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Hello everyone,
today I am releasing the latest update to the game titled The Cycle. This patch brings the first localization, a new gamemode as well as numerous bugfixes and small changes.
With this update, Catharage receives its first translated version - German! As a native speaker, this translation was entirely home-made (no AI here!) and frankly, a pain to put together. It turns out that localization support is not best done 8 months after a game's launch. Despite some issues, the game now supports localized text for both static instances like buttons as well as runtime-generated text, such as weapon descriptions, and groundwork exists for more future languages to come. Work is currently ongoing on French, Spanish and Italian localization. While I cannot give a fixed date for these, expect to see them at some point in the future. Note that as a result of this localization, some UI text has been made smaller to accomodate larger strings in other languages. Some minor elements also remain untranslated as of now but will be fixed soon.
The Cycle is a hardcore singleplayer daily challenge mode that can be accessed from the Fleet & More header in the launch menu. In this mode, you'll be put into a fixed, daily seed warp with your ship and no upgrades. You can warp, but cannot choose your destination, and warping will increment the "day" of the seed by one, so depending on how far you get, you can preview many days to come. Playing the mode will not gain materials or scrap, and while objective structures can spawn, completing them will not progress the respective objective! As usual, completing missions will allow you to place on an exclusive leaderboard. The Cycle is intended as a knowledge challenge for experienced players who know their way around the game, and a more competitive playing field than the normal progression-enabled leaderboards.
Overview Grid Display: A new shader has been implemented into the overview, showing gridlines and angle information to help orient navigators in space. This data can also be used to coordinate in multiplayer, where telling coop partners where to go has thus far been challenging.
Buff to Hunter Killer Sensor: This module was severely underperforming compared to most other options, owing to the fact that only a single entity could be marked at a time. It has been buffed to mark up to 6 targets at once, which should enhance its power by a lot.
Mythic items will properly uninstall after being extracted
Fixed a bug where the Tutorial damage message could unintentionally be displayed while extracting under fire
Fixes for some rare crashes
Other small fixes
That's all for this update. I hope you enjoy the new mode and additions, and maybe post a score on the Cycle leaderboard! Note that Catharage is currently discounted at 50% for a week as part of the "Games Composed In Germany" Sale.
Hey everyone,
last announcement I teased that work was being done on a new feature - now it's here: Online Coop is coming to Catharage with the Covenant update!
This has been a long-requested feature that I had initially considered out of scope, owing to the massive amount of knowledge, time and money required to bring it to life. After doing some research a few months back I found a third party middleware capable of bridging the gap, one specifically designed for this case: bringing online multiplayer to singleplayer games that weren't designed for it. Using this solution enabled me to offload a significant portion of the backend programming and took this conversion from unthinkable to (relatively) easy. As such, I have to go into some legal and technical detail about the exact nature of the coop coming to the game.
Catharage uses Coherence Networking SDK to facilitate its online component. Sessions are peer-to-peer, meaning one player acts as "host" and all the other players are "clients" connecting to their machine. Catharage uses neither central cloud hosting nor dedicated servers - this is both a financial and future-proofing measure that ensures it will remain possible to play Catharage online for at least as long as Steam exists, independent of Coherence itself. In order for this peer-to-peer self-hosting to work, the new build contains a built-in replication server that is automatically launched on the host computer when opening a lobby. This replication server is software licensed from Coherence and because of this, participation in Catharage online multiplayer requires agreement to the Coherence Replication Server EULA.
Because the fundamental structure and risk/reward nature of Catharage is fully intact in Covenant, online features are subject to some restrictions. To play with others, the host needs to open a Lobby - this is only possible after selecting and embarking a ship but before warping for the first time. A new "online multiplayer" option will appear in the top level of the pause menu when embarked to Catharage station. In this menu, players will see an automatically populated list of available lobbies, named after their owner. Players can also host their own lobbies from here: Either publicly or for friends only. Once clicked, Lobbies or Host buttons will close the MP menu after a small delay and the multiplayer status indicator at the bottom of the pause menu will indicate whether a successful connection has been achieved. Note that lobbies do not currently feature passwording or other protection mechanisms, and once warped, will be locked until the session disbands.
All player-side exit mechanisms function in coop just like they do in singleplayer: Players can extract, suspend or quit the game at any point (unless interdicted). All exit mechanisms will also disconnect players from their current Lobby. Should the Host player die, extract, suspend or quit, players within the Lobby will have the opportunity to exit on their own terms, but they cannot continue the session.
Note that since suspension is fully functional in multiplayer, suspending together and re-embarking are perfectly valid and intended ways of pausing and resuming multiplayer sessions as well as re-joining dead players. Since warp difficulty is determined by the host, the difficulty penalty from resuming a suspended save is applied as usual.
