- Dev Log #13: The "Economy & Colonization" update is now live! - 13 March 2021
Dear players, The first major content update of Galactic Crew II "Economy & Colonization" now live and available to anyone having access to the Beta version of the game! All features were already explained in previous dev logs, but here is a summary of all the things that are new or improved! Tutorial added The first major addition to the game is a Tutorial that will teach you the fundamental mechanics of the game and give you an introduction into space battles, crew management, navigation and operations. It takes you by the hand and guides you through everything step by step. Any veterans of Galactic Crew 1 won't learn much new, but it will help any new Galactic Crew members. Creating new games The category "Background" was renamed to "Profession". There is a new profession for you to choose: the scientist. She has similar abilities as an engineer, but she isn't able to build colonies…
- Dev Log #12: The Closed Alpha is here! - 6 February 2021
Dear players, Last april, I made my work on Galactic Crew II public and now you can test the current state of development! I will invite more players with promotional actions over the course of the next weeks and months, but right now the Closed Alpha is exclusive to all owners of Galactic Crew! Important notice! All game files of Galactic Crew II are stored in a separate folder. That means, that any save game files from Galactic Crew 1 on your computer won't be changed by using the Alpha version of Galactic Crew II, but the Alpha might overwrite your Cloud saves. So, if you have used Cloud saves for Galactic Crew 1, I recommend to start Galactic Crew 1 once to download all Cloud saves before starting the Alpha to make sure you have physical copies of your save games. If you want to make a backup of your save game files, you can find them here: Open your Windows Explorer Type in "%appda…
- Dev Log #11: The Closed Alpha is very near - 2 January 2021
Dear players, I do not have any exciting new features announce, because I spend the time since the last update only on playtesting and bug fixing. When I first started playing the game as a whole instead of testing single features, it was a brutal bug fest. However, with each new test & bug fix session, it gets better and better. I have to take core of many things that are currently going on in my private life and my dayjob, but I hope to launch the Closed Alpha by the end of January or early February. This version will neither be perfect nor will everything work perfectly. This will be a version showing the current state of the game that will be available to every owner of Galactic Crew. You can test it and give me feedback and report bugs if you want, but I fully understand if you want to wait until the final release. It is a mere option to play even before the Early Access. Of course…
- Dev Log #10: The Closed Alpha is near - 12 December 2020
Dear players, A couple of weeks have passed since my last update and it was a very fruitful time. Promotional art was created for Galactic Crew II as you can see below. As a result of that a Steam page has been created. I already got a positive review of it from Valve so I can make it public at any given time. Free Galactic Crew II for everyone! In my very first announcement of Galactic Crew II, I said that I will try my best to provide a free copy to every owner of the original Galactic Crew game. In the past weeks, I worked together with a Valve employee to figure out how we can achieve this. As a result, we will do it like this: Once I can start a Closed Alpha, I will create a second branch in Steam of the original Galactic Crew. That means, everyone who owns a copy of the game can, if he/she wants, download the development version of Galactic Crew II. You may know this method from o…
- Dev Log #9: It´s all coming together - 7 November 2020
Dear players, If you follow me on Twitter, you already know that I worked on basically any feature of Galactic Crew II over the past few weeks. Level Editor I replaced the user interface design with the same design elements I use for the game itself, making the level edior visually more attractive. I also added a new feature that let's you group models. You can then insert the model on any planet you are designing making new planets an easy and fast process. Colonization I completed the management code for planetary outposts and added the first user interface elements enabling you to transfer goods and items between your spaceship and your outpost. I am currently waiting for an artist to complete my order of new models, but I wanted to share a preview of some buildings that will find their way into the game soon. Game engine I invested two weeks to improve the underlying game engine. My…
- Dev Log #8: Planetary colonization - 25 September 2020
Dear players, I primarily focused on adding the colonization feature I wrote about last time. I am not completely done, but I managed to implement the most vital parts of the feature. Whenever you are on a planet, your engineer can start building an outpost anywhere on the planet. The feature works similar to video game classics like Dungeon Keeper where you build your base by placing floors, walls, doors and build rooms. Like starship rooms, each outpost room has a specific purpose and active or passive influence on the outpost. Solar arrays provide energy, while crew quarters provide living space and workshops enable you to craft a wide range of objects. There will be a limited range of features you can do with your outposts once I start the Closed Alpha, but more features will be added over time. I am working with two skilled 3D artists who are currently creating game assets for Gala…
