A small update before big ones
over 4 years ago – Sat, Nov 16, 2019 at 01:27:09 AM

Greetings Crying Suns fans!

Alt Shift team is currently working on some big changes and improvements for Crying Suns. Before going further into the details of what’s coming, here is a quick list of changes we pushed a few minutes ago:

11/15/2019 Update:

Story, events and texts

• We improved again the events procedural distribution. The average distance between two events repetition has been increased. We also fixed some remaining statistically rare situations where the minimum distance between two similar events could have been still too low.

Gameplay:

• It's now impossible to have two cryopod events during an expedition

Interface, Graphics and Sounds

• Frigate laser projectile effects were not the ones intended on most of the frigates, it has been corrected.

BugFix Major

• We fixed a major issue where the previous save "recuperation mode" was not working properly.
• We fixed a major issue where, in case of a power outage while saving, all the save files where wiped off.

BugFix Minor

• We fixed the allowed memory size for the sound engine that might have been insufficient, causing sound issues.

A quick look back

If you followed our last announcements and updates, you already know that many corrections and improvements have been made such as:

• A new chapter selection feature allowing a much higher replayability (with new Steam achievements related).
• A big rework of events distribution to prevent repetitions
• A first rework on special officers availability (still ongoing, see below)
• Game balancing adjustments
• Ergonomy and “quality of life” improvements
• The Steam Cloud save feature
• And many bugs corrected, of course

What’s coming

Following the roadmap we announced a few weeks ago but also your valuable feedbacks on Steam and Discord, here are the ongoing subjects we are working on right now until January 2020:

• A complete rework of special officers selection/availability, much easier to understand and much more interesting to play.
• A deep rebalancing of the unlockable battleships, the idea being to allow more gameplay diversity between them and more advanced strategies.
• This rework involved a long and deep rethink on a strategic level to ensure a global consistency and will also come with a lot of brand new contents (officers abilities, squadrons, weapons) and updates to existing ones to support these changes (an open beta will allow the beta-testers to try and evaluate these substantial changes very soon).
• Brand new events including new quests, risky situations and skill related situations.
•  New contents to improve environment diversity (new stations, new civilian ships)
• The iPad version is progressing everyday (stretch your fingers ;) )
• Of course, lots of bug fixes and “quality of life” improvements.
• And maybe a small surprise for players who will finish the whole game with every battleship in Hard mode ;)

Finally, the Artbook is almost ready! Here is a glimpse of it: 128 pages of Crying Suns artwork, unreleased contents and researches, a premium hard cover, in short: a very exclusive item for the biggest fans.

Thanks again for your support!

[Major update] Replayable chapters, events repetitions fixed, and many other things
over 4 years ago – Thu, Oct 24, 2019 at 12:24:14 AM

Greetings Crying Suns fans,

Crying Suns was launched almost a month ago and thanks to your valuable feedbacks since the release, we were able to define our next priorities to improve our game. Following your comments and reviews, we mainly worked on 3 big subjects :

• Making the game replayable
• Lowering the repetitiveness of some events
• Refining some gameplay parameters to provide a better experience
  

Replayability:

We developed a new “chapter selection” feature. After completing the story, you are now able to replay any of the 6 story chapters (with or without the story events, as you can reset the story on each chapter) and of course, with any of the battleships and officers you unlocked until then.

Thanks to this new feature, you will be able to finally unlock story achievements you may have missed in your first runs! In addition, new Steam Achievements have been added for completing all chapters with every battleship, although only your future runs will count for these achievements (unfortunately, save files from previous versions don’t contain the information about which chapter was achieved with which battleship).

Events repetitiveness corrected:

Following multiple players reports that a small group of events appeared very frequently, we conducted a complete audit of the event procedural generation. We found several blocking issues that were provoking statistical aberrations. We also found that we had too much constraints on events generations (related to graphical environments, gamedesign constraints or POI types) which made 20 to 30 events to be mostly picked against the few hundreds of them (!) We conducted a complete redesign of our approach and the repetitions of events should occur a lot less often now. A lot of events that were almost never picked before should now reappear and most of the time there shouldn't be much repetition between two consecutive full runs.

Gameplay adjustments:

We reworked some game parameters to improve the global game experience, including a rebalancing of Neo-N distribution (making it fairer mostly), adjustments on some weapons effects and some squadrons abilities. We also heard your feedbacks about the lack of difference between the unlockable battleships so we started to adjust their characteristics to foster diversity among them and encourage various game strategies. We will continue these improvements in the next versions of course.

As planned in the roadmap, we also started to integrate the cloud save feature although this one will only be available from the next version as we need players to update first their data files with this version.