As Lobby hosting and joining is only possible after embarking, all players enter multiplayer with their own upgrades, engineering and unlocked ships. Cargo resources collected in-run are player-specific and are not shared. Mission rewards and bounty credits on the other hand are automatically shared to all Lobby members, and objectives are likewise completed for all players, including their associated scrap payout. Coop features an exclusive leaderboard that all lobby players will be listed on simultaneously. Area difficulty is determined by the host and their difficulty increase upgrades, so make sure to check these before embarking! In the same vein, hosts can choose to perform chaotic warp by activating them just like they do in singleplayer.
In principle, all items function the same between single- and multiplayer. All weapons, modules and upgrades work the same and some may even have increased utility on account of having more navigators around, such as field emitters. An exception to this is the fleet, which is not available while in multiplayer - hired fleet ships will remain upon hosting or joining a Lobby but cannot be commanded, and hiring new ships at Outposts does not work. In-run upgrade structures like Forges, Extractors and Reliquaries can be used by each player individually and will not deplete after one use.
To ease coordination, multiplayer repurposes the fleet command overlay to show other players' ships while in a Lobby. Fleet attack buttons are similarly reused, these will apply a large "tag" to enemies that can be seen globally, to allow focused attacks and notification for special threats.
Catharage is a demanding game driven by complex maths and a physics-based simulation, and can be performance-hungry even in singleplayer mode. Since playing in multiplayer adds a networking component on top of this, hosts in particular need to have powerful hardware to successfully host large lobbies in endgame areas. The player limit is five, and multiplayer areas are less dense than singleplayer sectors, but it is still possible to hit limits in specific circumstances (such as flying five Queens in Verdant-dense parts of space). Please also keep in mind that while the coop mode is quite robust and has undergone a lot of internal testing, I'm still just one dev, so bugs and minor issues may still occur.
Known issues specific to multiplayer:
Background planets may not be fully synchronized
Player-side visual effects like cruise trails and status effect VFX are not synchronized
Ship engine trails behave in visually weird ways upon warping
End-screen kill counts may be wrong
In rare cases it is possible to have Scene desync, where world generation does not match up on host and client machines. This is not game-breaking and usually fixes itself on the next warp, but may lead to odd situations where collision-relevant geometry is not shared between players
Beyond coop, other changes are coming as well:
For those who've seen and unlocked it all, are sitting on huge piles of materials and credits, utterly dominating anything below five-figure threat levels, I'm introducing Prestige: A way to reset progress for reward. While the credit reserve was an attempt to bring a credit sink into the game, Prestige is a total wipe that puts players back to where they started at the very beginning. In exchange for this sacrifice, they will gain new power and abilities:
A global scrap multiplier is added for each prestige, making the (typically) slowest resource acquisition quicker
One of three stat packages can be selected to be carried over into the future
Ship visual customization is unlocked, allowing Prestige players to show off their progress when flying online
Whether you're resetting to be on par with newly flying coop partners or just want more to chew, I hope Prestige entices at least some of you to give it all away (again?). Note that with the introduction of Prestige, the Global Credit Reserve is deprecated. Its supply drop buffing functionality has been rolled into the standard supply drop behaviour, so the bonus quality the community achieved is still there - it just cannot increase anymore (for now).
With Covenant, a small number of new items are being added to the game:
Auto Support Beams are a laser type that functions similarly to point defense, but in a support role. These turrets will automatically target allied ships within a certain radius and have negative damage and armor strip, healing whatever they hit. While they are especially useful in coop, they also target drones and fleet members so solo captains can make use of them as well
Tabula Rasa is a new mythic engine that fully removes all regular status ticks on a long cooldown - a perfect tool for players stuck in large environmental hazards or reeling after a tough fight with Blackguard enemies
Item collection is changing slightly with Covenant. Instead of being able to pick up items by default, players will now need to enable tractor mode to interact with loot in space. With this change, combat will no longer be interrupted by (sometimes unpredictable) item windows, preventing misclicks and more rigorously delineating looting and combat as separate gameplay phases. Since time stopping and slow motion are not available in multiplayer, it is also convenient for that mode.
Fixed an issue where mythic legion armor would spawn too many turrets
Fixed an issue where beacon missions would sometimes auto-complete before starting properly
Pause menu has been reorganized to house some buttons that were previously top-level in more appropriate categories
Made target icon pinning also display the health box for pinned targets
Changed Rapacity relic bonus to no longer stack but properly carry over when suspending
Added a shield break VFX and SFX, and increased the visibility of damage overlays
Changed Armor, Shield and Hull bars to no longer stretch infinitely
Missions have had different marker colors added to make it easier to visually distinguish them
Added larger death explosions to some large ships
Made player ships, fleet ships and drones no longer collide with each other. This change should make flying large carrier groups much less annoying
Tutorial messages have been fixed to no longer have incorrect text spacing
A new secret POI has been added, with a secret function...
Other small fixes and tweaks
Over the past couple of months, some great community contributions have been made for Catharage. I want to shout out the Beginner and Sector Guide made by Shaggy Moose - this is an excellent resource for those new or rusty and I highly recommend giving it a read! There are also guides by Zflocco and Dimble, each going into more granular detail on itemization and POIs respectively.