- Dev Log #7: More planets and shield effects - 29 August 2020
Dear players, As I wrote in the last update, I was mainly working on three different tasks in the past weeks. Planets First of all, I continued working on the new environment system I developed for planetary missions in Galactic Crew II. The terrain is now smoother and the water looks more natural. The new environment system does not only look better than in Galactic Crew I, but is also faster, more efficient in terms of CPU and memory usage and it enables features that simply were not possible in Galactic Crew 1. One of which I will announce later with great enthusiasm. ːsteamhappyː Spaceship shields After finalizing the terrain shaders, I invested time in a new shield effect for spaceships. As you know, in Galactic Crew 1 you could equip your spaceship with shield generators, boost their efficiency with shield boosters and you were able to regenerate them with drones and engineers. Ho…
- Dev Log #6: Planets and level editor - 7 August 2020
Dear players, Over the past weeks, I focused on a new planet system to make developing planety expeditions faster, to make modding easier and improving performance and efficiency. I am not done, but I want to present you infos about the current state. Before I started anything visual, I made a complete revamp of the way planets are stored and processed in my game engine. I created a few demo levels to test both the level editor and my data structures and even complex planet levels were less than 2 MB big. This means you can create many levels and share it with this community without wasting any hard drive space and you don't have to care about network bandwidth when using them in multiplayer games! I am still optimizing the loading time of planets, but I am already down to a few seconds. I plan on further improving the loading time for an even better gaming experience - no one likes to…
- Dev Log #5: Mining, Exploring, Equipment and UI - 3 July 2020
Dear players, I wanted to give you an update last week, but because of a surgery, I was not able to do so. However, I was able to complete multiple milestones in the past weeks. Asteroid mining In Galactic Crew 1, you had the possibility to mine asteroids in space to obtain iron with a chance to collect energy crystals and rare loot like diamonds. For Galactic Crew 2, this mechanic remains, but there are also other types of asteroids in one belt. For example, you can harvest silicon to craft building materials. Asteroids will also be fully animated to create a more dynamic feeling. New equipment & UI is completed I finally completed the work on the user interface and made some further improvements to it. For example, the view below shows the current state of the crew overview. It is similar to the one used in Galactic Crew 1, but is more cleaned up and all features of all pieces of equi…
- Dev Log #4: Salvaging - 6 June 2020
Dear captains, In past three weeks, I worked on several topics. I am still working on the re-design of the user interface, but I am almost done with all controls, which is a great development milestone. Salvaging One of the features I completed in the last three weeks is salvaging. As I mentioned in an earlier Dev Log, all resources and goods will be important in Galactic Crew II. Therefore, you will need to have ways to obtain, collect or harvest them. A new way to acquire resources is using salvage drones. Salvage drones can be equipped at any space station like other drone types and they use the same slots as combat, shield and mining drones. Engineers got the new active skill to dispatch salvage drones to shipwrecks and space junk you find during your journeys. The quantity of salvage cycles for each drone depends on the skill level of the engineer dispatching the drones. Although t…
- Dev Log #3: Better dungeons - 16 May 2020
Dear players, Dungeons As I wrote in a previous post, I want to make everything better in Galactic Crew 2. I loved the dungeons in Galactic Crew, but I had some issues with them. For example, it took me a long time to hand-craft them and new rooms, enemies or resources were difficult to add. I completely rewrote most game mechanics regarding dungeon management. In Galactic Crew 2, there won't be a fixed set of dungeons, but all dungeons will be generated when you enter them. This has many advantages: it takes less disk space, because I do not have to provide dungeons and you will never visit the same dungeon twice. Also, I can easily add new rooms, features, enemies or loot at any given point and it will be automatically available for any future dungeon you visit. That makes it much easier and faster for me to add new content! The difficult part is to create meaningful dungeons that don…
- Dev Log #2: New inventory and tech tree - 2 May 2020
