Awesome! As a newish player to Starmade I was a little concerned I was coming in on the wrong side of the bell curve. I'm relieved to know big plans are on the way!
Welcome to the forums.
Please, keep a few things in mind.
This game is in Alpha. As such, it is feature
incomplete and your ship/station builds can break from update to update. Do not get overly attached. (seriously, some people have a big problem with this. we have multiple rant threads which I am
not going to link to)
The development team is relatively small and do not have magic wands. Some things take a while to happen and minor bug fixes are not really a priority. (it's better to get all the pieces in first instead of fixing things 4 dozen times)
The devs in general, and
schema in particular, like to keep details to a minimum. Quite often you have no idea what the guys at Schine are really working on. And then Schema will ninja some long awaited feature without even telling the rest of the team. Sometimes you want to scream at the heavens, other times it's christmas morning.
Updates are every other week. We expect the next one this coming weekend. It can take up to 12 hours after the announcement before the update actually becomes available. They are usually good at keeping to schedule, but cut them some slack if they delay to fix some serious bugs.
Some useful links.
The
roadmap - another source of info about future development. A more long term list.
The
wiki - Not always up to date, but
Crimson-Artist works diligently and will welcome help once you are up to speed.
The
bug tracker - Check this out to see what is wrong with the game and to let the devs know when it's not working right.
Bench is the guy who keeps us up to date on what's happening. When you want to dive into logic, check out his
videos.
Another source of videos is the
Twitch channel. I think this is usually
Criss, but others may pop in. Dig up the Q&A and twitchcon videos for more info on the game. And don't forget to check out Criss's
thread, where he shows off all the ships and stuff that will eventually be in game.
Player suggestions and idea that have made it into the game have a '
Planned' tag on them. There are other tags as well, it would be a good idea to get to know
what they mean.
We are currently in between council sessions, so those links are down. But basically, it's a bunch of players that have volunteered their time and got voted into office to act as information conduits between the developers and the community. Remember,
they are players. They don't always know the answer and they don't get to make any decisions. But they
can ask. Keep an eye out for an announcement about who these people are (any day now).
I'm sure I've missed a few things. But be patient with Schine and remember some key facts.
They don't have to let us play their game. It's nice of them to listen to our feedback, but we don't really know what the code looks like. In the end, the decisions are theirs. Unfortunately, this is also a
second job for most of them. They aren't making a lot of money yet and some of them waste time eating and having families and doing other things so they can pay rent. We try to cut them some slack for stuff like that. :p
