Wishlists are everything when you're an unreleased game on Steam. Without them, your game pretty much disappears into the void at launch. We’ve been doing well so far, with enough to get on Popular Upcoming, but progress has been slow.

Every day I log in and check the numbers. Wishlists, followers, demo downloads, etc. One day last week more people deleted Star Vortex from their wishlists than added it. It's hard not to be demotivated but that's all part of the journey.

Then, two days ago, a friend messaged me: "SplattercatGaming just posted a review of your game." Within a day I had over +1,500 wishlists, +200 followers and over 500 new players trying out the demo. Holy cow...

The last couple of days have been a whirlwind of feedback, bug reports and suggestions. This update is my first attempt to address some of them, more will follow. Thanks to Splattercat for the phenomenal review and to all the new players who saw it and are now here!

Parallax Changes

Some people evidently don't like the slow parallax background artwork. I attempted to address this last update with my new dust layer in the clouds, to give a greater sense of movement. With this update I've also increased the movement speed of all the background elements. I'm hoping this will go some way to addressing the feeling that you're not in motion.

Sell Price Doubled

Long ago players in Star Vortex had too many credits and nothing to spend them on. These days with the Assembler, players often find themselves running short. As such I've doubled the sell price of all items in the game. This means items now sell for 20% of their buy price instead of the old 10%. I'm hoping this gives a little more freedom to buy things and experiment.

Friendly Ships

I designed the friendly ships, I picked their colors and gave them names. Yet still, I try to shoot them when they arrive in Warzones! Clearly, there is still an issue with identifying friendly targets that adding temporary [Friendly] tags did not address. All friendly ships now permanently show their names above in blue text that I'm hoping will stop me from trying to kill them on sight.

PDL Color

It was mentioned briefly in a live stream that PDLs were hard to distinguish from incoming laser fire and I have to agree. There was no real reason for them to have colors as they're kinetic damage. Now they're white so they should be easier to distinguish.

Display Change

I don't normally highlight bugs but this one was game-breaking. The game now defaults to Borderless Fullscreen (because it's safer) and if you change this in any way you'll get 10 seconds to accept the changes before they auto-revert. Some setups allow players to pick refresh rates that their monitors do not support and this can make the game unplayable.

Lots of other bug fixes and quality of life changes below. We finally tracked down the last of the assembler storage errors and your drones should no longer go whizzing away like easily distracted children.



Enjoy! Another update should be out this weekend where I'll hopefully address some of Splattercat's feedback directly.

Patch Notes

New Features / Content

• Resetting slots now includes your initial primary slot.
  

Balance Changes

• Doubled sell price of all items as items now sell for 20% of their cost to buy.
  
• Credits dropped by transports in intercept encounters have been doubled.
  
• Increased drone range by +10% as they still feel a bit short range.
  
• Infect waypoint mission is now correctly level 12.
  

Quality of Life / Accessibility

• Friendly ships now permanently have their names above them in bright blue text.
  
• Increased parallaxing of background objects to improve sense of movement.
  
• Background stars no longer remain static to improve sense of movement.
  
• PDLs are now white as it made no sense to give them damage-type colors when they're kinetic.
  
• Auto Untarget Out Of Range setting is now enabled by default.
  
• Moved auto target settings out of gameplay and into the controls category.
  
• Game now defaults to Fullscreen (Borderless) due to refresh rate issues on some devices.
  
• Display changes are now followed by a 10s reversion countdown incase it doesn't work.
  
• Rewrote some of the Admiral's dialog to make him ask more questions.
  
• Adjusted ESA's dialog to make its personality more consistent.
  
• Fixed random Dialog that called Echo 'she' instead of 'it'.
  
• Skip cutscene button should no longer accidentally be clicked when reading dialog.
  
• Added a pop-up tutorial to prompt new players about the navigation panel.
  
• Shorter loading screens that don't run a 3s animation no longer display tips.
  

Bug Fixes

• Friendly and enemy drones should no longer fly off in wild fast orbits.
  
• Fixed bug where closing assembler panel with shared storage open could cause errors.
  
• Fixed controller navigation issues inside upgrade tooltips.
  
• Fixed another issue where the global light would not reset in the Alpha Saxa.
  
• Fixed a null pointer as the upgrade panel opens.
  
• Fixed a null pointer in NavigationHighlight.Update().
  
• Fixed a null pointer in DialogOverlay.OnDestroy().
  
• Fixed bug where Phantom parts would not unlock at the end of Sector 2.
  
• Enemies will now target the player even when they have boost immunity.
  
• Fixed null pointer in NullSave.ReIconed.CompareIdentifierName().