First day on the job (and still not fired)

About a week ago I published a vertical slice of "star damage", my longtime sci-fi immersive sim  passion project. The game evolved from an ongoing unity fps prototype which sprouted from the question "what if first person shooters could have detailed interactions with their weapons and also it was set in space?". The release itself is a simple demo of about 4 years of on and off dev, almost entirely done by myself (excluding things like mixamo animations and sound libraries). As it stands, the game is still rough as hell. Though I'm confident that the overall game experience will improve as I continue pushing out updates.

What's in the box?

The release is a vertical slice of the planned game with a tutorial level and about 30 minutes of gameplay.  I focused on a core set of games features to test if the game could hang together as a whole experience. Those features were: 

• A drag and drop inventory
• A basic combat system and enemy ai
• The ability to interact with the world and tinker with items
• An examination system to add noir vibes
• An interactive tutorial that explains all of this
• In-game cutscenes and save states
• A menu system to drive basic options and game state 

There are still bugs that appear now and again during gameplay. Overall I can't complain too much about the way things turned out.

How'd it go?

The engagement on itch.io with my game has been beyond my expectations at around 20 views and one download. Those numbers might sound ridiculous to any normal person, but I appreciate viewership of any kind after years of working in a silo. I'm hoping that as I continue to refine my vision of the game that the game will steadily find it's audience, increasing it's engagement.

Looking forward 

There's still a fair amount of polish that I'm looking to get done before I continue. I'm currently doing an art pass on all the placeholder art (new models for hands, environment art, interactable items). The combat and enemy ai is in dire need of a second pass; if I have to see one more fucking enemy teleport in front of the player to get a jab in I'm going to lose my goddamned mind. Most importantly, I need to add in the credits list to credit all my user testing contributors that have made the game as well thought through as it is and a change log so players aren't blindsided when things inevitably change.

Long term my roadmap is:

- Fleshing out the existing mechanics

- Continuing to add content like new levels, new items and new enemies

- Refining UI and adding art to build towards a space-horror-pulp tone

- Restoring peer to peer multiplayer using steamworks (yes this was a multiplayer game at one point).

- Automated build pipelines so the latest and greatest builds are available all of the time instead of when I feel like building and uploading the game 

Let us boldly go

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm extremely pleased with the results of the release. I can't wait to continue to work on this project as as I'm able. If you've read any of this, I truly appreciate your interest in the project and I hope it can meet some of your expectations.

For now you can continue to expect any updates to the game to be pushed directly here for free.