Well, this is it folks! Dark Star has received what will be its final update. There are a lot of things to talk about here, so skip to the tl:dr if you don't want the long form.

To start off, what is in this update? Well, frankly not as much as I had hoped, but closer to what was originally planned. Final edits on language and updates posted in the Devlogs as well as some other edits I wanted to make and was testing got in. So with that, I delivered what I initially promised when I put Dark Star up. I'm proud of that, hitting a reasonable goal on my first game is a good thing! As for what I had hoped, that is more complicated. To put it simply, while I was testing Dark Star I felt something was lacking. I have gone on to learn that it was crunch, I like crunchy engines and crunchy games. I was hoping to make a massive combat re-balance, and the mechanical stuff of that is in here, but some of the loftier ideas are not. 

This is a good time to move on to the second part of this, the postmortem. As I tested Dark Star, I found it lacking in the things I personally like in a game, while it was still a perfectly serviceable Lumen game. I hemmed and hawed about what I should do about this for quite a while, until I decided to make a big update. If you follow me on twitter, you may have noticed me talking about that. Stuff like what is happening here is why I don't talk about something until I am 100% sure it's going through. The big exploration update and enemy update, where I add a new set of exploration mechanics, currency, and made factions seem more thematically cohesive isn't happening. The primary reason for this is that working with a narrative combat engine just isn't for me. Lumen is a fun engine and I have seen a lot of really cool looking games made with it! I also just don't find it too my tastes to design with. Oh well, you live and you learn, and who knows! Maybe in a few years I'll look back on this and think it was a silly idea. I don't know, I don't have precognition and I stopped reading tarot years ago.

So, what does this mean for Dark Star going forwards? Final Update is a pretty weighty choice of words. Frankly, this version of Dark Star will stay as it is and be available for purchase until itch shuts down or my account gets hacked or something. The other thing is that I'm not done with Dark Star entirely. I like the setting, and I clearly had ideas to bring Dark Star into the style of game I have learned I like. The short answer is that I will be putting Dark Star on a new engine with the mechanics and ideas I had so that it is better suited to my tastes. I could just do this on the Lumen engine if I really wanted too, but that would require a good amount of work that could be circumvented by just putting the game on another engine. Work smarter not harder, you know? That said this is a back burner project for now. If I had to place it in a queue it would land between 3rd and 6th place, so it may be a while before this happens. 

In the meantime, I hope anyone who downloads the demo or buys the game has fun with it. It's a quirky little tabletop hero shooter with a flim-flam sci-fi aesthetic, and there is fun to be had with it! And to anyone who bought the game, thank you so much for taking a chance on a brand new game developer's first game. It has flaws, it has good parts, and it was an interesting way to start things off. Thank you for reading, thank you for considering the game, and thank you if you buy it. I hope you will look at what I do next with mild curiosity if nothing else.

Sincerely,

Oscar Charlie Tango