Welcome to Gagarin Station

The updated station interiors are all done and I've moved on to working through an intimidating pile of bugs. I'm quite fond of bugs IRL, so I've stopped thinking of it as bug squashing and more like I just have to shoo them out of the kitchen, help them find a nicer habitat. Give 'em a little sugar water, find a nice leaf to set them on. Anyway.

New Station Interiors Complete!

Brand new interiors are in place for depot, outpost and city class stations. The lighting issues introduced in the last update have been fixed, but I'm still not super happy with the lighting. Lighting is hard. But you know my motto, better than before is good enough for now.

Welcome to Gagarin Station!

Outpost hangar exit

Commercial Services

"You are here"

In addition to less janky lighting, the interiors are now more visually interesting and slightly more believable, with equipment for refueling and air handling, maintenance hatches, and, you know, pipes & shit. Purely cosmetic. I've also given each province their own interior color scheme, so while stations of the same class are still quite samey, at least there's some variation now between provinces.

The landing pads are now much smaller, upping the difficulty a bit by requiring more accurate landings. There's still quite a margin for error, but it's more like 1 meter rather than 10. This allowed me to place the hangar exit closer to the ship, and I put the terminals for refueling and managing contracts closer to the hangar itself, so the whole "get out of the ship / turn in contract / pick up contract / refuel / get back to the ship" routine is less tedious than it was.

I hadn't intended on working on the space stations at all for this update, and it's been a huge detour, but it's one that I'm glad I took. The old placeholder designs were getting pretty stale, and I think it would have been a mistake to let them stick around until the province updates, as was the original plan. I'll continue to work on these interiors in future updates, but I'm quite happy with where they're at for now.

Fixin' Bugz

I am now faced with a list of over 50 bugs, both major & minor. Play testing will reveal more. Fixing some will create others. We've got game breaking bugs, we've got bugs that can probably wait for a future update to be dealt with and bugs that definitely cannot wait, we've got bugs that bug me but might not bug you, the most tremendous bugs, bugs like you've never seen, big strong bugs with tears in their eyes. One bug, two bug, red bug, blue bug. Fucking bugs.

Coming Up Next

I have no idea how long all this bug fixing is going to take, it's just so hard to estimate. And I'm always wrong even when I think it's going to be easy to estimate, so let's just say that I'll probably be done someday. But after that, BOOYA BABY, we'll get this thing out in the wild.

I haven't decided yet, but I'm also kind of thinking about putting together a new tutorial series. I think I made the right call by making a video series instead of an in-game tutorial (for now), but MAN is that thing long & boring. I've already written the outline for a much more concise series. We'll see. Is it worth it? I don't know. Is anything worth it? Not healthy to think too hard about it. OK SEE YA!