Dear players, Two weeks ago, I announced that I work on Galactic Crew 2. Today, I want to give you a short update on what I did in the past two weeks and what is currently in the making. Inventory One of the ongoing processes is to overhaul the entire user interface. The screenshot below shows the new inventory design and the resources of Galactic Crew 2. In the first game, most resources where just for trading or were used in some missions. In Galactic Crew 2, all resources will have a purpose and there are going to be new ways to acquire resources. One of the new resources is construction material. I wonder what this resources will be used for... ːwinter2019happybulbː Tech tree One of the game mechanics that resulted in very positive feedback was the achievement system to unlock new content. Of course, Galactic Crew 2 will feature it again. However, I redesigned the entire user interf…
- Dev Log #1: I am working on Galactic Crew II - 15 April 2020
Dear players, Recap Making video games was always a childhood dream of mine. I founded my own company in 2017 and worked for more than two years full-time on Galactic Crew. It was quite a journey. I experience a lot of things and although I could not create a sustainable business and went back to become an employer for another company last year, I enjoyed the ride. The start of Galactic Crew was quite rough. I had to rush it, because I needed financial fundings to keep my business running and as a consequence the game lacked essential features in the beginning. First, I had weekly updates pushing new content every Saturday and I could see increasing player satisfaction in form of nice e-mails and also numbers: The chargebacks/refunds on Steam dropped dramatically in the first months. After the game was released last year, I was proud on one hand, because I could be a full-time game deve…
- Update 44 - Level Editor Bug Fix - 8 December 2019
An issue was fixed that could cause game crashes when starting the level editor.
- Update 43 - New settings and fixes - 24 August 2019
I've added a new setting to invert mouse buttons to support left-handed players. You can find the option at the bottom of the in-game's settings window. In addition, two bugs have been fixed that could lead to crashs in rare cases.
- Update 42 - New winning condition - 15 June 2019
Dear players, As requested by a player, a way to win a space battle has been added. You can now win a space battle by killing every crew member on the enemy spaceship. It does not matter how many hull strength is left, if every enemy is defeated!
- Update 41 - Tutorial Fixes - 8 June 2019
Several bugs regarding the Tutorial and gameplay have been reported and fixed: In the Tutorial, the enemy spaceship could flee resulting in an aborting Tutorial. When zooming in, the Tutorial text boxes pointing to objects could display wrong information. Upgrading your spaceship at a shipyard could result in a game crash.
- Update 40 - RELEASE - 28 March 2019
Dear players, It's been a long ride and I enjoyed it. Now, I switch a button and the game is released. Story I started developing a 3D game engine back in 2015 as a side project to my day job without any plans on making an actual game or even founding a company. As time passed, the game engine got bigger, better, more reliable and I started to build a small game around it. More time passed and it was already mid 2016 when I decided to quit my job to realize my childhood dream to found my own video game company. Another year and a lot of work later, I had the very first version of Galactic Crew released as Early Access product on Steam. I was so proud of my work and contacted influencers on YouTube from around the world and told them about my game. Some of them requested a key and put their Let's Play videos online. The reviews were bad. I mean... really bad. It was devastating for me, b…
- Update 39 - New planets, dungeons, skills and missions - 2 February 2019
Dear players, The latest update of Galactic Crew features over 60 new dungeons, four new planets, a new skill and new events and missions. Capturing ships A feature that has been requested quite often is the ability to capture enemy ships. This feature finally made it into the game! Your engineers got a new ability to capture an enemy ship after you disabled it! You do not need to create a new game to use this feature, all engineers automatically have this ability as soon as you patch the latest version of the game! You can start the game with a rather small spaceship and use the Unpredictable Space card that was introduced with the last update in combination with the new engineer ability to capture larger ships. You can also capture ships with unique paintings that are normally not available like the Pirate Zeus! https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F305197%25E2%2580%25A6
- Update 38 - Level editor - 8 December 2018
The latest update of Galactic Crew brings you a level editor to create your own levels and several improvements and fixes to polish the rest of the game. Some of these features were requested by the community. If you have anything you want to see in Galactic Crew, feel free to send me an e-mail at [email protected] Level editor A detailed description how to work with the level editor can be found here. In general, you can choose between a desert and grass type planet and add any model to your scene that is available in the game. There are also a bunch of models available in the level editor that are not part of any planetary scene or dungeon in the game. https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F30519747%2Ffb375784c04964c9ddf96e44a0c6a736a62ebee1.png On the left side you will find a list of all objects sorted into the categories buildings, props, nature, N…