To celebrate the release of this update (and perhaps entice some coop partners), the game will be discounted for a week following this announcement!
That's it from me for this update. I hope you all give multiplayer a try, fly far with your friends and fight cool battles together. Huge thanks to the internal testing team on the Discord, all of whom have been indispensable for bringing this mode to life! If you have any feedback, further questions or encounter bugs with the new update, make sure to let me know, either on here or on the official Discord.
Hey there!
I've just uploaded a new build containing UI features that have been in internal testing for a while, all regarding the behaviour of targeting icons on the HUD. The new menu, titled "tgt icon options", contains the following items:
Enable/disable target icon bloom will toggle a new behaviour where target icons "flee" from the cursor in a bloom-like fashion, intended to help select specific icons from dense clusters.
Screen Fraction to Hide/Show Tgt Icons determines how close the permanent readouts for distance and lock percentage need to be to the cursor before being shown, given as an integer divisor for screen height.
Threshold for bloom behaviour controls how many targets need to be in close proximity to the cursor (close being twice as close as the hide/show fraction value) before the blooming behaviour starts.
Icon bloom strength determines how strongly target icons flee from the cursor.
All of these values are persistent and per-device. Depending on feedback the minima and maxima, as well as step values are all subject to change.
There is also a new function that allows for individual targeting icons to retain visibility on their distance/lock displays regardless of distance from the cursor. To enable this, click on the white dot that appears to the right of the target icon once full lock is achieved. Two smaller dots will appear, marking this icon as a "fixed" icon that won't disappear with distance from the cursor.
I hope that these changes will allow players to better customize the targeting process to their liking/situation.
One more thing...
Though I wrote last time that no more content updates will come to the game, and I am looking forward to new projects, there's one thing that I haven't been able to get out of my head, and the more I think about it, the more I want to do it - let's say a much-requested large feature is currently being investigated/worked on and will enter closed testing soon. If it works out, space will get a lot more crowded in the future ;)
Hello!
After some delay I am very happy to finally release this major update, Catharage: Angelwatch. Before I get into the details I want to thank the new and returning contributors as well as community testers, all of whom helped make this the largest and best update to the game yet.
New Keybinds have been added for many actions such as activating individual weapons, using abilities, cruise and tractor states as well as fleet commands. These can all be accessed and rebound in the options menu, and new hotkeys will also now be displayed on their respective button in the game UI. Note that the new keys will not show on the keyref in the top right, which would otherwise bloat to unwieldy proportions, and that warping and extracting do not have keybinds - I do want players to scramble to hit those still!
Fleet Commands have been greatly expanded and added to a new Fleet UI element, found on the left side of the interface whenever fleet members exist. This UI shows each fleet member's current Health status, speed mode and AI state. Next to individual fleet ships are three command icons, each representing one AI state. Below the fleet UI are larger hotkeyed buttons that apply the AI state to the entire fleet. States work as follows: HOLD will make fleet ships patrol at their current location, engaging enemies as they normally would, HOLD ON ME will make fleet ships patrol at the players' current location, and RETURN makes fleet ships follow the player while ignoring other contacts until shot at. These AI modes also incur specific speed rules, and fleet ships have been retuned to be closer to player equivalents in terms of normal and cruise speeds.
UI Text has received an overhaul, as nearly all instances of contiguous text have had their fonts replaced with a more readable alternative. Most buttons and single-line elements retain the prior font.
Target Lock Indicators have been added to all ship-sized enemies, showing how close the player ship is to attaining weapon locking capabilities. This should help specifically newer players understand the sensor system and develop an intuition for the combat model. The tutorial has been changed to more clearly reflect this new information.
Forges have had their upgrade descriptions made more verbose to be more specific on the numbers behind their effects. They have also had additional upgrades added.
Engineering upgrades have had more speed-related items added as well as a new mercy mechanic for early game: If not yet unlocked via meta upgrades, the most expensive engineering upgrade will always be for armor regeneration. This will provide a consistent path to mid-game-capable power for new players.
Bounty Hunters are a new behaviour for enemy ships that can appear rarely on most spawns. These relentless captains will know where the player is even when not inside their sensor bubble, and chasing the Navigator is their primary aim.
Various tweaks and bugfixes have been made to interface and base game functionality.
A new module ability type has been added: The Field Generator can roll on all module types and will change in functionality depending on the base module. This ability creates a static zone in space that confers a buff on players while inside this zone, ranging from sensor reduction to armor regeneration.
A new agility booster has been added to complement the speed boster, available on engines.
Single-Use restoration abilities have had their values increased significantly to be a more viable alternative to regeneration boosters.
Lure modules and the Lure POI have been reworked: They have more range and work on all enemy ships instead of a single faction. Ships affected by this Lure may now also switch to a cruising speed mode, making the effects much more noticeable (and dangerous).
Mythic items have been added: This new item type can roll on any module or weapon and will modify its behaviour in interesting and/or powerful ways. Akin to uniques in other ARPGs, mythics have a static roll chance unaffected by area difficulty, so they can be encountered at any point in the game. On modules, mythics will replace the module ability, usually with a passive effect. On weapons, mythics roll like perks, meaning they can stack with other effects such as split, escalation beam or ricochet. In total, over a dozen mythics can be found, and there is no restriction on how many can be used at a time!
