As Alpha 5b finishes, work on Alpha 6 is underway! So far, we’ve decided that the broad area of focus will be making the people simulation matter more to gameplay. Above, a shot of one such feature: citizens now have different affinities for each duty, shown as smiley/frowny faces, as well as their skill rating shown in stars. This means that a citizen might be skilled at a job they dislike doing, or vice-versa, and because this affects their morale and skill advancement rate you’ll sometimes need to weigh their needs against the greater good of the base. We’ll talk about more features like this soon.
Additionally, Alpha 6 will add the long-overdue Power system, so that Fusion Reactors finally do something! More details on that once we’ve got the system on its feet - basically, you’ll need to build reactors to provide all your base’s machines with power. If you load an older save game in Alpha 6, there will be a “grace period” in which you have to build power reactors for your base before the power simulation kicks in. To make this transition easier we’ve re-enabled the reactor in the Construct menu so you can build them in now, though they won’t do anything until Alpha 6 ships.
Spacebase DF-9 Alpha 5: “Doctors With Boarders”, has been released! See the patch notes for an eye-wateringly detailed list of changes.
This update is easily our biggest yet. It’s also taken much longer, and we apologize for that. We did some underlying tech work to support all the new features, and we think Alpha 5 is a really solid step towards version 1.0 of Spacebase - you heard right, we’re gonna finish this game someday!
Lots of these features relate to combat: raiders laying siege to your base with breach ships, building turrets to make getting in harder, fighting out in space as well as indoors. Others relate to base health: citizens can now be injured or sick, so we added Doctors to help keep everyone healthy. The new Research Assignment screen gives a nice global overview to the research system we added in Alpha 4.
Ace programmer Ben Peck rebuilt our “event system” responsible for queuing up things like immigrants, invasions, and meteor strikes; it’s now a lot easier to tune and predict how difficult or easy a game session will be. We’d love to hear feedback on the game’s overall challenge in our forums.
We’ll probably have an Alpha 5a build out in the next few days with fixes for some of the known issues and anything we get from crash reports. So please, intrepid Early Access players, dig in… and good luck staying alive out there!
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Mac OSX and Linux builds are included in this. Very sorry for the delay!
Important note for 64-bit Linux users: If you don’t hear any audio, try installing the 32-bit ALSA libs - this command works in Ubuntu, other distros’ equivalents may vary:
sudo apt-get install libasound2-plugins:i386 libasound2-plugins-extra:i386The silver lining is that if you’ve encountered other Steam games with no audio on your system, this might fix them. Thanks to this post on Valve’s issue tracker for the info.
Video and announcement post coming tomorrow. Due to some recent core tech changes we’re having some issues getting the Mac and Linux builds ready, so we’re releasing the Windows build of Alpha 5 today with Mac and Linux soon to follow.
Major Features / Enhancements:
Minor Improvements:
Bug Fixes:
Known Issues: (soon to be fixed in build 5a)
Alpha 5 is close, but after some unforseen delays - in a true show of dedication to research, I came down with a terrible space virus last week - we’ve decided to push it into next week, no later than May 28th. As consolation please enjoy the above: final art for the raider boarding ship by Jeremy Mitchell. Mean lookin’!
We sincerely apologize for the delay, but rest assured we’re making good progress. The pizza icon from the previous post is now gone. Alpha 5 is going to have a lot in it. SOON.
Alpha 5 is progressing and should be ready next week! Above, a rough cut of something I’ve been working on: a Research Assignment screen that lets you track research in a more global way. We’d wanted to add this with Alpha 4, but it’ll be especially nice to have now that you’ll need to research cures for some of the nastier diseases you’ll encounter.
All the major pieces are in place now, and we’re going to spend this week refining and balancing everything.
The pizza icon on that screen is my reminder that the screen isn’t done yet. Once it’s up to snuff I’ll remove it and possibly enjoy a Pizza Reward.
