’t likely to be impacted by whatever Unity is doing until we have Unity 2020.1 or even 2020.2. Tool development is a good candidate because it doesn’t rely on any features that are changing.
Until next week! In the meantime you can find me on Twitter, Discord or the game’s Steam Forums.