- Major technical upgrade for modern systems. - 8 November 2019
I've spent the last few months upgrading the build system for Starship Rubicon to get it to run more nicely on modern systems (compiling it with Blitzmax NG as opposed to the depreciated vanilla Blitzmax). If you've had problems getting it running on Windows 10, this should be the fix for you. Or a 64-bit linux system. Or, like, any mac. Joystick support is dropped. If you really want it, you can opt back into the 2.2 branch. Changes: Moved from a 32- to a 64-bit build. OpenGL is now the graphics driver for all platforms. Locked the render resolution to 1280x720 so the game doesn't play differently on different sized screens. Lancer AI has been changed to hit-and-run instead of circle-and-shoot. Dialogue size resized from 2x to 1.5x (I'm still not happy with how it looks, but it was too big) Reef boss now is layered underneath shots instead of on top of them. New terrain hazard: spinnin…
- Windows 10 is NOT supported. - 10 May 2017
Been getting reports that Rubicon has trouble running on Microsoft's latest hey-know-what-would-be-fun-switching-your-OS update. I don't have a Windows 10 computer to test it/make a fix (and won't for the foreseeable future), so I'm just gonna declare it unsupported for the time being. Sorry for the inconvenience. I just don't have the resources right now to fix it. Edit: Sounds like even compatibility mode might not work. I'd rather people give it a pass than have a bad experience due to technical problems, so if you have Win10, I'd really recommend holding off for the time being.
- Windows 10 is NOT supported. - 10 May 2017
Been getting reports that Rubicon has trouble running on Microsoft's latest hey-know-what-would-be-fun-switching-your-OS update. I don't have a Windows 10 computer to test it/make a fix (and won't for the foreseeable future), so I'm just gonna declare it unsupported for the time being. Sorry for the inconvenience. I just don't have the resources right now to fix it. Edit: Sounds like even compatibility mode might not work. I'd rather people give it a pass than have a bad experience due to technical problems, so if you have Win10, I'd really recommend holding off for the time being.
- Crescent Loom is now on Greenlight! - 10 February 2017
Crescent Loom, the genre-shifted neuroscientific sequel to Starship Rubicon, has been launched on Steam Greenlight! I depend on crowdfunding to make new games, so if you enjoyed Starship Rubicon and wanna see more, head over to Greenlight show it some love! As a sidenote, backers over at the Kickstarter have put putting together some really elegant creatures that I'd like to share with you: check them out on Kickstarter!
- Crescent Loom is now on Greenlight! - 10 February 2017
Crescent Loom, the genre-shifted neuroscientific sequel to Starship Rubicon, has been launched on Steam Greenlight! I depend on crowdfunding to make new games, so if you enjoyed Starship Rubicon and wanna see more, head over to Greenlight show it some love! As a sidenote, backers over at the Kickstarter have put putting together some really elegant creatures that I'd like to share with you: check them out on Kickstarter!
- Kickstarter for the sequel! Neuroscience & physics-based creature construction! - 1 February 2017
Crescent Loom: weave neurons, stitch muscles, create life. The Kickstarter is now live! Update: we made it! Follow progress on the dev blog. It's a bit of a genre shift: we're moving from space into the ocean. In Crescent Loom, players construct physics-based underwater creatures and weave scientifically-accurate neural circuits in order to explore an alien ecosystem. https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/015/250/708/590b8d0db83d6b60a8eb1e2e77decabc_original.gif?w=680&fit=max&v=1485112046&q=92&s=588018fdda39a853c4f36d32a7663c15 After the events in Starship Rubicon, the planets of both humanity and the bio-engineering Alien Nemesis lay in ruins. Most surviving humans now sleep in cryopods collected by the Pilot on her warpath towards the Nemesis homeworld. The Pilot now returns to one of the planets that she burnt from orbit and begins using a piece of Nemesis technology called a "Crescent Lo…
- Kickstarter for the sequel! Neuroscience & physics-based creature construction! - 1 February 2017
Crescent Loom: weave neurons, stitch muscles, create life. The Kickstarter is now live! Update: we made it! Follow progress on the dev blog. It's a bit of a genre shift: we're moving from space into the ocean. In Crescent Loom, players construct physics-based underwater creatures and weave scientifically-accurate neural circuits in order to explore an alien ecosystem. https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/015/250/708/590b8d0db83d6b60a8eb1e2e77decabc_original.gif?w=680&fit=max&v=1485112046&q=92&s=588018fdda39a853c4f36d32a7663c15 After the events in Starship Rubicon, the planets of both humanity and the bio-engineering Alien Nemesis lay in ruins. Most surviving humans now sleep in cryopods collected by the Pilot on her warpath towards the Nemesis homeworld. The Pilot now returns to one of the planets that she burnt from orbit and begins using a piece of Nemesis technology called a "Crescent Lo…
