entropy-game-dev

[entropy-game-dev]

Is there somewhere to submit bug reports?

Hi there,

Probably the best place would be emailing me (entropygamedev@gmail.com) or posting on the discussion thread in the steam forums - I have some more detailed instructions there about submitting a bug report, but to keep it short, if you could send me what you did to cause the bug, the crash message (if any), and optionally attach your save slot's file and log, found at C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\StellarTerminus\default), that would go a long way to help me track the bug down!

Thank you!

[entropy-game-dev]

Hi, I recently played the steam demo of Stellar Terminus and while I like a lot about it, the one thing I found the weakest are the procedural generated dungeons. I remember a long time ago reading you also planned pre-set handcrafted dungeons on the main story path, is that still in the game?

Hi there,

Thanks for trying out the game (and apologies for the late reply to both your steam forum posts and your message here!) I wrote a more lengthy reply on the forums but I've copy-pasted the relevant dungeon part of the response here:

Regarding the dungeons, I initially wanted to keep the scope of the game small and not have too many hand-crafted dungeons, but after designing the tutorial area, it honestly wasn't too bad. Definitely for the key story areas they will be hand crafted, and I was thinking as an in-between to have set piece rooms that can be placed within the randomly generated dungeons.

The main drives for exploring different dungeons are not quite in at the moment (there is only one boss) but I plan to have different resources, parts, and bosses available within dungeons belonging to different factions. Furthermore, I have another major type of dungeon planned, this being wide open areas with various features scattered about, think a planet surface rather than its cave systems. I know these points don't necessarily alleviate your points, however. I definitely agree that things need to change in order to keep dungeons fresh going up into the various tiers. I'll have another look and keep considering what else I can do to make exploring different dungeons more interesting!

In any case, thank you so much for putting the time into the game and for giving me very valuable feedback!!

[entropy-game-dev]

Hello, I found out about this game on Twitter and installed the demo version! However, I'm Japanese and can't speak English 😔 Are there plans to implement Japanese in the future?

Hi there, thank you so much for your question!! I saw that a popular Japanese account retweeted my store page when it released and I was happily surprised!

In terms of localization, I would love to localise the game eventually once it has been completed!

The majority of my text is in databases which are easily translated, though I have a lot of UI text that is currently hardcoded, which will be a lot more challenging to get translated.

My low resolution font may also be another challenge - I will probably have to omit kanji and just use hiragana/katakana.

I've translated my answer into Japanese with Google Translate:

こんにちは。ご質問ありがとうございます。リリース時に、日本の人気アカウントが私のストアページをリツイートしているのを見て、嬉しい驚きでした！

ローカライズに関しては、ゲームが完成したら、最終的にはローカライズしたいと思っています！

テキストの大部分はデータベース内にあるため簡単に翻訳できますが、現在ハードコードされてい�� UI テキストが多数あり、翻訳するのはかなり困難です。

フォントの解像度が低いことも課題の 1 つです。おそらく漢字を省略して、ひらがな/カタカナのみを使用する必要があるでしょう。

Google 翻訳を使用して回答を日本語に翻訳しました。

[entropy-game-dev]

it's up

[entropy-game-dev]

The cheeky last minute UI rework

A week ago, I had Lucinius play a near-complete version of the demo build and he had a bunch of good suggestions after playing it for a solid few hours.

One part of his feedback centered around how move information was displayed. Previously, in non-battle menus, the move info would follow your cursor, and thus you weren't able to mouse over the various stats or check the description (which would have outputted to a log that isn't visible anyway).

Now I've made it so that clicking on the move icon displays the window in a static pane, letting you mouse over the various icons. Also, the description now appears in-line inside the window, regardless of where you're looking at it!

I made a whole bunch of other changes, and ahead of tomorrow's demo release (I can't believe it's finally happening), you can read about them below the cut!!

v0.18 - Demo Build 1

Features:

Auto-deposit materials is working and on by default

Mouse over now shows curr/max for hp/en/ammo + stat title

Going past the max floors now sends you back to the ship

New trap added that instantly spawns an encounter

Clicking on an attack icon with the mouse now makes the info panel stay open

Clicking the description button/pressing pause with a move selected now displays it within the panel

Archive sprite added to base

Game now tracks enemies encountered and killed

Added target marker to tutorial area

Archive can view logs and tutorials, and enemy names

Balance:

