Obey protocol or go rogue as you take on the role of a powerful A.I. in Starmancer. Build bustling space ports, secret laboratories, and ethically ambiguous human farms. Defend against starvation, sabotage, and space cannibals. Don't worry, you can always grow more humans.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Less than 3 days left!
about 6 years ago
– Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 08:54:39 PM
There's less than 56 hours to go in our Kickstarter!
Help Us
We don't have a crazy marketing team or anything. We just have Victor and Tyler.
You guys (and girls) can help us so much. If every one of you told just one more person about Starmancer, it would be awesome.
Please share our page on social media (or anywhere). Tweet it, create a thread in a relevant subreddit, or just tell a friend.
Many of you have been asking about new objects, so we wrote a quick devblog to show off some objects that are currently being worked on. You'll see these in the Alpha.
Thanks everyone for participating in the station building contest. We haven't decided on any winners yet, but there are some really cool stations out there.
We'll be announcing the winners tomorrow.
In the mean time, here are some of the stations:
A garden created by Lou Bagel
A fancy station created by Gremdavel
A very unique station made by Zio
Thanks everyone!
Don't forget to share our Kickstarter!
Creative Mode Reached and Doomsday!
about 6 years ago
– Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 01:23:25 AM
We've hit $100k which mean we now have enough funding to guarantee development will continue after initial release!
Thank you so much everyone!
Robots
Our next stretch goal (not the new one) is all about Robots.
We want to play around with the interplay of human with technology.
We're planning a faction composed of all robots. This faction doesn't inherently hate humans, but it prefers more "robotic" stations. As such, we'll be adding mechanical bodies that you create and transfer colonist consciousness into.
These will be entirely new colonist bodies.
They won't require normal food (so maybe they eat fuel) and they'll be able to survive in rooms without an atmosphere. We're actually planning on making special "robot" food recipes. Like a salad with fresh metal shavings.
The drawback is that normal colonists do not like seeing robots (especially if they were friends with the former colonist) and "human" factions don't like it when you upload a human consciousness into a machine.
Internally, we're planning on adding a random value between 0 and 100 for how much a faction likes robots vs humans. A value of 0 means that they hate humans. A value of 100 means they hate robots. A value of 50 means that they're neutral and will accept either humans or robots. So some factions will be fine with converting your colonists into robots.
We're also adding "brain implants" for controlling your colonists more directly. Combine this with robotic bodies and you'll essentially have some sort of "Cyberman" (from Doctor Who).
We're also adding cyborg limbs that you can use when a colonist loses their human limbs (you could also forcibly augment your colonists with robotic parts).
You'll research and build all of these things in your robotic lab.
Doomsday
Our new stretchgoal is focused on adding different ways for your colony to be destroyed.
Rogue colonists will secretly enter your colony and attempt to destroy it from within. Enemy factions can hack your colonist databanks, so a newly grown colonist could be an infiltrator in disguise. You'll get clues about who the rogue colonist is, so you can try to selectively "remove" the enemy colonist. Or you could just purge the entire colony. It's your choice.
We're also adding a new Xeno research lab that can get your colony into all sorts of trouble.
Dimensional rifts can appear. These can destroy entire sections of your station and cause...strange entities to appear (we're both huge fans of Lovecraft, so expect things to get weird). Occasionally normal colonists will spawn from dimensional rifts. Who knows where they came from or what they might be carrying.
Space plague is a deadly disease with no known cure. It slowly mutates your colonists and turns them into zombie-like creatures. Your mining ships will occasionally come back with an infected colonist or an entire horde of these monsters. You can build quarantine zones to keep your healthy colonists away from the sick ones.
Alien growth infestations can consume your entire station. This will be some sort of "mold" looking growth that slowly covers your floors and walls. Colonists will become trapped by this mold and slowly consumed. Think of the Zerg creep from Starcraft.
Thanks everyone!
New Stretch Goals and Demo Tutorial
about 6 years ago
– Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 12:49:05 AM
Hello everyone,
Aliens
We reached our 2nd Stretchgoal!
We'll now be able to expand our team with an additional programmer.
Our 5th stretchgoal and post-release expansion is themed around Aliens.
We want there to be some mystery surrounding them so we won't be revealing everything.
You'll be able to find old remnants of xeno technology, rare materials, blueprints, seeds, and such.
Acquired either through missions or trading.
The xeno tech will introduce a new tier of resources, used to build new versions of certain objects like reactors, turrets, and doors.
Creative Mode
This is a copy and paste from a previous update.
Creative mode is our next stretch goal.
Our intent is to provide you with the tools to create any station/scenario that you want.
You'll be able to build instantly (like in the demo), spawn resources, spawn colonists, spawn pirates, etc.
You can move colonists, edit their stats, give them diseases, whatever you want.
We'd also like it if the player can adjust relationships with other factions, but we might not have time for that.
Colonists won't die in creative mode, either.
There will be a button for switching between creative mode and non-creative mode.
Most of the work will just be in creating the user interface to support these features.
Demo Tutorial
Some of you asked for a tutorial on the demo, so here.
We realize that the interface isn't the best right now. We actually had no intentions of releasing a demo during our Kickstarter (we didn't think that people would actually want a demo).
Demo Update
We made some small updates to the demo.
Max zoom is now 2 times bigger
Added HD screenshot button (it will capture a screenshot in twice the game resolution)
The build is now a "development" build, so exceptions shouldn't cause a crash. You can expect things to get weird if there are any errors (but at least it won't crash).