- Update: 2.16! -- Hangar test drive, controller polish, bug fixes - 19 January 2016
Hopefully the last patch for a while! TLDR; to see some of the controller fixes, you may have to delete rubicon.options in the main game folder. (it'll generate a new one by default) The biggest thing here is a not-abysmal controller scheme. Having designed the game ground-up for keyboard+mouse, it was a challenge to get the same kind of responsiveness from a controller. One note is that the main triggers on a 360 controller are not supported -- the default driver is set up such that if one is held down, it cancels out the other. Since I couldn't find an easy fix, I just left them disabled. Also I JUST REALIZED joysticks haven't been working on linux or mac at all. I was able to throw together a fix for Linux (i.e. it works on my box, hopefully your milage will not vary), but Macs are still out of luck. Same goes for special Steam Controller support. C'est la vie. The one thing I change…
- Update: 2.16! -- Hangar test drive, controller polish, bug fixes - 19 January 2016
Hopefully the last patch for a while! TLDR; to see some of the controller fixes, you may have to delete rubicon.options in the main game folder. (it'll generate a new one by default) The biggest thing here is a not-abysmal controller scheme. Having designed the game ground-up for keyboard+mouse, it was a challenge to get the same kind of responsiveness from a controller. One note is that the main triggers on a 360 controller are not supported -- the default driver is set up such that if one is held down, it cancels out the other. Since I couldn't find an easy fix, I just left them disabled. Also I JUST REALIZED joysticks haven't been working on linux or mac at all. I was able to throw together a fix for Linux (i.e. it works on my box, hopefully your milage will not vary), but Macs are still out of luck. Same goes for special Steam Controller support. C'est la vie. The one thing I change…
- All New Video Interview With Wick, Creator of Starship Rubicon! - 22 December 2015
Recently I got together with Wick to do a retrospective interview discussion about Starship Rubicon and get this thoughts on this years launch. We talk about some of his new projects as well as some of his early memories of Star Wars and his start in game development modding Star Wars Battlefront II. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O2Z-vF-cX0
- All New Video Interview With Wick, Creator of Starship Rubicon! - 22 December 2015
Recently I got together with Wick to do a retrospective interview discussion about Starship Rubicon and get this thoughts on this years launch. We talk about some of his new projects as well as some of his early memories of Star Wars and his start in game development modding Star Wars Battlefront II. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O2Z-vF-cX0
- "Deep discount" Bundle Postmortem - 15 December 2015
This last October, we got an offer to have Rubicon be part of a "deep discount" game bundle. Ten games were going to go for $2.50 -- an insane markdown, even before it got split eleven (including the bundle site) different ways. How could something like that turn a profit? How can devs make a living if that's the landscape of sales? What does it mean for a couple thousand extra Steam keys to be released (for basically free) out into the internet? If you're interested in these kinds of behind-the-scenes economics, here's the postmortem I wrote up on the experience: http://wick.works/2015/12/14/bundle-stars-postmortem/
- "Deep discount" Bundle Postmortem - 15 December 2015
This last October, we got an offer to have Rubicon be part of a "deep discount" game bundle. Ten games were going to go for $2.50 -- an insane markdown, even before it got split eleven (including the bundle site) different ways. How could something like that turn a profit? How can devs make a living if that's the landscape of sales? What does it mean for a couple thousand extra Steam keys to be released (for basically free) out into the internet? If you're interested in these kinds of behind-the-scenes economics, here's the postmortem I wrote up on the experience: http://wick.works/2015/12/14/bundle-stars-postmortem/
- The Best Gift Of All - The Starship Rubicon Demo For The Holidays - 25 November 2015
After a string of summer events showing Starship Rubicon, winter approaches, and as such comes the incredible march of the holiday sales. Starship Rubicon will join the legions of games on sale and we want to give people an extra incentive to buy the game at its super discounted rate so today we are launching a demo. If you haven’t tried Rubicon and have always wanted to this is your chance! As everything awesome, the demo runs on PC, Mac and Linux and contains a tasty slice of the actual game: 3 playable ships and the entirety of level 2: Sol. As with most demos we keep some of the great stuff for the full meal deal but we think there is a lot here to try and it’s well worth your time. Cheerful Ghost annoucement
- The Best Gift Of All - The Starship Rubicon Demo For The Holidays - 25 November 2015