Starting area has slightly more loops

Starting area has slightly higher encounter density,

Removed local relay from starting area

Added spatial constant to starting area

Added Holepunch routine to Punch Press

Slightly increased passive random recruit chance from 1 to 2%

Buffed max damage recruitment rate divisor from /3 to /2.5

Nerfed heal recruitment rate divisor from /3 to /4

Changed starting system escape fuel needed to 20

Gain a small amount of fuel when researching local/relativistic navigation

Added party size to the base matrix research rather than subsequent research

Features now scale around the mid floor of the dungeon instead of around floor 2

Dungeon floors, rooms, and corridors get bigger as you go down

Damage/heal recruit function ceiling'd so you make at least 1% progress when you do the correct action

Slightly revised title screen animation

Revised enemy encounter formula to scale around the center floor of the dungeon + adjusted dungeon encounter mass respectively

Changed Gimbal Lock's status from stun to slow

Made summons recruitable

Buffed all part slots and changed power load formula to compensate

10% buff to large enemy stats for each square above 1

Make killing with an element apply advantage, even if it resists or was neutral to the element

Polish:

"are likely in rooms" -> "are more often found in rooms"

"can be used for fuel" -> "could be used for fuel"

"once a line has formed" -> "once a line has formed in the element grid"

"the astronaut has been destroyed" -> "your suit has been critically damaged"

"the robot core's power load." -> "the robot core's power load (to the left of the equipped parts)."

Power load tutorial only comes up when you exceed it

Changed POWR to HEAL when looking at a healing move in the attack description

Disabled interaction with central 3x3 core area and changed description

Changed first strike/ambush bar colour and text

Added fuel unit value to fuel item descriptions

Added filter menu icon

Deep Diver sprite updated

Burrow sprite updated

Recruit chance icon doesn't show mouseover text when invisible

Swapped weapons 1 and 2 equip location on the assistant to match sprite appearance

Removed extra line on the bottom of the big map

Equip vfx effect now appears under move info panel

Black outline added to all dungeon features

Made recruitment pink text appear over the damange numbers

Made it so that locations can't spawn directly behind the black hole image in the navigation screen

Made the main black hole image slightly transparent in the navigation screen

Reordered research tutorials

Scan description revised to indicate it can reveal more and more information progressively

Updated matrix tutorial to talk about core tiers

Changed equip sprite fx to green

Swapped arm that has the arm computer in a cutscene

Tutorial edited to say cores have innate routines

Edited lowest_5levels to be an accurate tutorial

Bugs:

Disabled the ability to look at the big map during the beginning of an encounter

Floor scanning effect now shows all the time for unexplored tiles

Removed debug value allowing you to interact with lore objects infinite times

Priority of mouseover is only cleared with the text now

Fixed player recruit chance status doing the opposite of what it says it does

Fixed healing-type recruitment not working

Fixed no item tutorial firing incorrectly because research inventory manager was not ready

Conduct animation was not happening when the conducted element was not the last hit on an enemy

Fixed lowest floor tutorials not firing

[entropy-game-dev]

The large enemy rebalance

It's such an infamous trope in video games, the super hard enemy joins your party, and is now utterly underwhelming. That's not so much of an issue in monster collecting games such as pokemon or SMT, as the enemies and players are fairly symmetrical in terms of their stats.

However, the enemies you fight in Stellar Terminus have fixed stats, and yet you have the ability to recruit almost any robot you fight (bosses and summons excluded, for now). Thus there was always the potential to fall into the strong enemy, weak ally trap.

The way I have tried to overcome this, is by using the enemy stats as a base, divide them down depending on their tier, so that everyone is scaled to the same amount, then calculating what their stats would be at level 100. The aim is to keep your recruited robots' stats true to their enemy stats by keeping everything in proportion with each other.

The rebalance

So recently as I was playtesting I realised that enemies bigger than 1 square were too weak for their size and rarity. Enemies at Tier X will have an absolute maximum of X*100 HP, and X*10 in their attack, defense, and speed stats, depending on how they are specialised. However, giving those stats to a multisquare enemy made them inordinately weak as they still only get 1 action per round. This plus the fact that you can target multi-square enemies with AoEs, doing even more damage to them, meant that I had to buff these enemies, otherwise they would be less threatening than I intended.

For now, I have increased their HP by 10*[excess squares] and their other stats (except speed) by 1*[excess squares]. I had to then make a similar reduction when calculating their player stats, as all units are treated equally when recruited.

Time will tell if that'll be enough to balancing, or if that makes them too powerful/weak to fight! Naturally I'll be listening to any and all feedback when the demo releases - message me here or go to the forums, whatever works for you guys!

[entropy-game-dev]

Scanning... Scanning...

