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Hello everyone,

I am hoping to start a public beta playtest on Steam of SpaceSlog (If all goes well) from Monday the 26th of August for one week, until Monday 2nd of September. Please sign up if you want to be included.
Accounts will be picked at random and we will only choose a small pool of players for this first test.

Please also note that this is to help test and offer feedback on the current progress and state of the game, so please only apply if you wish to help test and report issues. If you only want to try the game then please wait for us to release a demo - which I hope will be the following week (As long as no major issues are found during the playtest)

You can register your interest here.

https://produnogames.com/blog/2023/07/20/atmosphere-in-spaceslog/

In this months development video we discuss upgrading to Godot 4, a few new features in the game and how many wishlists we have acquired over the last couple of weeks.

You can view the video below over on YouTube.

Below are the current store fronts where you will be able to purchase SpaceSlog. The game is currently not available for sale so please feel free to wishlist it.


Steam

Epic Games Store

Itch.io

Hey everyone, I posted a new devlog over on our webpage regarding our new logo, go check it out .

I just wanted to give everyone a quick heads up regarding the development of SpaceSlog. We are currently in the process of setting up the Steam page. We are just waiting for new art assets from our artists then we can submit this to Steam for review.

Please note however that this will just be a 'coming soon' page where we can start to accumulate wishlists and also allow our testers to download the game via Steams new playtest feature. We hope to have this live before the end of March, at which point I will post again here.

We still plan to release in some form of early access this year, but that will be on Itch.io only. So any early adopters are able to purchase and play the game if they want to. This will also help us gain at least some revenue for development, which means less contract work for me and more time spent developing SpaceSlog (We also need to pay our artists plus other development costs).

Steam relies on wishlists to determine how popular a game will be, which then helps them determine the level of promotion the game will receive on release. This means we need to gain as many wishlists as we can before we release into EA on Steam. For this reason we will not be releasing on Steam until at least 2025. But this means we will have a much better, fully featured and polished game to release to the larger audience. Please note that SpaceSlog will stay in early access on Steam for as long as is needed.

I hope this approach will give us the best chance to succeed, allowing us to develop our game exactly as envisioned and to the highest quality possible.

https://produnogames.com/blog/2022/11/30/mod-support-in-spaceslog-devlog-2/

Here I talk a bit about the game, show some basic game play and talk a little bit about where we are going. You can find the main blog over on the webpage HERE

[Information on how you can help translate SpaceSlog]

Information on how you can help translate SpaceSlog


We use Github to keep track of all localisations and to allow collaboration between the files. The repos are currently set to private and i will make these public once the game has been released in some kind of capacity. If you want to help then please DM me and ensure you have a Github account so i can add you to the repo.

If you have not used Github before, then i would suggest downloading the Github desktop app https://desktop.github.com.

Although translations can be added directly to the game and will work. They should be added at compile time to take advantage of optimizations. I will pull all language files from the repo for each update of SpaceSlog.




Translating SpaceSlog


All the languages can be found in the SpaceSlog game directory>Data>Core>Language.

When adding your own language you need to name the folder with the correct locale code. A list can be found at this link.
You can check the English (en) language files for an example and copy paste stuff over if needed.


There are four folders containing the different types of translations needed for SpaceSlog:

• Keys folder contents are used for menu items and labels. These are written using .csv format.
• Generation folder contents are for names and other procedural generation text. These use .json format.
• Strings folder contents contain various .json files containing text used by the game.
• Anything in Injected contain translated lines for anything in the Core folders. ie, anything that can be modded.
  To translate these files you will need to add a .json file with the same name as another file from the Core folders, then ensure you add a key to the dictionary that follows the same key as the item you want to translate.
  This key should then contain a 'title' which is the name of the item and a 'description' which describes the item.
  

Metadata:
You will need to fill out a Language_Info.json file - again this can be taken from the English language files and just replace the current data with your own.

Note: Please ensure files are saved in UTF-8 format, otherwise it may cause errors.

@Daneel53 has kindly created a tool to help with translations of SpaceSlog. You can find it here.


Translating SpaceSlog Steam page


We still need our Steam page translating to various other languages, this helps us to advertise the game in other locales in the correct language, hopefully increasing the popularity of the game.

If you would like to assist with these translations then you can find our repo here.
There you will find information on how you can help and the languages that are still outstanding.


Thankyou for helping translate SpaceSlog.

Feel free to check out the blog post on electricity in SpaceSlog over on our webpage. I will make a new thread here each time i upload a new blog.

https://produnogames.com/blog/2022/03/01/electricity/

I am currently working on the power systems and we have a few choices regarding efficiency.

A generator will burn Uranium. So we can either have a small generator that takes up one tile and generates 1000w of power per 1 Uranium. 1 Uranium will take 3 hours to burn. (These numbers still subject to change)

We can add efficiencies for space used and for burn rate per watts of power. For example, we have a large generator that can produce 5000w of energy per 5 uranium per 3 hours.