Don't hesitate to use the Steam forum or our discord channel to report any problem you might encounter in the game. Your feedbacks are crucial for us to improve the game experience.

Discover the full changelog here on Steam.

Enjoy!

The Crying Suns development team

Crying Suns Roadmap
over 4 years ago – Sat, Sep 28, 2019 at 12:56:06 AM

Greetings Space Adventurers!

It has been a week now that Crying Suns was released and it’s time for us to share with you our roadmap for the next months. Thanks to your valuable feedbacks, we were able to adjust our plans to improve the game quality and make it deeper and more replayable.

We plan to update the game progressively every week with the following items:

Before 1 month

• Adding the Cloud save features
• Improving the overall replayability by allowing players to get back to previous chapters to experience the story again and try to beat each chapter with each battleship
• Adding several “Quality of life” features (knowing which auxiliary system stacks, misplaced repair count, improving the identification of special officers, unwanted dialog skip, etc…)
• Gameplay balancing 
• And of course, focus on fixing bugs, crashes, performance issues and typos
   

Before 2 months

• Improving the special officers availability features (too confusing for now)
• Adding new events and working on random generation of events to avoid repetition 
• Continuing gameplay balancing, “Quality of life” updates and fixes
• Adding new contents (abilities, weapons, etc…)
   

Before 3 months

• Continuing gameplay balancing, “Quality of life” updates and fixes
• Improving replayability (maybe new game modes? Still a work-in-progress)
• Adding new contents (abilities, weapons, etc…)
• Adding new events
   

Between 3 and 6 months max

•  DLC with 2 new factions (Prag Mah and Phalanx), with new playable battleships, units, 4 new special officers (an example below), weapons and faction specific events. Might include more stuff but it’s still in discussion.
• The iPad version
•  Artbook release

 A glimpse of future new officers?

This list is not exhaustive, we might add or modify some items depending on your feedbacks of course.

Join our Discord community

You will be able to discuss with other players and directly with the development team, give your feedbacks, suggest ideas, and even learn some useful tips to go forward into the game.

Click here to join : https://discordapp.com/invite/jgdQ7XY

First update after release!
over 4 years ago – Fri, Sep 27, 2019 at 02:27:16 AM

Greetings Crying Suns fans,

It has been an incredible launch week for the team and we are so glad to see that you are enjoying Crying Suns. All your comments, reviews, and even videos, give us a lot of motivation to go forward and improve our game everyday!

To sum up this first new update, we mainly worked on:

• correcting blocking problems and crashes
•  achievements unlocking problems
• rewriting, correcting typos, improving texts globally
• improving interface, graphics and sounds
• and of course correcting a few other minor bugs
   

Here is the link to see all the details about this update: https://steamcommunity.com/games/873940/announcements/detail/1601517045997468225

Don't hesitate to use the Steam forum or our discord channel to report any problem you might encounter in the game. Your feedbacks are crucial for us to improve the game experience.

Stay tuned, we will also announce very soon our roadmap for the future major improvements of Crying Suns!

Don't forget to join our Discord server

… to discuss with other players and the development team. Click here to join us!

Crying Suns is available on:

• Steam
• GOG
• Humble Store

The Crying Suns development team

Crying Suns is OUT!
over 4 years ago – Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 03:36:09 AM

The full version of Crying Suns is now available on Steam, Humble Store and GOG!

Once again, all the team would like to thank you! Your engagement, feedback and encouragement have been invaluable for us during this marathon.

People who have chosen to receive the PC version (Windows and OSX) received this morning an email from Backerkit informing them that their Steam key is available. We have also just made available to backers who have chosen to receive the OST, a Steam key to download it (still via Backerkit).

If you did not receive the email, try to check your SPAM folder, or connect directly to your Backerkit account to get your key(s).

Game content

As promised during the Kickstarter campaign, we have included in the final game:

•  Two alternate endings (for each one, a new end cutscene and 5 new events related)
•  Advanced expeditions with animated illustrations on each event and an enhanced user interface 
•  Epic boss fights (enhanced and bigger boss battleships, Boss mega weapon, additional boss AI behaviors and patterns)
• Additional content like new stations and beacons, new planets and new civilian ships
   

The two factions (Prag Mah and Phallanx) will soon be integrated into the game, thanks to a DLC that backers who have chosen to receive the PC version will receive for free and which will contain some additional surprises.

We hope you'll enjoy the game!

Spread the word!

If you want to help us, don’t forget to post a review on our Steam page.

And if you want to discuss with other players and the development team (in English and/or in French), click here to join our Discord server!

The Crying Suns development team