A key feature in any RPG is understanding your opponents, and you can pre-emptively scan an unknown enemy to reveal its statistics. After an initial scan, you'll see its current HP, which is nice to known when planning your next move.

Additionally, you may reveal its elemental weaknesses and its recruitment conditions, depending on your virtual attack value compared to the target's virtual defense. Most likely, however, you'll need multiple scans to completely unlock all of its statistics.

You can also uncover its elemental weaknesses or recruitment conditions organically when you attack it, and of course, once you recruit a unit, all of its stats are revealed to you whether you had scanned it or not.

I plan to have multiple scanning abilities, one that works off physical attack and another for exotic attack. Most likely these will prioritise different information first.

Acquisition

Your robot Assistant will have Scan by default, but it can be found on a variety of support-oriented parts. Additionally, the Astronaut will have it by default once you unlock and power a certain node in the AI matrix - the passive bonus grid I've shown off a fair while ago.

Initially, the inspect function was locked behind that node, but I found it felt really bad not being able to view enemy stats prior to unlocking it, and so now it provides a nice bonus for the player rather than locking a quality of life feature behind it!

Powering that node with higher tier cores will increase the efficacy of scan, revealing more information to you all at once!

[entropy-game-dev]

Demo date announcement!

The most important information up front: The demo's release date will be the 27th of September, 2024!!

I don't think Steam notifies you even if you have followed/wishlisted the page, but still, every single follow and wishlist helps immensely. You can check the game out here, and this is also where you can grab the demo from once it's out.

The lore of the demo

A few months back, in late June, I had just come back from housesitting. One of my friends, Lucinius, mentioned that Steam was holding a space exploration festival on the 2nd of September, and suggested I get the demo ready for then. I thought this was a great idea and feverishly started working to finalize everything.

It took 6 days total to get my steam developer account up and running, including paying for the ability to put a game on Steam, getting the OK regarding tax details, etc. It takes 30 days from initial payment to when you are able to actually make the store page live. The process was quite overwhelming but this amazing guide here helped me through basically all of the process, and it was super accurate!!

About a week before the festival, I had everything ready and went to do the store pages and upload the game build. I thought uploading the build using the provided command line tool would be the hard part, and the store page would be the easy part. However, there are so many assets and variations thereof that Steam asks for that I had not prepared (about 20 in total with very specific size and design requirements), and so it took several days to complete this in a manner I was happy with.

It then also took about 5 days for the content to undergo review and for it to be approved (or not). The game page and demo build got approved, but the demo page did not as I didn't have "demo" on my assets that I had submitted for it, so it took another 5 days after correcting the page for it to be approved. This ended up being approved a few days after the space exploration fest had started, and so I thought I'd push the demo back for the next relevant festival - luckily a turn based rpg one - on the 1st of October.

However, a few days ago, I was sadly informed that my game (turn-based RPG, by the way) was not suitable for Steam's turn-based RPG festival after applying to enter it. I wasn't given a reason, even after reaching out to support, except a generic one that stated my game may not have been a good fit for it.

I honestly thought it would be a given I could take part, but that is obviously not the case! It was a bit disappointing hearing the news and the lack of feedback from Steam regarding the decision, but I'm not too fussed overall. That's because now I actually get to announce to you guys, and much earlier than I otherwise would have been able to, that the demo will be available the weekend before the festival starts!!

The date was strategically chosen, of course, to ensure I have enough time to finish polishing it, and that it wouldn't be lost among the sea of other RPG demos potentially (or not, I'm not sure) releasing during the festival!

In any case, the whole experience was seriously eye-opening. Probably not too interesting reading about it, but that's where my life has gone the past few months, and I'm actually super excited I'm finally finally allowed to mention the context surrounding my recent posts! Thanks for reading!

[entropy-game-dev]

In the demo build of the game, at the bottom of dungeons deep enough, you'll find a unique object that allows you to summon the train boss I've been posting about over the last couple of weeks. (Ignore the fact that I'm still on floor one, I've spawned in a test one for demonstration purposes!)

I also totally forgot to make the object delete itself after being interacted with until today! So since I was debugging it, I thought I might as well show it off to you guys!

I have designed the boss fight to be beatable when you're at the upper end of the tier 1 content (levels 1 to 10), but it'll also spawn even within the tier 2 sectors (levels 11 to 20) and should still be fairly challenging, especially if you're worn down fighting your way to get down to it. The game is quite open, so depending on how you play it, beating it might be considered the end of the demo.