Fixed some minor bugs that no one probably noticed
The new build links are live on the Kickstarter page.
Thanks everyone!
Chucklefish, Missions, Station Contest, Colonist Demo
about 6 years ago
– Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 12:41:18 AM
Hello everyone,
This has been a very busy week for us.
Chucklefish
If you haven't heard, we've officially made Chucklefish our publisher. You may know them from Stardew Valley (publishers) or Starbound (developers).
(I don't like to use exclamation marks, but I really am quite excited about this).
As you might imagine, this kept us incredibly busy in these past 2 weeks.
The short version is that they played an early build of the game and liked it (and us) enough to offer a publishing deal.
Victor and I will continue to develop Starmancer, and Chucklefish will provide us with all sorts of feedback and support. This shouldn't negatively affect our release date.
We wrote a dev blog about missions. It's probably one of the most asked about features.
It's a relatively light read. I personally enjoy writing about how specific mechanics are implemented more than big picture features (but I guess that's why I'm the programmer)
Many of you have been creating really cool stations, so we thought it would be fun to have a little contest.
The rules are simple: Take a screenshot of your station and tweet it using #StarmancerContest.
Make sure to follow us on Twitter (so that we can message you when you win).
The best stations win.
We're having 3 categories: Most Unique Station, Most Fancy Station, and Best Garden
You can submit 1 entry per category. We're also going to select 1 random winner, so just tweet your station and you'll have a chance to win. There will be 4 winners in total.
Every winner will get:
Free digital copy of Starmancer
Alpha/Beta Access
Design a colonist
Design a mission
You do NOT have to back us on Kickstarter in order to be eligible for the contest.
Colonist Demo
Our demo is not yet live on the Kickstarter page, but it is finished.
I need to sleep, so I don't want to make the demo publicly available (in case there are any issues).
If anything doesn't work, leave a comment, and I'll get to it in the morning.
Please don't save these links, because they might change in the future.
We want this to feel like a demo, so we've limited/removed several features. You can't actually produce any resources with the ore refinery or food recycler, for example. You can still use them, they just won't do much. Basically, we want to give you a sample of colonists, but not the actual game.
Don't forget that colonists need to breathe. Build an Oxygen Machine and attach a vent. If your colonists die...just spawn some more.
Don't forget to place incinerators and morgue drawers to clean up the corpses.
You can change a specific colonist's job just by clicking on them (and using the dropdown). There could be an issue if you change a colonist's job while they're performing their current job.
Colonists also use a schedule (you can change it in the very "polished" UI). By default, they stop working at around 22:00.
If you didn't know, you can press 1-9 to speed up the game. 0 sets the game to the max speed, but I wouldn't do this. I mean, you can, but things get weird.
Here are the changes in this build:
Press "C" to spawn a colonist at the cursor position. Only 6 living colonists can exist at a time. Colonists will self-destruct after 3 to 8 game hours
1.) The duration of most things has been reduced so that you can actually do things before your colonists die.
2.) Grass, Sand, and Water will now randomly place plants when placed. You can place these floors multiple times to change the randomly selected plants. There is around a 66% chance for no plants to be placed.
3.) Removed morale penalty for seeing a dead body (otherwise nothing would ever get done in the demo). This isn't actually true, we simply changed the minimum class level to 15. Colonists start at class level 0, and they won't survive long enough to become class level 15.
4.) Added a memory display to the colonist window, just so you can see the various memories that the colonists create (this is only for the demo...probably)
5.) Colonists start hungry, thirsty, and tired so that they'll eat, drink, and sleep before self-destructing.
6.) The "Exit Game" was moved to the top right corner. A Starmancer watermark was added to the top left corner.
7.) Your own turrets will shoot your colonists...for testing (colonists don't understand how to run away from a friendly turret, so they'll just stand there and die)
8.) Added screenshot button, it will automatically hide the UI for you. The button is in the lower left corner. The hotkey is F12
9.) Blood will despawn after 7 in-game days. I'm not sure if there's a performance impact from lots of blood. You could spam spawn colonists in front of an active turret to stress test it.
Thanks everyone
Stream VOD and Screenshot Button
about 6 years ago
– Mon, Mar 05, 2018 at 10:06:15 PM
We've been 200% funded! Thank you!
Share the Page
You people have done so much already, but it would be incredibly helpful if you told other people about our page.
If everyone tells just 1 friend about the game it would help out so much.
If you don't have any friends, just start talking to a stranger about Starmancer. You'll become great friends in no time.
Stream VOD
Thanks to everyone who came out during the stream. It was fun to show off the game and answer your questions.
We uploaded the entire video to youtube (it's around 4 hours)
Screenshot Button
Some of you asked for a screenshot button, so we added one.
The screenshot button is in the lower left. Press it, and a screenshot will be taken at double the resolution of the game window. All of the UI elements (including warning popups) will be hidden for you.
The zoom will not be affected, so zoom to whatever level you want before taking the screenshot.
The screenshots are saved to the same directory as the demo's exe (or equivalent).
F12 is the hotkey for the button.
Example of screenshot button
Demo Release
The new demo build will be released later this week. We're finishing up some colonist issues (minor things like colonist sleeping positions). Mostly we're just really busy with all of the Kickstarter things, so it's taking a bit of time.
Other Cool Kickstarter Games
We think that it's important to support indie games (we're a bit biased) so here are 2 really interesting Kickstarter campaigns that we've found.
I know you're busy, but check these games out. Click the links.