Relics have been added: These are single-use or stackable upgrades that change ship behaviour and tactics in drastic ways, comparable to Keystones in other ARPGs. They are acquired from the newly added Reliquary structure, where one of two relics can be chosen. The total number of relics is seven, with some focused on pure power gains or utility and others on significant tradeoffs but similarly significant buffs to compensate. A new UI element at the top of the screen shows the currently applied relics during gameplay.
From here on, everything listed is content exclusive to the endgame, where the majority of the content additions of this update happen - that is the chaotic space unlocked after completing all regular objectives and constructing the chaotic gate.
The Celestials are a new enemy faction exclusive to chaotic space. While their design speaks for itself, their ships are also outfitted with dangerous new weaponry and abilities, including some mythic items and the capacity to deal new damage types. They are very dangerous and should only be challenged by experienced players with a good set of upgrades already unlocked...
A new supercapital boss encounter is included as the final fight of the Celestial progression, and this one is the most dangerous one yet. Prepare well, and maybe bring a fleet to be safe!
Six new playable ships can be unlocked at the new Shrine structure, and unlocking these represents the new Celestial objective track. Unlike previous ships, celestial vessels need to be unlocked in-run using in-run resources. Afterwards, they can be picked from the menu like regular ships. These ships are generally more powerful than base game equivalents and also have some slot/bonus combinations that haven't been available yet, such as range and damage bonuses with drones.
Three new meta-upgrades will unlock as players progress through the celestial objectives: Loot Chance will add a flat loot drop chance to any enemy encountered, making low-loot enemies more reliably drop items and enabling enemies to drop loot that normally wouldn't, such as drones! Scrap and Material Retention allow you to keep a percentage (up to 50%) of your collected currencies on death, which will make risky gathering runs much safer.
New status effects are available to find from celestial enemy loot (and also used by celestials themselves): Ascension will build up stacks on targets until they either die or accumulate 100 stacks, at which point an AoE explosion doing damage equal to the number of ascension stacks will occur. Damnation also accumulates and increased the direct damage received by the amount of ascension stacks, acting as a "reverse escalation beam". While ascension can only be removed by triggering its blast effect, damnation can be cleansed from the player by refusing a relic at the reliquary.
New POIs can be found in chaotic space, usually belonging to celestials. These offer new opportunities for currency collection, but are especially dangerous. This includes a new environmental hazard, the Firestorm.
With Angelwatch, Catharage is now a larger and more fully featured game than I had ever initially planned, and I consider it to be content complete. There are some small ideas still bouncing around in my head that require more technical exploration, so these may come at some point. While I will of course continue to monitor discussions and all other relevant channels to respond to questions and fix bugs, I also want to be clear in stating that Catharage is not a live service or early access game, and will not receive continuous updates. Further performance optimization as well as better Steam Deck and Controller support are things I plan to explore, but there are also other projects and ideas I look forward to developing (Catharage II?). If you've enjoyed the game so far (and maybe have been here for some of the behind-the-scenes development) I hope you'll join me again then.
And that wraps up Angelwatch! I hope you all enjoy the new features and content, find some cool loot and try your hand at fighting the new enemies. Make sure to let me know what you think, either on the discussion here or the Discord. If you've been following the game but haven't taken the dive yet, or are reading this as your first exposure to the game, note that there will also be a sale to celebrate the release of this update, discounting the game at 40% for a good while!
Hey there,
first of all I want to welcome all the new players, followers and others who have found the game over the past few days. Most of you will likely come from Splattercat, who did a fantastic showcase of the game:
The outpour of support, feedback and engagement has been wonderful and I hope you all enjoy the game!
Onto the new changes, some of which are direct results of suggestions and feedback:
Internal Camera Rework: I've spent the majority of the past two days reworking the camera code to make it more streamlined, more performant and easier to modify and play around with. This has resulted in some changes to specific aspects of some of the modes, although these should not be disruptive. Users of the non-horizon orbit camera (default for advanced preset) will find that their camera no longer accumulates rotational error over time. This will make the movement of this camera more predictable and stable. Toggling on the horizon for this camera no longer replaces it with an entirely different camera but simply enables the horizon plane and puts angular limits on vertical rotation so it's not possible to turn it on its head. Chase cam is essentially unchanged and will work as before.
Pause menu camera and movement settings have been reordered into a new submenu that also includes descriptions and new options:
Recentering is now an integer instead of a toggle, allowing players to choose the duration before recentering moves the camera. Setting this to 0 (the default) will disable recentering.
Modifier orbit behaviour can now be set to toggle instead of the default hold. This will enable players to press their look modifier (default RMB) and switch between either moving the camera but not selecting targets and not moving the camera but selecting targets.
Click-to-align can now be enabled for advanced control mode.
