DEVLOG 06 – Vision & Changes

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Wow, some time has passed since the last devlog and so much has happened…

Vision

The last post was about fighting mechanics and exploration discussions (read about it here), and we can share some news about that. But – after a lot of experimenting and thinking we felt we needed to go back to the drawing board to find a conceptual umbrella for all the ideas we had and which were already implemented. That was a great idea actually. We ourselves discovered a lot of aspects new and refined the concept of StarBoost into a more concrete vision: a robust tournament system with ranked leagues across various planets, set against the backdrop of an intergalactic conflict. Different factions not only compete for their vision of intergalactic racing but also for social, economic, and political interests.

Release

One of the significant decisions we’ve made recently is regarding the release timeline of StarBoost. Initially, we planned to enter Early Access (EA) at the end of 2024 or the beginning of 2025.

However, we’ve decided to change our approach and want to be fully transparent about it.

There are various reasons for this shift, but a key factor is that entering EA seems more feasible when there is already a community around the game. A supportive community that trusts both the developers and the project makes it more likely for players to invest in a “potentially” risky game that is not fully fleshed out.

We have a clear vision of how we want to build and maintain an EA community responsibly and supportively. However, we currently don’t have the capacity to do that effectively while still developing new features and core game functions.

Since StarBoost is our first title and we don’t yet have an established community, we’ve decided to aim directly for a full release in Q1 2025. This way, we can focus on delivering a complete game and building a player base from there. Once the game is out, we can consider taking our next project into EA, leveraging the experience and community we’ve built.

After the release, we will continue to support StarBoost with updates, DLCs, and porting to different platforms. This brings us to another topic that has been on our minds this past weeks: grants!

Grants

We applied to an important grant now and are still in the process of doing so for others to get more funding going for our game. This also would open up the potential to really bring StarBoost to life with the vision we have for it. We would also be able to continue strong as an Indie Game Dev studio in the long run, working on improving and pushing StarBoost but also other titles.

Getting all the paperwork in a form did cost us quite some time and energy, so development has been on the backburner for a while and only now we can pick it up where we left it.

Demo

The free alpha demo was accessible from the steam next festival February 2024 up to now but we decided to take it down until we release the final game. The discrepancy between the alpha version and the current state was too much to still have it live for potential customers and feel good about it. We want to show StarBoost at it’s best, and that’s no longer it. Developing a Demo configuration and maintaining that, creating builds and keeping track of everything is too much to do and we decided we should spend our time focused on the main product and not keep ourselves distracted. Also we are currently touching a lot of core features and code so there is always the risk of breaking things – which is fine and part of the process – but always having the demo in the back of your head and trying to keep everything in a perfectly playable state was a major blocker for that undertaking.

Back to the development trenches and see you soon!

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