After a string of summer events showing Starship Rubicon, winter approaches, and as such comes the incredible march of the holiday sales. Starship Rubicon will join the legions of games on sale and we want to give people an extra incentive to buy the game at its super discounted rate so today we are launching a demo. If you haven’t tried Rubicon and have always wanted to this is your chance! As everything awesome, the demo runs on PC, Mac and Linux and contains a tasty slice of the actual game: 3 playable ships and the entirety of level 2: Sol. As with most demos we keep some of the great stuff for the full meal deal but we think there is a lot here to try and it’s well worth your time. Cheerful Ghost annoucement
- 2.14 Controller hotfix. - 11 November 2015
Lemme preface this with some history: the original motivation for me to develop Rubicon was to see if I could make a better control scheme for Asteroids using the mouse. The core mechanics of the game are centered around it. The trade-off between moving and shooting, aiming and steering, and being able to smoothly and immediately transition between the two. Any port to another kind of control interface is going to be just that: a port, awkward and a little mismatched to the design of the game itself. Alas, the conventions and expectations of the shoot-em-up genre thereby seem to have taken me by surprise. I didn't expect people to demand controller support with such vigor. I was hoping people would meet the game on its own terms. I didn't even bother to do a final check for controller functionality before shipping the previous patch, which was a mistake: plugging in a controller doesn't…
- 2.14 Controller hotfix. - 11 November 2015
Lemme preface this with some history: the original motivation for me to develop Rubicon was to see if I could make a better control scheme for Asteroids using the mouse. The core mechanics of the game are centered around it. The trade-off between moving and shooting, aiming and steering, and being able to smoothly and immediately transition between the two. Any port to another kind of control interface is going to be just that: a port, awkward and a little mismatched to the design of the game itself. Alas, the conventions and expectations of the shoot-em-up genre thereby seem to have taken me by surprise. I didn't expect people to demand controller support with such vigor. I was hoping people would meet the game on its own terms. I didn't even bother to do a final check for controller functionality before shipping the previous patch, which was a mistake: plugging in a controller doesn't…
- Update: 2.13! -- Boss tweaks, larger dialogue, technical fixes. - 28 October 2015
After showing at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo (Jon's writeup of the event), it became apparent that some of the bosses (I'm looking at you, Dodongo) still had a couple bugs. I took the opportunity to wrap those tweaks up with the bugfixes that I've done since Steamlaunch into a new patch. I haven't done a boatload of testing with this version, but how bad could it be? You can opt into the "stable" branch if you would like to roll back to 2.12 for whatever reason. I would like to hear what people think! Probably the most visible change is the doubling of the dialogue + portrait boxes. It was a little jarring for me, but there were enough people that couldn't read the text that I decided it necessitated a change (and thanks to pixel art, it'd have to be 2X). Plus, although it was designed to be somewhat ignorable, people were missing some important information. If this is abhorrent to y…
- Update: 2.13! -- Boss tweaks, larger dialogue, technical fixes. - 28 October 2015
After showing at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo (Jon's writeup of the event), it became apparent that some of the bosses (I'm looking at you, Dodongo) still had a couple bugs. I took the opportunity to wrap those tweaks up with the bugfixes that I've done since Steamlaunch into a new patch. I haven't done a boatload of testing with this version, but how bad could it be? You can opt into the "stable" branch if you would like to roll back to 2.12 for whatever reason. I would like to hear what people think! Probably the most visible change is the doubling of the dialogue + portrait boxes. It was a little jarring for me, but there were enough people that couldn't read the text that I decided it necessitated a change (and thanks to pixel art, it'd have to be 2X). Plus, although it was designed to be somewhat ignorable, people were missing some important information. If this is abhorrent to y…
- Come Hear Our Starship Rubicon Talk And See Our Booth At This Years IndieGame Con - 25 September 2015
Greetings human. Wick and I will be giving a co-talk at this years Eugene IndieGame Con about Starship Rubicon from it's early stages to eventual Steam launch. We talk about the games humble beginnings, Kickstarter and also discuss the age old question "why make another indie game?" Spoiler alert, we ain't rich but we can hopefully convince you we had fun and learned... something. Oh and come by and check out our all new Cheerful Ghost / Starship Rubicon booth. We will have some surprises for people so come check it out. http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/2644/come-hear-our-starship-rubicon-talk-and-see-our-booth-at-this-years-indiegame-con
