Idle Space Navy Devnote XXX

Quality of Life Improvements in ISN 0.08.0

So, the Steam launch of Idle Space Navy 0.07.4 has been a much larger success than I expected. Over 3,000 people have added the game to their library, and over 500 have given it a try over the past two days. I’m blown away by the number of people who have taken a chance on a first-time indie developer’s early access game, and I really appreciate it.

I’m not stopping here, though, because ISN has a long way to go. ISN 0.08.0 is the next major version of the game, and among new features (such as the Artifact System – the second prestige layer – and new items and upgrades) are a large chunk of quality of life improvements.

Ship/weapon purchase woes. One of the issues I’ve seen people bumping into is that they’re buying ships and weapons before they really have a use for them. I’ve added an item to the tutorial, but I’ve also gated ship and weapon purchases and upgrades behind map square purchases in 0.08.0. This means that you’ll have to buy a map square in order to buy more ships or weapons.

Decimals decimal-ing decimal-ly. The standard in ISN has been 3 decimals for everything, simply because 3 decimals were and are being used for notations for over 1 million (1,000,000) of resources (most obvious for credits). Evidently, though, this has caused some confusion, so values below 1 million will have their decimals trimmed to 2 places. Beyond 1 million (so, in the realm of notations), values shall continue to keep 3 decimal places.

More info in the Lab. The Calibrator has more information about how your earnings for Calibration Chips are calculated in a new toggle, and the level requirements have been placed into a toggle as well to declutter the Calibrator’s display.

More info about saves. The main menu has received a bit of a rework, not only including the new manual save as a selectable option but also including some information about the saves in question – telling you what version the save was made on, the save’s save number, and the time the save was made. It gives you more information about your saves!

Quality of life bugfixes. There have been a few quality of life bugs zapped, such as automates’ toggles and upgrades being weird, the Lab reset tutorial not displaying right (probably part of the first issue I listed here), and module values not being displayed quite right.

Either way, there’s a lot coming in 0.08.0, and I think it will solve a lot of the issues people have had with 0.07.4, as well as bringing a bunch of new features to the table. ISN 0.08.0 is targeted for mid-October, so stay tuned!