Modern control mode has been updated so that both Yaw and Roll inputs trigger its perceptual yaw motion, making it easier to use both modes in a hybrid configuration.
Icons have been added to the overview representation of all loot and currency items, making them more visible from afar. These may get updated in the future to show more detail.
An issue where the click-to-align target would be misplaced when the camera was too far away from the ship has been fixed.
Reduced the health values of the Leviathan freighter ship.
Added a pause menu option to lower the current system's ambient brightness.
I've also decided to delay the demo rework/update somewhat so the large number of new demo players aren't immediately save wiped just after starting!
That's all for now, as always, please let me know how you feel about these changes and if you encounter any issues.
Hello,
in today's update I want to recap the changes of the last couple of days, announce the upcoming new demo and give more details on the Angelwatch content update.
If you've kept up with the changelogs on Steam or the Discord you'll already know that I've made some minor changes to several aspects of the game. Today's update includes a larger change to how movement stats work so I'll recap all of it here for easier consumption:
Speed stat has been removed and replaced by new "AGL" and "SPD" stats that show as decimal multipliers, similar to how range and damage bonuses are displayed. This is because the previous speed stat was an internal value that worked together with several unexposed values (like physics drag and mass) to determine ship behaviour, but was not readily comparable and causing confusion. Additionally, because this value was being directly modified by speed-changing elements like modules, forges and meta upgrades, the effect of those upgrades on ships could vary wildly with no clearly visible reason. The rework makes the internal values hidden and exposes only the final multiplier, which affects all ships equally and is also now referenced and changed by all relevant other sources such as meta upgrades, modules, abilities, forges and set bonuses. With this change, upgrades will affect most ships more and especially larger capitals ought to feel more nimble and zippy.
I've aligned the maximum upgrade levels of agility and speed to match at 30.
The chase camera has had translational and rotational inertia added to its movement to lessen the jolt of impact-based movement and accentuate the movement of the ship. The strength of this effect can be changed using the new "chase cam stiffness" setting in the pause menu.
Camera distance changing has been implemented. This works on all cameras and is bound to the prior "Zoom" bind by default. Zoom behaviour is still available by using both the camera orbit modifier (default RMB) and the scroll wheel together, and tutorial texts and the HUD key reference have been appended to show this.
An option has been added to disable the advanced control mode pitch inversion. This feature was designed to help players with prior flight sim experience acclimate to the controls but has been noted to be causing confusion for players that swap between control modes frequently during gameplay. The new option is in the top layer of the pause menu and will change the internal behaviour without changing keybinds.
A small description of drone mechanics has been added to the help&info menu.
Various fixes have been implemented, notably to set bonus behaviour and chaotic gate menu buttons.
If you have any feedback after testing these changes, make sure to let me know!
Since its launch before NextFest last year, the demo has received a number of updates but is currently way behind the launch version in terms of bugfixes, polish and feature set. While I believe that it still serves as an acceptable introduction of the core game concept, it's been outpaced in several important ways and will receive an update to bring it in line with the current feature and polish state of the game. Because of technical reasons (and dumb decisions on my part back in November) this update will require a larger rework of the demo to fit it within the new world generation and progression framework, which will in turn most likely require a save wipe and lead to some content changes for the demo. I'm aiming to release this update to the demo before Angelwatch later this month.
Before the winter break I announced the coming content update "Angelwatch". While I don't have anything to show yet in terms of screenshots or video, I want to give a more detailed view into some of what's coming:
Angelwatch content will be divided into two parts - Systems (available to all players, regardless of progress) and Content (available to endgame players that have unlocked the chaotic gate). On the content side of things, the last announcement already covered most of it; new ships, enemies and objective structures will be akin to a new faction space that only happens beyond the chaotic gate. This will include a new tab on the endgame menu screen for the new unlockables, but notably, ships will not be simply bought in a menu - instead, celestial ships need to be unlocked in-world at the shrines, with materials and currency in ship cargo.
On the systems side, another new element that will be available to all players is Mythic Rarity items! These will be dropping from normal loot sources and work as modifiers on existing items. Instead of simply being better in terms of stats, like a "MK6"-type rarity would be, mythic items will spawn as extra perks on weapons and extra abilities on modules, enhancing them with powerful effects. Currently I plan to include one to two mythic variants for each item type. A preview of some effects:
Philospher's Stone: Mythic armor that converts sustained armor strip into shields
The Aegis: Mythic shield that can reflect incoming projectiles
Cloudstrike: Mythic cannon that EMPs on hit and produces lightning strikes on EMP'ed enemies
Additionally, new types of "normal" abilities will also be added in Angelwatch, including Field Emitters: A new type of ability that creates a static bubble in space providing a module-specific bonus while inside; this could be a restorative effect, a damage bonus or a sensor/signature buff, similar to how existing Shroud enemies work.
That's all for today, I hope you enjoy the recent changes and are looking forward to Angelwatch!
Hello!
