Applications and alpha updates for Starport Delta
It’s been a busy time here at Cloudfire Studios over the last few weeks. We’ve released two new updates to Starport Delta for our alpha players, made a new gameplay trailer, helped out our local game development meetup, put in various applications and our Technical Director has also had a new baby!
Our 0.9 alpha update included a major update to our in-game UI and our first steps for localization support as we added German translations for the core UI. We were also very excited to produce our first alpha gameplay trailer from the 0.9 release. The recent 0.10 alpha update had all new designs for several tiles, new music, new systems and the first of our characters. Both updates have been significant in their own ways, as well as incorporating a lot of design work that will become more evident in later updates.
The Christchurch Game Developers recently hosted a site for the Global Game Jam. The Cloudfire team was there to help out, including streaming the opening ceremony down to Dunedin so some of the gamedevs down there could virtually participate in the Christchurch Jam site. At the playtest meetup held at the start of this month, we sponsored some prizes to give out to some of the teams that had done extra well during the jam. Memories of Melodies and The Things They Left Behind took out the overall winner and runner up, as well as each picking up other honours. Safe Space also got Best Use of Theme. We sincerely hope they all go on for a full release!
There are a lot of opportunities out there for game developers to apply for funding and/or exposure via marketing showcases, festivals or award ceremonies. With our shiny new gameplay trailer and more updates to the game in hand, we have applied for a few over the past few weeks. As we recently mentioned, applications for PAX Rising at PAX East 2019 were open (now closed) and while we’ve already committed to going to PAX East, there’s some definite prestige to taking part in Rising, and every little bit helps! We also put in an application for an Unreal Dev Grant, which is an outstanding initiative from Epic Games to help support developers making interesting creations using Unreal Engine 4. Last but certainly not least, we’ve thrown Starport Delta and our hat in the ring for The Pavs (formerly Play by Play awards), the awards that are a part of the New Zealand Games Festival, which is a celebration of all things gaming open for both public and developer-focused activities. Fingers crossed for all of these!
An recent interesting side effect of having a store page for people to wishlist Starport Delta has been interest from people who are keen to do translations. We had always planned on doing multiple localisations for Starport Delta, but we hadn’t anticipated that people would be proactively coming to us! We’re evaluating on a case-by-case basis at the moment for how much we can accommodate right now, but it’s going to be exciting as we add more languages in the coming months and hopefully more post-launch as well.
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