To view this Devnote with screenshots, check it out on the Phoenix Aura website.
Good news: I'm not dead! The long story short is that I'd been fighting a persistent stomach ailment ever since the release of Idle Space Navy 0.09.5, and that really limited my energy to work on the project (along with any of my other projects). That, however, has finally resolved, and I'm back up to full energy.
The good news there is that I've finally cleaned up the new Items UI and Deployment Center, and after that, everything else has been falling into place - so here's the news you've been waiting for:
Idle Space Navy 0.10.0 Releases 25 May
That's right, we finally have a definite release date for Idle Space Navy 0.10.0! After a much longer release cycle for all projects involved than I intended (I had originally intended 0.10.0 to be out in early April, and that after I developed a small idle game for my website), I've finally got 0.10.0 in a state where it's ready to release.
As usual with a major release, I'll be having a launch stream on my Twitch channel, this time starting at 7:45pm Pacific (10:45pm Eastern), with the release of 0.10.0 onto Steam at the top of the hour (8:00pm Pacific, 11:00pm Eastern) on 25 May.
What's Coming in 0.10.0
Obviously, there's a lot of changes in 0.10.0, many of them related to quality of life.
The New Items System
In 0.09.5 and before, you'd have long lists of every individual item. It was easy to get cluttered, or even get item overload. The limitation of modules to 240 helped this, but more was needed to help organize the list.
Initially, a thought was given toward being able to sell old items, but old items will actually be useful in the Contracts system coming in future versions, so I was hesitant to include this kind of system in 0.10. However, what's changed in 0.10 is that deployment of items is now managed type by type. Instead of having a list of every single Cutter or Frigate you own, you'll simply have X Cutters and Y Frigates in the deployment system, and you can deploy and recall them with single clicks.
The Deployment Center is now much easier to use as well. Instead of deploying every single item individually, you package up a whole ship - including its weapons and modules - and deploy it all at once, and then you can manage a ship's items from the same parts of the Deployment Center. This creates a much more unified and easy to use interface, speeding up deployments.
One significant change is to Temporary Modules - they're deploy and done instead of being recallable. The Module Points spent on them aren't refundable either - once placed, they stay placed, and are destroyed if the ship is recalled.
Module Points?
Instead of endless strings of module items, you now can pick Modules out a la carte. To do this, Module rewards are replaced with Module Points, which are spent in the Deployment Center to place Temporary Modules. A new resource icon is being added to the Resource Bar to show how many Module Points you have on hand.
The Commonwealth of Isara
The enigmatic scientist castes of the Commonwealth of Isara are ready to assist your navy in pacifying the various pirate bands raiding their borders. Skilled in resource management as well as research, they can greatly boost the effectiveness of your Credit and Calibration Chip collection.
With 9 new Artifact upgrades, the Isarans will boost Credits, CC collections, and Laser weapons.
Milestones BETA
One of the most requested new items has been an achievement system. While I'm still working out just how I want this to look, I've decided to start testing with a few of what I'm calling "Milestones". These are one-time achievements that will reward Neutronium or Neutron Stars for reaching them. They're not affected by any form of reset. While I don't think these will be the final forms these achievements will take, I wanted to start to roll something out.
Once Milestones are more finalized, they'll be the basis for ISN's Steam Achievements. Also, in future, there will be "Goals" - repeatable achievements which reset on Calibration, Artifact collection, or other such resets. More on these in future versions.
UI Overhaul, Part III: Yard, Lab, & Artifacts Screens Refined
The other portion of UI Overhaul III (aside from the new Items System and Deployment Center) is a series of refinements to the Yard, Lab, and Artifacts UIs. A lot of this was just formatting updates (rearranging some blocks so their contents don't run into each other), but one major upgrade is that locked items - instead of being hidden - will now show their unlock conditions. This way, players can see the content they have yet to unlock instead of just being in the dark.
Another fix is that upgrades relating to ore and asteroids are currently hidden, as those systems are disabled pending their upcoming rework in 0.11.
Finally, scrollbars have been yelled at to have the top be at the top, and hopefully all start at the top as well.
More Rebalances & Systems Updates
The Foundry Automate, which will upgrade your Scrap Refinery automatically, has been added and is unlockable for 100 CC.
Daily Rewards can be collected after 22 hours instead of 24. Additionally, both they and Offline Progress produce visual alerts on screen, and Daily Rewards will check if they can be collected every hour in order to ensure you never miss another Daily Reward.
The Information Codex has been updated and slightly expanded. The Tutorial was revised and shrank slightly to match with the new Deployment Center.
The Lab Time Bonus base amount has been reduced from 0.004 per minute to 0.0025 per minute, and its maximum time has been extended from 600 minutes to 1000. Additionally, offline time now counts toward this progression in part.
Ships have been rebalanced to ensure more ships than the Command Ship Mark I are useful, as discussed in Devnote XXXVI.
The Future of ISN is Now
With the release of 0.10.0, Idle Space Navy will be much closer to the original vision I had for the Steam release.
I do want to thank those of you who've stuck with the game and given it your feedback since the release of 0.07.4 last year. While it hasn't been as smooth as I thought, mostly because I didn't think of a lot of the stuff that had come up as people played with the game, I genuinely think ISN is reaching a point where people can reliably enjoy it.
For those of you who've put aside the game, I am hopeful that 0.10.0 will convince you to give it a second look. The game is much refined from its unbalanced version first presented, and the future of ISN beyond 0.10 is looking bright indeed.