The Jovian System

[MF]

Quite interested in this. I like the combat ideas. Building a spacesation could be fun.

Concerning Titan Outpost. The NPC's felt like whoever designed them.

Haha, thanks. That would be me. Most were made with the same character tool I wrote for the player to create the player character with added tweaks. An obvious exception is Daxia, who I'll be the first to admit looks better than the rest. Phil, Karen and Syaoran are not supposed to be lookers, but the other NPCs weren't intended to offend the senses much either.

Jovian System will use the same system, but improved. Better textures, new base meshes. However, a lot of NPCs have radiation burns so prepare for more ugly characters.

 

[Tavernking]

The images in the original post are broken.

 

[Modron]

They load just fine for me.

 

[Tavernking]

They load just fine for me.

Weird, didn't work on Chrome but loaded on Safari.

The game looks good.

 

[MF]

They load just fine for me.

Weird, didn't work on Chrome but loaded on Safari.

The game looks good.

Thanks. Yeah Chrome blocks non-https image sources ever since a 2020 update. The screenshots are out of date anyway, I should get around to posting that development update this week.

 

[Modron]

Didn't notice that release date before, this on track for January 2 still?

 

[Tyranicon]

Didn't notice that release date before, this on track for January 2 still?

Looks like there will be a closed alpha instead of a wide EA release.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1441520/discussions/0/3598968559036225815/

The Jovian System is shaping up very well, but due to the ambitious nature of the combat system, the early 2023 target for Early Access will not be met.

There will be a closed combat alpha in the form of a skirmish mode, from which the combat system will iterate and improve. This is almost ready.

While that is tested by a select group of people, work on the rest of the game will continue, hopefully towards Early Access by the end of 2023.

Even though early 2023 was never a target for the full release, even if you were hoping to get your hands early access in a few months, I'm sorry. I hope I'm not trying the patience of those of you who are looking forward to the game too much.

Stick around and I'll try to update more frequently.

 

[MF]

The closed alpha is just the combat alpha mentioned in This Thread. Won't be out before the end of the year, though, as I decided to do some more work with immediate pay, what with the ridiculous energy prices here right now. Cost of living practically doubled and it's really messing with my development budget/schedule.

Not sure where it says January 2 though? It should list 'To Be Announced' on the Steam page?

 

[Modron]

Release date on the top right is filled in on the steam page above the developer/publisher links/user tags. Even if below it says coming soon.

 

[MF]

Ah, didn't realize that, thanks! I moved it up, as that date refers to the general Early Access release and sadly that's a long way off.

 

[Tyranicon]

The closed alpha is just the combat alpha mentioned in This Thread. Won't be out before the end of the year, though, as I decided to do some more work with immediate pay, what with the ridiculous energy prices here right now. Cost of living practically doubled and it's really messing with my development budget/schedule.

Not sure where it says January 2 though? It should list 'To Be Announced' on the Steam page?

You gotta do what you gotta do, nobody (reasonable) will fault you for that. Making money as a gamedev is fucking hard.

 

[MF]

Just a quick update on this:

A couple of things happened.

• I was swamped with work and making ends meet, but that's stable now.
• My GPU got fried and it took NVidia 6 weeks to determine the cause of failure and send a warranty replacement. On the plus side, they sent me a 4080. That's awesome, but I had to basically restrict development to non-graphical things for two months. I got to do some campaign writing, which was a fun reprieve from the combat programming. I also took the opportunity to take a step back and look at what's there and what I still have to build. Daunting as it is, I was still pretty happy about it.
• I decided I wanted to support not just multiple teams in combat, but set diplomatic stances for them so you can achieve allied victory, remain neutral or have an FFA. This will be necessary for the campaign anyway because I wrote a quest where you can pit factions against each other. I initially planned on scripting that, but it's much better to do it this way. It required rethinking the team and combat character data structure. This took a while, but I'm glad I caught this now because it would be exponentially more work to implement later. It's just one of those things where you can't iterate on what's there, it has to be implemented on the foundational level.

So what is the ETA on the combat alpha now? I honestly don't know. Things keep coming up and if I can't get it done by May, it might even be pushed back to the end of the summer. I'm shooting for May, though

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Any news?

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

You're old, bot.
senile me didn't spot The Jovian System general-thread.

 

[MF]

Well, there is in fact news.

A sort of pretest was done with just two friends and there were so many things that needed work that I didn't want to do a more public test yet, not even a closed one. Made huge strides since, but it's all in terms of scaffolding the systems, making the frameworks more robust, adding drag & drop to the inventory UI etc...Not very exciting to talk about. Well, maybe the improvements to the character system with things like a mutable buff/debuff system that can carry over from combat turns to out of combat time units and things like that are interesting. I should share more.

In any case, I do have some other cool things to talk about. I'll schedule some time for that, otherwise I'll never get around to it. I noticed it's been more than half a year since that last post but it feels like much less.

 

[Modron]

 

[Nm6k]

How is work on the game been going so far this year?

 

[MF]

Good and steady, but slower than I would have liked.

I vastly improved my tools and had to completely rework pathfinding for what I had in mind. I decided to take a few steps back and implement/test all this with abstract shapes instead of going for fully fledged good looking maps right away. I still have those maps, of course, but instead of adapting game mechanics to fit something that I think looks cool, I'm going to stick to doing it the other way around as a rule. I can always add custom environmental effects and such if I feel the need, but keeping a steady focus on the basics will make for a better game.

There was a crossroads where I almost decided to scale it back and implement more traditional RPG combat with just the vector movement as a gimmick, but I'm glad I didn't. I'm having a lot more fun with the zero gravity and spatiality aspect of it now that I've worked out the kinks. I'll post a new dev update about it after I finish up my current list.

On the actual RPG front I did get a lot done in terms of quests, locations, NPCs etc. I really needed the palette cleanser of clearing my head from all the math involved in the other aspects.

 

[Nm6k]

You still intend there to be a close alpha test with sign up's if that didn't already happened and I missed it?

 

[MF]

You still intend there to be a close alpha test with sign up's if that didn't already happened and I missed it?

You didn't miss anything. That is still the intention but it's hard to say when.