It has been nearly two weeks since the launch of the game, and I want to give a little update on how it went and where we're going. First of all I want to thank everyone who bought, played and streamed the game, as well as everyone who wrote on the discussion forums and joined the Discord! Launch has performed about as I expected based on the wishlist numbers, and I'm very happy with the response so far. Over the past two weeks I've uploaded a number of small, unmarked fixes that mostly dealt with bugs reported by players and slight balance tweaks, and from what I can tell, no major issues have appeared that would make the coming winter break problematic.
I'll be taking a holiday for about two weeks, being unavailable to fix bugs or address platform issues. I'll still check in and respond to discussion threads occasionally, and the Discord has other community members/moderators capable of answering questions.
When I return in early January, work will be focused on the first major content update for Catharage coming in late January: Angelwatch!
This update will focus on QOL and endgame content, and will feature the following changes and additions:
New "Celestial" faction, including new enemies, new objectives, six new playable ships and new upgrades to unlock
Two new interactable structures: The shrine (celestial objective and ship unlock structure) and the reliquary (new in-run upgrade structure)
Relics: powerful, one-time use items that change ship behaviour significantly
A new, very hard supercapital boss
Two new status effects exclusive to celestial loot: Ascension will store procs to generate an AoE explosion on target death, while Damnation will increase the damage of all other incoming damage by proc amount
New module abilities
Fleet QOL: Fleet status UI, more fleet member commands and new fleet ships including support ships
Look forward to more details during January and on the Discord.
Also note that the 30% launch discount will end on December 24th, and because of this launch discount, the game will not be further discounted as part of the winter sale!
That's all from me for now, happy holidays and a happy new year!
Hello!
in this Devlog I will cover what's been happening in November and talk in depth about the upcoming release version of the game. I've spent the last month making the remaining content, fixing bugs and finalizing Catharage for release. For about two weeks now, a public playtest has been running where interested players could preview the (almost) final version before and until it comes out. This has been very helpful in gathering more needed feedback and discovering bugs and issues to fix. I want to specifically shout out the Discord members, who've been instrumental in making this playtest a success and have provided fantastic suggestions as well as found many a bug I'd missed.
The full version features the following new content:
Three new NPC factions have been added. This includes 18 new playable ships, over two dozen new enemy types, new upgrades bringing the total up to 20 and new objectives and mechanics:
The Verdant Swarm is a drone-focused faction with many enemies fielding their own little fleets as well as some new support ships, including an AoE healer unit. Their playable ships tend to have more drone slots in places other factions don't. Similarly, the upgrades specific to this faction buff drones in old and new ways, like expanding the number of drones players can field or giving them shorter respawn timers.
The Tyrians are a mysterious faction that specialize in sensors and stealth. Some existing sensor- and detection-related enemies have been reassigned to this faction. When facing these enemies, you will be engaged from longer distances than usual, and they also include an AoE stealth unit that can hide its allies from your detection. Player ships from this faction have strong sensors and some other unique stat combinations that make them stand out. If you're looking to kite or snipe, get to unlocking these!
The Blackguard are disfigured by radiation and fly weird-looking, highly tessellated ships. All units of the Blackguard spawn with randomly rolled weapons, similar to how the player's own loot is generated. This makes them highly unpredictable and potentially extremely dangerous - just like players, they can have weapons that permanently damage stats and do high damage very quickly. Since player gear is already random, playable Blackguard ships instead have randomized stats that change on every embark. Upgrades from this faction are diverse but include some very impactful progression items, such as starting gear level or warp difficulty increase.
A new mission type has been added, requiring you to protect a Catharingian freighter from periodically spawning enemies.
Gear has been overhauled in several ways and some additions have been made:
Armor stripping has been diversified:
Lasers and Launcher now roll with significantly less Armor Strip on average
Cannons roll with more Armor Strip and are intended as primary anti-armor tools
Launchers have been bifurcated:
Launchers come in two new variants: Rockets are fast, but do less damage, Torpedoes are slow, but do more damage. All missiles have had their base and scaling damage values increased.
Lasers have been tweaked to limit the tick amount their status effects apply and reign in their damage rates, to no longer outclass all other options at high levels.
Cannons have had a special calculation added that scales their damage based on firerate, so low-firerate cannons do more damage to account for their lower hit probability.
I've also introduced soft range caps on all weapons to further solidify their roles and the balance between them. These can be overcome with the right upgrades.
New perks and module abilities have been added:
Spread cannons fire multiple shots at once. They have reduced range and a cone-like accuracy penalty to compensate for the increase in damage.
Split missiles divide into four sub-projectiles midway to their targets, increasing the total damage and resistance to point defense.
Retargeting missiles can re-seek onto new enemies if they are still in flight while their original target dies.
Tracer projectiles have been reworked into Disruptor projectiles, which decrease a target's sensor strength on hit.
Sniper Sensors have been reworked into Target Painters, which increase the signature of all current sensor contacts.
Lure Sensors have been added. These will draw the attention of idle enemies of a specific faction in a similar way to the Lure POI.
Armor Blast modules convert your armor into an AoE explosion with a randomly rolled integer factor.
