Spirit of the Stars

Spiritus Astrum should be transiting to Free early next week, so I have been working on improvements and bug fixes for the game so that it will hopefully be more stable and bug-free when the price change occurs.

I have added a full-featured bug reporter to the game that allows players to submit log files (If they choose to) automatically.

I have also made several improvements, mostly to the single-player survival modes, such as allowing the valkyrie fighter to spawn at random in the world, and improving the docking/undocking system.

I have improved the LLM frontend in the game, and added very preliminary support for remote access to OpenAI’s API. This feature is still in beta however.

I have fixed an issue with players saves breaking after some updates. This was caused by steam replacing the local server database with a blank version when the server-side database file was modified. I have fixed this by storing all databases and player saves in the persistent data path directory, which is where they should have been.

There have also been a lot of minor improvements and fixes to the UI, and other systems, as well as improvements to the multiplayer server code.

Players can leave marker beacons in multiplayer mode now too.

I have been mostly focusing on bug fixes, optimisations, and adding tutorial/helm menus, etc, to the game.

The learning curve in Spiritus Astrum is very steep. This is partly by design, but also partly due to lack of tutorials, etc.

I have temporarily disabled Ansel and VR support. These features were working, but not fully, and were causing issues for people who activated them accidentally.

I have fixed some optimisation issues with the game, and added some tutorials and help screens to the main UI and the startup sequence. I have also added navigation aids to the game to help guide players

Hopefully this will reduce the learning curve for new players.

I have spent the week improving the Early Access build of Spiritus Astrum.

The community has discovered several bugs and issues which I have been working to fix.

Some of the more serious issues, involving players being unable to log in to the game and players having their saves corrupted, should now be fixed.

I have also added an additional “Quality” slider to the main menu graphics options to allow players more control over their graphical quality. This should help players playing the game on older hardware.

I have made improvemnts to the UI to make it more intuitive and reliable.

Probably the biggest quality of life change that I made was to improve the movement system for players. The old system was quite clunky, and resulted in a noticeable “sliding” effect, the new system is substantially better.

There is still some work to be done, but I am making good progress!

Spiritus Astrum has now been in Early Access for a week.

The launch was somewhat rocky, to say the least. There were substantially more bugs in the game than I realised, and I picked up some negative reviews and comments because of that.

Once I discovered the issues that players were having with the game, I decided that I would make the Early Access period free, rather than paid, and I made an announcement to this effect on steam.

Unfortunately, Steam support has told me that I cannot change the price of a newly released game for at least 30 days, and so the game will remain paid until then.

On the plus side, the community response has been extremely supportive, with a large number of people buying the game even after I announced that it would become free just because they wanted to support me! I find this very encouraging, and I am very grateful for this support.

The focus now is to continue to work on the game, and fix the bugs that have been reported.

The most common issues reported seem to be issues with logging in. These were caused by a combination of confusing UI design and the game server being blocked by users firewall and network security settings.

There were also some issues with saving and loading not working correctly.

I am confident that most of these issues have been fixed.

There is still quite a lot of work to do, but the game is in Early Access, and I am confident that if the community continues to report bugs and issues then I can solve them quickly.

Spiritus Astrum will be launching into EA early tomorrow, the 14th September.

The base price of the game is 4.99 USD, and there is a 25% launch discount for the first 14 days.

There may be some bugs and issues with the EA release, especially in the first few days and weeks, but I am confident that the game is ready for EA.

I am very grateful to my beta testers for finding several bugs, which have already been fixed.

I have also created a test branch for Spiritus Astrum, which will hopefully make deploying any needed fixed quicker and safer in the future.

I am just a week away from the EA release of Spiritus Astrum.

I have added some new weapons and effects, as well as some upgrades and improvements to the valkyrie fighter in the third campaign.

I have also made some minor quality of life improvements to the game, including adding more lights, etc, to some of the capital ships.

I am now working on some final debugging, and on a new trailer for the game. There have been extensive improvements since the last trailer, so I think it’s time for a new one.

I did find some minor issues while gathering footage from the trailer, but these should be fixed in a day or so.

The last major issue is the price. I am still not sure what price I want to set for Spiritus Astrum.

It will either be 4.99 USD, or free.

The goal with the project is not to make a profit, however my concern is that if I release the game for free, people will think it’s low quality, or full of microtransactions, upsells, etc (Which it isn’t).

I will decide on a final price very shortly.