This month brought a huge feature online, some UI and backend work, our yearly team BBQ, and a philosophy shift in how we’re building. Here’s what happened.

The Lexicon is Live

The Lexicon is our tech tree, and it’s one of the biggest features in the game. It’s up and running now, and we’re thrilled to see it working.

The Lexicon is a massive web of connecting nodes, each representing a technological advancement your Empire can unlock by spending Insight. The whole tree is always available, so you’re never locked into one strategy.

Markets

Resource management is done. This is the new UI for tracking your reserves and production rates for a world, so you can actually see what your Empire has and what it’s making.

Movement Refactor

We rebuilt the movement system on the back end. The old version couldn’t handle moving leaders around or moving units within fleets, and there wasn’t a clean way to patch that in. So we redid the code from the ground up to support it properly.

The Team BBQ (and a Safari Surprise)

Every year we get together in person at our CFO Tim’s place on Lake Michigan for a BBQ with everyone who’s put work into StariumXCV over the years. Most of us work online, so it’s always good to see each other face to face.

A bunch of us pulled out our phones to try the testing build of the game, and for those with iPhones it didn’t load. Also, it turns out Safari doesn’t support transparency for the animation file format we are using.

We fixed the loading problem and ended up making a whole separate set of animations just for Safari. Somewhere, a Safari engineer is shrugging.

We also bought a MacBook to catch these problems in the future.

A Different Approach

We’re changing how we’re tackling development going forward. Instead of chasing polish and perfection feature by feature, we’re aiming for bare bones functionality across the whole game first. Get everything working end to end, then come back and refine.

What’s Next

  • Shipyards
  • Garrisons
  • Ship Designer
  • Unit Designer

Thank You For Supporting StariumXCV

We’d love to get to know you, and we invite you to join our community on Discord. Our devs are always around and happy to chat, whether you have questions, feedback, or just want to say hi!