dev – Star Zeal 4x

First of all, apologies for the super long period in the dark without any updates. There are multiple reasons for this, though the main one is that I realized development was far off from where I thought it was. So I decided to go quiet(except for the discord) until I got enough done to at least be more confident the release is near and have the ability to update and market the game more easily. Between the second closed alpha release two years ago and this update, there has been a massive amount of work completed which you should be able to tell from the official Steam page trailer above.

Anyway, this is not a dev log(which will come shortly) it is rather a quick news post to let everyone know the game is absolutely alive and kicking. Also to coincide with the new trailer and all round refurbishment of the other website pages for the game.

I did have a personal tragedy happen midway through last year which delayed development but there is no need to get into that here. What matters is that I have not given up even in the slightest, I am now more motivated than I have ever been and willing to do whatever it takes to see this game released as intended. I will also be uploading a roadmap for the early access along with the dev log which is a few days away.

Thank you to those who stuck with me all this time. I appreciate it greatly.

If you want more details and want to see more frequent small updates please join the discord here: https://discord.gg/cgSAV277wM

Star Zeal 4x is still alive! The reason I have not updated for so long was to help myself focus on some stubborn and heavy coding that remained. Development has had its ups and downs but has luckily gone well enough in the last 6 months for me to able to post this.

A great amount of work has been done since the last time I uploaded anything, so much so that I have forgotten some of it. As such, I cannot fit everything I can talk about into this post, so I will be quickly summarizing what has been done and subsequently making some dev logs.

These are the main areas I have worked on, in preparation for the early access release:

-Game physics, EG: ship movement and combat. All of these now use physics simulation more so than they used to. This made the tactical part of the game feel smoother and more sensible. You will be able to see what I am talking about in action in the upcoming combat/tactical video.

-Weapons have received some more code and refining. There are now 3 main types of weapons, beams, plasma and ballistic. More are planned for a later stage.

-AI: Much more of the AI code has been completed, especially with regards to relations and the character AI which controls leaders independently to their factions. So now the interactions between you and the AI should get a bit more spicy.

-Great deal of bug fixing and troubleshooting, along with the never ending work on the UI.

-Large amount of art including vfx and new ship models like the sloop class seen as the center piece in the header image. The sloop class is the first official “proper” sized ship in the game.

Simply put, I managed to get an important chunk of development in the bag and I will get into the real meaty details in the upcoming logs. It will be a sort of final run before early access and there is a lot to go through. See you soon.
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If you want to support Star Zeal, check out the support page here https://atomic-temporary-150259190.wpcomstaging.com/funding/ or use the paypal link to the right of this page.

You can also follow Star Zeal 4x on:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKCFIhlv7VuJpNfMKxeE7qw

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Akuu_D_E

IndieDB: https://www.indiedb.com/games/star-zeal-4x

Tag: dev

Star Zeal 4x is Still Alive!

News: August 2021.