The Last Starship's devs show mining vessels and player feedback
Those players want a tutorial
The first developer update video of The Last Starship focused on combat, which I thought looked pretty swish. The second developer update video for Introversion's space-everything game says, hey, this game isn't about combat, and talks about user-made ships, mining vessels and, in an additional video, early player opinions of the playtest.
Here's the update video:
The Last Starship let in a small tranche of players to do some testing via Steam last month, and the result is a lot of people building and sharing their ship designs. Much of the video above is spent showing off those user-created ships, which are far larger than anything the developers had built themselves. Large enough that the unoptimised game chugs a bit while rendering them.
After that, they switch to showing mission types that aren't the combat sorties we saw in the first video. The idea behind The Last Starship is that you construct a ship, or fleet of ships, and then take on different kinds of missions which put your creations to the test. It's a bit Prison Architect, a bit FTL, a bit every-space-game-in-one.
In another video posted this week, developers Chris Delay and Mark Morris broke down the numbers behind the game's (extremely) soft launch. In the two months since it was announced, they've accrued over 30,000 wishlists on Steam, for example. The most interesting numbers are the questionnaire they sent to players, asking them for their opinion on the current test build, their interest in future updates, and their preferred features. 44% of players said they "got completely stuck."
It's early days for The Last Starship, but I always enjoy developers being open about their progress. If you want to get involved, The Last Starship isn't yet available to buy but you can request access to the playtests on Steam.