January 2021

Rubber Banding

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A big question I get from folks as they’re signing up — “what’s to stop someone who has been playing for a while from coming in and stomping me as soon as I sign up?” — and it’s a very valid question. A 4X game, by it’s nature, involves a bit of exponential growth, population being one obvious example in Galactic Impact, but also sheer access to resources: finding a second planet, then another, then all those planets funding your fleet, to find more planets, there’s an intrinsic exponential growth. 2x.

Of course, if you join today, and I join tomorrow, and we’re on the same exponential growth trajectory in a game, I can literally never catch you, it’s mathematically impossible, which diminishes the fun for both of us. For me, I can’t ever “overtake” you, so why try? But also for you, because you have no meaningful peer competition.

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Live!

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And we’re live! You can sign up here. Tuning and balancing and expanding game features will be an ongoing project, but the game is now fully playable, and we’ve got several empires already starting to grow. Come on in and check it out!

Start Your Galactic Empire

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Play Galactic Impact

Small Delay

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There’s a pretty long backlog of updates I need to get edited and posted out about the development process over the last six months, but dropping this short update in real time, because a lot of the copy says “releasing December 2020”, and that’s clearly in the rear-view now.

Sneak peek at the new look!

The goal was to launch the more open phase of public beta on the 17th of December, but in the weeks leading up to that, I had several great conversations with first one, then a second, incredible designers who were excited about the project and I was able to hire to take on the daunting role of cleaning up the visual garbage I’ve been subjecting early testers to and they started working through the screens, and have come up with some remarkable work, which they began implementing immediately.

With such a slick visual overhaul so close in the offing, it felt weird to arbitrarily ‘release’ with the old interface, when the new interface is so much clearer and inspiring for new players. So as soon as the new design starts rolling out to the server, I’ll be throwing the doors open for some more players!

Scary and exciting.