One week of Stars Reach Kickstarter

 Posted by (Visited 147 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , ,
Mar 032025
 

Wow, it has been an intense six days.

We launched on Tuesday, which feels like an eternity ago. It’s a mad scramble to get everything done, make sure you have all the content ready, to answer the huge inflow of questions, find all the spots where you weren’t quite clear enough… but you just survive on little sleep and keep pushing. And sometimes you get a good result!

Last night we hit the $500k mark on the Stars Reach Kickstarter. This also unlocked our third stretch goal, the Hyugon playable species that you see animating over here. (There’s a blog post up on the website if you want to learn more about them!).

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STARS REACH Kickstarter funded in 1 hour

 Posted by (Visited 1385 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: ,
Feb 262025
 

I can’t tell you how much of a rollercoaster yesterday was. We hoped to see a strong Kickstarter but reaching our goal is less than one hour is just amazing, and a real expression of support from the community. Thank you all so much. (You can check out the Kickstarter here!)

We’re not stopping here. As I write this, we are on track to double our initial goal today! We hit our first stretch goal, for the Hansian species, overnight. Hansians were first mentioned in our lore in the short story “Interdicted,” which we posted up on the website a couple of weeks ago.

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Flooding Gaiamar

 Posted by (Visited 1569 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , ,
Dec 132024
 

A true story of what happened in the pre-alpha testing last night in Stars Reach.

It began as an upwelling under a basement.

Oh, ever since the crater lake next door had overheated and spewed a geyser far into the sky, water was everywhere… condensing on every surface. But this was something more. It bubbled up from under Leric’s house, right there by the fountain in the middle of the settlement on Gaiamar.

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Old movement stuff for STARS REACH

 Posted by (Visited 3830 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , , ,
Aug 282024
 

When it comes to interim stages of game dev, I am a bit of a packrat. I have paper maps from when I was doing Ultima Online, and UI sketches for Star Wars Galaxies… of course, for my current thing, Stars Reach, I have a whole pile of images and videos going back to the very earliest days of the project.

I mention this because we just posted up a little article about movement and the camera in the game, which has pictures from some of the prototypes that we did to test out moving around. Just for fun as I was writing the blog post, I actually located the last version of the prototype and played around in it!

Some of the things you can see in these shots:

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The first players land in Stars Reach

 Posted by (Visited 3718 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , ,
Aug 212024
 
GIF courtesy of hooby, showing sunrise on the test map

This past weekend was a huge milestone for us — the very first regular players landed on an alien world in Stars Reach and ran around and had some fun!

This was a pre-alpha test aimed mostly at testing our login systems, infrastructure, bug reporting, and a few other plumbing items like that. We turned off most all of the game systems we already have, in favor of getting baseline metrics with only movement and chat enabled.

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