Several modules and perks have also received balancing passes to make their values more reasonable.
Set Bonuses have been tweaked and expanded:
The Summoner Set Bonus now increases the drones spawned per slot with its 2-Piece effect, instead of turning weapon slots to drone slots.
All Set Bonuses have had extra scaling effects added, meaning they will continue to give bonuses past the 4-Piece effect - see the new Extractor POI below on how this is possible.
Among the new Points of Interest are some notable new additions and changes:
Forges have been tweaked to be less effective at buffing most stats, to account for exponential scaling
New Extractor POIs have been added. Interact with these to destroy a Set Bonus module and keep its Set Bonus - this enables Set Bonuses to scale beyond their normal 4-Piece effect if you are lucky and persistent enough!
Notable miscellaneous changes:
Sensor target display logic has changed to reduce clutter in high-density encounters: Drones will no longer show their range without being hovered, and a new visual effect has been added to indicate targetability.
Range preview spheres have been added to weapons on the overview. This replaces the previous behaviour, where weapons would show a line from the ship to the targeted enemy upon being hovered (this has become redundant with the new weapon activity display on the sensor targets).
Drones and Fleet members have had their movement behaviour changed, they now fly significantly faster to better keep up with cruising players.
Ships that have weapons added after they spawn (Drones, Fleet members, Blackguard) now correctly adjust their internal engagement range to match weapons.
Difficulty scaling has been tweaked: The game now scales enemy health, damage and range scaling independently. Health and damage will scale more aggressively past difficulty 1000 than they did in the demo, meaning the game will get harder more quickly.
Loot generation and rarity calculation has been changed. There are now fewer rarities, and loot scales further into the difficulty curve. Blackguard-dropped loot has an adjusted curve and special considerations, like being able to roll radiation status effect.
Fire status has been tweaked to work as a direct-to-hull damage type, or "true damage". This makes it significantly more powerful, both for players and enemies.
Drones have had their Overview sensor bubble graphic removed to improve visual clarity.
A lifetime limit has been added for missiles, deleting them after a duration derived from their range. This will reduce instances of "missile spam", where a ridiculous amount of them fly in circles forever.
Main Menu buttons for credits and leaderboard have been added.
New Sound Effects have been added to many UI elements, improving feel and responsiveness.
New Music has been added to both the main menu, ship select and general ambient soundtrack.
New Achievements have been added, covering all faction objectives and several "completionist" challenges like unlocking all ships.
Intro and Outro cinematics have been added, including voice over by Zflocco
Countless other minor changes, tweaks and bugfixes that are too numerous to list; most of them concerning release content.
When all faction objectives are finished, you will have the opportunity to spend resources on the construction of the Chaotic Gate, the final "endgame" for Catharage. This structure sits behind Catharage station and allows you to perform a special, uncontrolled warp into more random, more difficult encounters. Warping like this is similar to how it works in the demo, but since the release version features many more points of interest and enemies, the variance is even higher. Chaotic warps will increase the encounter difficulty more quickly than normally, and completing missions in chaotic encounters will net you an entry on the new chaotic leaderboard, exclusive to endgame players. This mode is intended as both a source of more currency and a competition for highscore, and will be expanded with more exclusive POIs and enemies in the post-launch content update!
While performance improvements have been made during the demo and playtest phase, the main rendering bottleneck (raymarched volumetrics) remains a significant performance factor in the release version. It can be adjusted with the "volumetrics downsampling" option in the menu to decrease its performance cost. I will work on further tweaking and optimizing this feature in the future.
The game is generally stable and all major bugs found during the demo and playtesting phases have been addressed, with one exception: There is an extremely rare crash that can occur when resuming a suspended run. Because of its high rarity (two testers have encountered it once in ~100 hours of gameplay each) it has been impossible to intentionally reproduce and as such, difficult to address conclusively. There is recovery functionality to credit the resources from this run to players that encounter the crash, but it remains an issue that I will continue to investigate.
World generation may exhibit some edge case behaviour in rare circumstances: Combined fog and skybox lighting may be very bright, making it difficult to see far away objects on high gamma screens, and players and objects may very rarely spawn inside megaliths - if this occurs, note that you can fly out of these objects without colliding with them.
After launch, I will spend time monitoring the relevant channels (Steam forums, Discord, direct contact) to gather feedback and probably find out about more new bugs. Depending on the amount and severity of these upcoming issues, be they balancing or bugs, a patch may come before christmas to address them. After christmas I'll be on a winter holiday until mid-january, but I will continue to fix issues and make improvements where necessary afterwards.
Catharage is built to be easily and quickly expandable with content, and I expect to release at least one post-launch content update with some of the things that didn't quite make it in time for the full version. Beyond that, community feedback will determine how far I take this game - I'm happy to keep working on it, but I also have plans for new games already cooking ;-)
If you're reading this waiting for the release, I hope you have fun with the game, if you're new, check out the demo to see if it's for you!
Hello everyone,
with NextFest coming to a close, I'm very excited to share that the game has surpassed 1000 Wishlists!
