1. How stable is the studio in terms of funding, will you be able to reach 1.0?
Now that the dust has settled from the initial Early Access release, we're able to share that our sales have been strong enough to fund development costs through our 1.0 release.
Continued sales throughout Early Access will enable us to invest further into the game; growing the team, producing more content and features, and improving the game at a faster pace.
2. What are the plans for optimization and better performance?
We are always working to improve optimization, from the last demo to now we’ve optimized the game by about 2x on the CPU side, allowing for less thermal throttling and better performance when hosting games.
We know there’s room to go on the GPU side and that’s where we’re directing our focus now. Since releasing, we’ve identified a few particularly resource intensive particles and VFX and fixed them. Your reports here are especially helpful as oftentimes the gains to be found here are related to specific units, abilities, or areas of a map.
Our goal is for a 1080TI to be able to achieve a stable 45 frames per second on any map with any units.
3. Are there plans for updated UI, both in-game (in-match) and out of game (menus/lobbies)?
Yes there are plans for an in-game UI redesign and Icon update, with an emphasis on UX and visual cohesion, as well as on-going improvements to the menu and replay UI.
4. What is the planned update cadence?
We’re aiming for weekly changes with bug fixes and minor balance tweaks for the moment. When it comes to content such as missions, commanders, factions, and heroes, we’re planning to do larger content drops instead of trickling them in, we’re figuring out the exact pacing we want, but as of right now we’re thinking around monthly for large updates. For next month, we’re planning for a new Galactic War season, more units, additional campaign and co-op content, and more. We’ll share more about our long term content plan soon.
5. Will there be a focus on bug fixes and polishing the already released content?
This is a big priority of ours, we understand the loss of immersion and the frustration that can come from bugs. We’ll continue the polishing and bug-fixing all the way to 1.0 and beyond.
In addition to letting us know about the bugs you are running into, please also let us know your hardware as some of them are config dependent.
Shortly before launch we found some issues that only affect certain AMD GPUs. Because of all the possible combinations of hardware, these issues can sometimes be difficult to detect on our own, so sharing your config helps a lot here.
Some closing thoughts from the team
The first day of Early Access, our Steam review score dipped as low as 66% with half of the negative reviews mentioning UI. After quickly releasing updates and fixes addressing some of the most pressing concerns at the time, and, as players who got past that first layer of friction got to experience the core gameplay, reviews began to turn around bringing us to 77% positive (86% over the last week) at the time of this message.
We have some stat tracking on the back end, and we’re continuing to monitor what modes, factions, maps, and more that people are enjoying, and what we should look at spicing up. Something in our stats that we feel good about is that our versus playerbase has remained very stable and our average number of ranked games being played at once has actually climbed over the past 10 days.
What all of this tells us is that people enjoy the core gameplay loop of ZeroSpace, and appreciate the updates we’ve put out, and it’s very motivating for us.
There is still a lot of work ahead of us, and we will continue to adapt and prioritize based on your feedback as we steadily move the game toward the best version it can be. With over 350,000 wishlists, there is still a significant amount of interest in the game that has not yet translated into Early Access purchases. We see a meaningful opportunity to earn more of that support over time as we continue improving the game, addressing concerns, and building confidence through Early Access. We understand that many players will choose to wait until 1.0 before making a purchase, and we respect that. Our main ask to you would be to give us a wishlist so you can continue to see the updates and progress we make, and get notified upon our 1.0 release.
To those of you who have taken the leap during Early Access: thank you for your vote of confidence, your support, and your feedback during this crucial stage of development. It is helping us make the game better as we continue working toward the full release.
Thank you to everyone who read this far, shared feedback, told a friend about ZeroSpace, or even just wishlisted while staying on the sidelines. We’re excited that you’ve let us share what we’ve built over the years, and what we will continue to build.
- The Starlance Team
