Welcome to our 45th newsletter on Star Atlas! This is a weekly newsletter, published by Aephia Industries, that is focused entirely on Star Atlas. Here we try to aggregate all the newsworthy tidbits that were dropped by the team throughout the past week
As Summer is nearing its end, we had a very light week, news-wise. It looks like this might be coming to an end soon, though.
As always, the team released a new edition of the Roadmap Scan (#19). Besides listing an overview of the progress being made, you can also read about Wenn & co descending into Atoph’s lair in this issue.
SCREAM
Earning Loyalty Points
Michael (CEO) shared a short list that illustrates the various gameplay activities one could partake in to earn XP and LP ([Faction] Loyalty Points). These are
- Fighting (of which there are 3 variants: Open Space, Territory & Starbase attacking/defending)
- Mining & Crafting
- Exploration
Besides this list, no further details were provided.
Mining
With regards to mining, Chip (Game Systems Designer) shared that ships will be able to “enter” planets, and have their crew disembark to assist in mining operations. There is technically no real mining being done by the ships themselves (note that this is all flavour, the effect will be that the ships are gathering resources).
Furthermore, if a planet gets attacked and damaged then that will affect the planet’s resource emissions temporarily.
The above is set up so that it will mesh well with the future addition of terrestrial mining operations to planets when land claiming has been implemented.
Progress
The project’s progress report did not change much compared to last week. New tidbits are that the Art team has been working on importing the WebGL assets into the game environment (PlayCanvas) and that the Web team plans to work on fleet management (fleet formation, disbanding, etc).
Other Progress
Besides SCREAM, the team had small progress updates on the following:
- The Volant Studio Showroom team is now finalizing the distribution of the game module.
- The DAO team is improving the ATLAS Locker, while Product Design is making progress with their work on the Proposal requirements.
- Mobile improvements are coming soon to play.staratlas.com
Lastly, the team has reported a known bug with the Coinbase wallet. Players seem unable to buy or sell ships on the market using that wallet.
Ships
Last week, we wrote that the team suddenly pulled back their new ship release, despite having announced it the week before on Twitter (the tweet has since been deleted).
Since then the team shared that the release of new ships has been paused as a result of them adopting a new approach. Going forward, ships will be dropped in a way that will help to amplify the upcoming (product) releases. No further details were provided.
It is certain that releases will resume later this year, though a date has not been mentioned.
🚨 Intergalactic Community Announcement 🚨
Due to the upcoming product release schedule, ship drops from all Star Atlas manufacturers are currently paused and will resume later this year.
The existing fleet stock will remain flight-ready on the Galactic Marketplace. 🚀 https://t.co/K6qCNGTb19
— staratlas
Marketplace UX Research
The team is soliciting feedback from their community regarding the new and improved Galactic Marketplace.
If you would like to participate, then please fill out this very short form. Here you can also choose to further participate in a live usability test session (30min) with a Star Atlas team member.