Ahoy there! It’s been a while, thanks for waiting around! The summer has been very busy with Nan and I participating in our first goat shows, as well as hosting an indie game developer mini-conference on Lake Powell.

But between all that, I’ve managed to get a ton of stuff overhauled for beta18! You can download it for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. (TestFlight for iOS will be mailed out shortly.)

So here’s the breakdown of what we’ve got! The most “in your face” change is the overhaul of the Galaxy Map. It now has a few constellations and each star has a slightly different game type with it. In theory, you can now play some 2v2 and donut shaped games!

Next up, the rankings got a major overhaul. I’ve only tested them a little bit, but now you should be able to rank up your flag, gain extra stars (by earning points on various stars), and get wings by winning in tournaments (right now: betting.) I reduced the number of ranking flags down to one flag for the whole game, as I think that makes things easier to understand, and it makes it so unlike previous Galcons where some flags were impossible to rank up, this one should be.

Next, I did some major work on the user interface stuff. For a long time I’ve disliked the pan + zoom features in Galcon 2, so Nan suggested I change it to a mini-map type thing. Which really changes how it works, but I think it works much better. Be sure to give Esparano’s Frustration mod a play with it and tell me what you think.

Lastly, I did even MORE work on the user interface. iOS players should be able to use multi-touch finally! I also got sick of the ludicrous number of options in the settings page. I wasn’t able to even be sure what some of the options meant after a while and it was beginning to break the UI code by having too many options. (It was possible to set up the game so it just plain didn’t work.) Anyway, I reset everyone’s settings and have a new set of them to mess with.

Thanks everyone for your feedback! Be sure to stop by the forums and tell me what you think of all the new stuff, I need your feedback to make this game the best it can be!

-Phil

P.S. Pop onto the servers right now, I’ll be playing for the next hourish and getting bug reports / feedback there too!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 26th, 2013 at 12:28 pm and is filed under galcon2. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.