Hiya folks!

Before I started writing this, I read through our last devlog and stumbled on this line:

“We’re by no means killing the game - quite the opposite, in fact. We have an entire list of future improvements, features, and optimizations ahead of us, but we want to take a break and work on some other projects before we get into the weeds on it.”

And OH BOY did we take a break. It’s been… checking the calendar… Exactly 4 years since our last devlog. I wish we could say we spent all of those 1,459 days working tirelessly to bring you the next version of Spaceyard, but… life, careers, relationships… you know how the story goes.

Regardless of that fact, we have been very tiredly working off and on to bring you the next version!

New in 0.4

The game has largely been rewritten from the ground up. While the gameplay hasn’t changed much since 0.3, the game is now much more stable, performant, and looking better than ever! We did change the gameplay in a few ways: new UI, new modes, new maps, new settings, rebalanced blocks and actions, better end game.

We wanted to focus on stability and usability in this release, but that ended up requiring a rework of a lot of our underlying assumptions that we had about How Things Should Work™. That said, and without further ado, here are the highlights!

UI

• Every textbox, popup, and button has a new coat of paint. We were tired of small low resolution text boxes and unclear jargon, so we tried to make all of the information as readily available to you as possible.
• The action bar has been removed (If only I had a nickel for everytime that happened in the tech industry)
• Actions are now performed through always-present buttons that are split into two groups: movement and construction
  • Movement buttons (translation, rotations, etc) are on the left side, shown next to your ship information.
  • Construction buttons are displayed in the new Build Menu on the right side of the screen during your turn.
• Added a “How to Play” section to the main menu.

Multiplayer

• The multiplayer system has been entirely reworked to improve the connectivity and reliability of the game overall.
• A new “Host Only” mode is available for those of you that want to host a dedicated server for you and your friends.
• Instead of crashing outright, the game now gracefully handles player disconnects. Technology!

Singleplayer

• You can now play Spaceyard without hosting a server in the new singleplayer “Sandbox” mode! The new mode is perfect for playing around with the mechanics without the pressure of competition.

Maps

• There are three new maps:
  • Field: The same as the existing map Yard, but with no space station.
  • Harbor: A map with only a space station and dead ships.
  • Void: A nearly empty map where the storm doesn’t progress.
• It is now possible to enable infinite actions and materials to let you play your own way.

Balance

• Loop Miners have been removed. They were infrequently used and made all of the backend code way more complicated than it had to be. We might add them back eventually, but it’s not worth the hassle for now.
• The starting sizes for all the maps have been cut (roughly) in half. Having elbow room is great and all, but we found it made the matches go on too long. Now matches conclude after ~40 turns which feels a lot more reasonable to us.
• The space station now powers down at turn 20. Through all of our play sessions, the space station always felt like the critical piece in the game. Given how much it can be a make-or-break moment, we wanted to push that out for as long as felt reasonable and still have a satisfying experience.
• Action and build points are now split up. Building and moving used to consume the same pool of points, but this encouraged behavior like building 100 tiles onto your ship in a single turn. We hope the craziness is cut down a little bit with the new system.

Performance

• Large operations like splitting a ship or moving long distances used to be done in a single frame. Not anymore! Now they’re broken up across multiple frames to make things feel smoother. It’s hard to believe that no one has ever done this before! /s
• v0.3.x was written entirely in Godot 3’s GDScript. While it’s a great language, it has known performance penalties associated with it. We’ve moved some of the frequently called code like the math system into Rust. Never have I cried tears of joy greater than seeing tens of thousands of function calls happening in the blink of an eye.

What’s Next?

Well, to be honest, we don’t know.

We definitely want to release at least one more version of the game where we migrate the codebase to the newest version of Godot (4.3 at the time of writing). During the last few years, we’ve run into a fair number of issues with the 3.5 engine that we’ve complained about, but most of them should be fixed after the migration.

After that, we’ll go wherever the winds take us. Migrating to the new engine might let us do some new and cool things we never would’ve thought possible. There’s talk of better multiplayer support in Godot coming up, and being able to have dedicated servers instead of peer-to-peer with port forwarding would be a game changer.

The options are pretty endless but… We’re tired. The code debt has been piling up, and we really don’t want to have to rewrite the systems a third time. We might take another break, or we might feel inspired and bang out 3 releases this year. We’ll take it however it comes.

That’s all in the future though. For now, we hope that you enjoy this version, and we’ll see you in 0.5!