However, the actual "official" end of the demo is after completing all of the tier 2 research , and you'll get a nice thankyou message instead of the tier 2 capstone research description that would advance you to tier 3. For those inquisitive minds, I'll save you the trouble - even if you managed to complete the research and cheat your way to tier 3 sectors and beyond, there are literally no enemies/items/locations tagged as tier 3 within the relevant databases!

I have a big announcement coming tomorrow, by the way, so look forward to that! Until then, thanks for reading as always :)

[entropy-game-dev]

One of the new additions to the build is flagging especially hard enemies. Currently, enemies 1 tier above the current dungeon tier have a 2% chance to spawn. This can mix up the battles to keep players on their toes, and give especially strategic players the chance to earn equipment, and a possible ally, one tier higher than what they'd usually have access to!

However, during playtesting, I got absoutely wrecked by a single monster and I had no idea it was a strong one because I didn't have the chance to scan it. On the suggestion of a friend, if I had big flashing warning symbols on it, I would have been more careful and run away or played more defensively. And so now I do!

It was easy enough to make it yellow, since all sprites are drawn as white to begin with and then a colour blend is added to it in game. The warning symbol is new, but uses the same code as the HP and recruitment UI text, but with an image instead!

[entropy-game-dev]

Hello there. I was trying to find you since yesterday. Something is wrong with the steam page for "Stellar Terminus". The game simply cannot be wishlisted. Pushing "Add to wishlist" button doesn't do anyting. Some kind of steam bug idk. Allow me to rephrase it. After wishlisting the game, the counter for the number of games in your wishlist will increase by one, but the game itself will not appear on your wishlist. Sorry for my broken english.

Hi there,

Thanks for letting me know! A couple of my friends have also noted the issue - I think it must be because there's no actual game build approved for the main game page. I have a build that has been approved for the demo, but I would assume that because I don't for the actual game, it doesn't show up in the wishlist.

Either that or there's some weirdness with Steam because it only just went up. In the backend, the wishlists and views breakdown looks very odd and not up to date as well.

Either way I'd just give it some time, hopefully it will show up eventually!

Thanks again!

[entropy-game-dev]

The Stellar Terminus store page... is LIVE

Well, it's been a long road, but I am so happy to say that I now have a game page actually live on Steam! Please do note that's all there is for now, but I do have a demo that has been already approved by Steam, and I am simply waiting for the right time to release it. Sorry for being coy, but it is ready to go and it'll be soon™, I promise!

If you're even the slightest bit interested, please please do wishlist (even if you have no intention of buying!) - I heard on the grapevine that having at least 100 wishlists is a key milestone to a successful release, and even that aside, I do appreciate every single one of them because, honestly, the fact that people would go out of their way to interact with my little project is something that never ceases to amaze me!

I made a story trailer too for it (the one on this post) that I'm really happy with too. Please listen to it with sound on for the full, gut wrenching, droning, existential experience!! I'll have a full gameplay one coming soon too, but for those of you who have been following me for a while, you'll know the drill already!

In other news, it was quite the process getting the store pages and demo approved by Steam. At some point I'll go through that with you guys, AND all the 90+ QoL, polish, and balance changes I've made since the last internal test build.

Thanks for reading and (potentially) checking out the game page!!

[entropy-game-dev]

Dreadnought-Class Thunderbolt Engine (front view)

This is the view that you'll be seeing for the majority of this fight - the boss has a set pattern where, over the course of a few turns, will buff itself up, debuff you, and then ram into the party at full force!

The custom AI database I have made "scripting" this behavior super easy, and I think is a nice and exciting crescendo to the rest of the fight.

[entropy-game-dev]

Dreadnought-Class Thunderbolt Engine (side view)

Here it is, the main man, the engine itself! It's such a shame that you'll only see this sprite briefly because its extremely high speed allows it to act first, and the first thing it does it turn to face you head on...

[entropy-game-dev]

Magnetosphere

It floats above the Assault Port and provides barriers and other support effects to the summoned units. It can also attack the party with a few E-M attacks! This is the only boss phase where both enemies need to be defeated to progress. They share dual custody of their sons and daughters :)

[entropy-game-dev]

Assault Port

What's a train without a passenger carriage? This 3x1 unit mainly focuses on summoning any valid Tyr unit, so all the ones you'll probably have been fighting to get to this point! Because of its size and central position in the grid, it can't summon any 2x2 units but any other sizes are fair game.

I knew I wanted essentially a silo hatch for them to come out of, but I went with a railroad crossing style design for the sides, which I'm quite fond of.

[entropy-game-dev]

Underclocker

Another smaller heatsink/CPU attached to the main Dataweaver unit that loves debuffing its enemies with various statuses, and yes, also heat too.