So 4 small generators will take up 4 tiles and produce 4000w of power per 4 Uranium per 3 hours.

1 large generator will take up 4 tiles and produce 5000w of power per 5 Uranium per 3 hours. Which means we are producing the same but within a smaller footprint.

We could however take this one step further and add a burn rate. Meaning the larger generator can have a lower burn rate so it burns less fuel per power needed. Example would be it takes 4 hours to burn 1 Uranium rather than the 3 hours the smaller generator takes.

We also have a durability efficiency rating. So the lower the health of the object, the less power it can produce. Which means they have to be maintained well.

Thoughts, suggestions?

I guess the efficiency thing could be some sort of upgrade via research....

SpaceSlog is now on Itch.io. Currently you still cannot purchase the game, though I am hoping to have a playable version at some point this year. At which point the game will release in early access and you will be able to purchase it from Itch.io. I still have not decided on a price but it will be around £15, then increase in price through later builds.

Currently I am still working though engineering contract work to enable me to pay the bills, so if you want to support me to enable me to continue making the game, then purchasing the EA build is probably the best way to do this, inc telling your friends to as well 


Heres the link to the store: https://produno-games-studios.itch.io/spaceslog


I suspect everyone will eventually get a Steam key, though obviously this is not something I can confirm or promise until the game is actually on Steam. Though it seems to be the case that Steam will generally allow you to supply keys to those that have bought the game from other stores like Itch.io.

I will from time to time be looking for new testers for the game. As we will initially be releasing on Itch.io, every tester will get a key for this platform. Meaning you will have access to all the newest builds of SpaceSlog from Itch.io forever.
If you would like to become a tester then please reply here with the following information outlined below.


Your OS and PC specs.
If you have any experience with any kind of bug tracker software (Not particularly needed).
Any previous experience testing games.




A couple of notes:

The most active members of the community will be chosen first.
There is a very limited amount of spaces available so do not be upset if you are not chosen.

Feedback on the following would be appreciated. We currently have rooms and these rooms can be assigned to pawns in a similar way to how beds are assigned to pawns in Rimworld, plus various other perks and features. It is also how atmosphere, heat etc all calculate and work.


I had been re-working the building as per the poll results which means we build hull, then we can build flooring over hull, similar to the way this works in Starship Theory.

The question is, how do we want to handle the way rooms works in regards to breaches. We currently have two choices that i can think of. Fyi, when i mention hull breach i mean either a hull or flooring tile has been removed or destroyed, leaving part of the ship open to space.


1. We remove the room and the atmosphere on a hull breach. This is easy to maintain because as soon as we have a hull breach, everything is removed so there is nothing to keep track of. Once the breach is sealed, the game re-creates the room and everything it needs. I suspect this will be annoying to the player though if they have a breach and it continually removes the room including the name and any pawns assigned. Though maybe it will not be much of a problem?

2. The second way is much more complex but may work better. We keep the room and alert the player there has been a breach. Atmosphere will slowly leak until the breach has been sealed. We need to consider at which point rooms will be destroyed though, so we need to keep track of this, ie, if more than 50% of a room is open to space we completely remove the room. Or do we remove any tiles open to space from the room, which could lead to other potential issues.


Any other ideas are welcomed, but from a technical perspective this is a pretty difficult problem to tackle.

We will have alert levels which can be activated on the ship. Traditionally alerts seem to be Red, Amber and Green. But as i was creating the buttons for these and realising it takes too much room to write the colour as text on the button, it may not be very good for those who are colourblind.



So we could have either High, Medium, Low Alerts levels (Although they are still fairly long to write on the buttons when we have very little space). Instead i was thinking of having Level1, Level2, Level3. Represented as L1, L2, L3.

Any other thoughts on this?

For anyone that has not seen it, i posted a blog regarding modding in SpaceSlog over on our main page. https://produnogames.com/blog/2021/04/25/modability/

If you have any questions regarding modding in SpaceSlog then feel to ask them here!

I posted a poll over on the discord asking what kind of factions people would prefer to see in SpaceSlog.

These were the questions asked:

What kind of factions or gameplay experience would you prefer?

A: Procedural generated factions that change every game and have limited lore and background?
B: Static factions that stay the same every game but have much deeper lore and background?


The poll is leaning towards B and i do have a few ideas regarding this.

We could have specific faction types which follow a strict rule for procgen factions. This means we could potentially have factions of type Bandit, Religious, Reaver etc. These faction types will have a loose backstory to guide the engine to create them. We can have other hardcoded rules for this for instance - ensuring we always have at least one Bandit type faction.

The faction type could also contain other rules to help the creation process. An example could be technological state, will Religious factions always have low technology? Or power, will a Military type faction always have high power (Power is what decides how powerful a faction should be, how much wealth it has ect.)


Feel free to give me your ideas! Is this a good way to go to ensure we have some kind of static factions mixed with procedural generation for expanded replayability? What faction types should we have? What rules should we have and how far should we go with them?