This past week has been quite eventful, with a couple of updates, plenty of new players and some coverage on Youtube and Twitch. NextFest has been a huge boon to the visibility of the game, vastly increasing the amount of players and multiplying the number of wishlists by over 4x. If you're interested in this type of data, here are some of the more impactful numbers:
Over 780 players have launched the demo - that's nearly as many as have wishlisted! While the conversion of demo plays to wishlists is nowhere as high, since most people who visit the NextFest capsule only wishlist, I'm still very happy with this player count.
Of those players, over 200 have successfully completed the tutorial. That is more than a quarter and a higher percentage than I had expected going off the pre-NextFest distribution. This may seem like a low number but as you'll know if you've played the game, Catharage is quite niche and a bit hard to wrap your head around, so I'm actually quite pleased with this distribution.
Average playtime for the demo has decreased somewhat but is still almost 1 hour, likely explained by large outliers at the high end of playtime. What I gather from this (and have gathered in the past, when this number was much higher still) is that while few players really get into the game, those that do end up spending lots of time - a win in my book!
If you've played a significant amount of the game (I see a couple of you creeping your way up the leaderboards) and aren't yet on the Discord, I want to invite you again to join there, let me know what you think and maybe even get involved further by making suggestions or discussing the game with other members.
What does the future hold?
I'm still planning to release the game in early December of this year and am quite confident that the release date is achievable. The foundations for outstanding content are laid and solid, some of that content is already produced, and the only things that remain slightly uncertain are some of the technical and programmatic aspects related to this content. If you've read the devlog from a while ago about the Starmap and release version content structure, you'll know that three new factions, around 20 new ships and a handful of new POIs are coming. I'm also working on new systemic content like new perks and abilities, new mission types and new objectives. The majority of November will be spent hunkered down, so unless something comes up that I think is either such a fantastic idea that it deserves immediate implementation, or such a terrible bug that it requires immediate fixing, updates to the demo will also slow/stop. You can expect more Devlogs as I complete individual content packages and smaller update posts on the Discord of course.
That's all from me for now, hope you had a nice NextFest and continue to have fun with the demo!
Hey everyone!
Today I'm uploading the second mid-NextFest update, again focused on feedback points collected over the last few days.
Tractor mode has been added. This new button to the left of the stat bar enables you to view surrounding loot in a similar way to sensor contacts. If you click on the "reel in" button, the loot will fly to you. This uses the same functionality as material and currency pickup, so if you're in the process of flying away from the respective item, it will take longer to arrive. Loot should be fast enough to catch up with cruising ships that have not been otherwise speed-enhanced. Note that regular contacts will not be displayed while in this mode; to see them again, toggle it using the same button. The tutorial has been updated to reflect this change.
Several UI tweaks have been made. The Repair button has been resized and moved. A new "kill drones" button has been added, which will kill all your drones - this is to regenerate them should they get stuck or be otherwise problematic. A new small permanent range display has been added to all enemies for convenience. A cooldown timer has been added to the cruise cooldown display.
Enemy density has been reworked. Now, ambient enemies can spawn almost anywhere on the map. In addition to this, the radius of enemy ambush triggers has been increased dramatically, and their spawn rate has also increased. Together, these changes should lead to more dense and more spread out enemies in encounters, providing more opportunity for players to hunt single enemies and more engaging moments during travel.
Camera recentering has been implemented for the chase cam, and can be toggled from the pause menu. This option will reset the chase camera (default when selecting modern control scheme) to its default position behind the player ship after 1.5 seconds of no camera movement.
There are also bugfixes, notably the issue where damage from projectiles could sometimes apply twice has been resolved.
I hope you enjoy this update!
Hello!
In what is likely the last major update before NextFest, I have some significant changes to both UI and controls! Controls are in a lot of flux right now, this is because I'm getting a lot of input from testers, and the quest to make the game more accessible is everlasting.
UI has been expanded to show weapon icons on non-selected targets, making it easier to see at a glance which gun is shooting at what. I've also modified the threat display background to be more noticeable and in a better position.
Control modes have been overhauled once more. There are still two modes, but they have been renamed to "modern" - the new default, and "advanced" - the old default. Modern now functions like the hybrid mode did before this update, albeit with a crucial change. Clicking to set alignment target is still possible, but it is now also possible to press WASD (or whatever Pitch and Roll are bound to) to rotate the ship relative to the camera. This is much more like common space game controls and should help players unfamiliar with flightsim controls to acquiesce to the game. Together with these changes the underlying math has been fixed to finally allow throttle-based agility to affect turn speed when using modern mode. "Advanced" mode remains unchanged but is no longer the default, and Tutorials have been updated to reflect this.
Camera modes have also been altered slightly. The previously horizon-aligned orbit camera is now aligned to its own rotational axis, and the horizon display has been removed from standard view. This behaviour can be reverted to be horizon-based using the new option in the pause menu.
Reward additions have been introduced for ship kills. I've implemented a first pass on a kill attribution system, which is important for later additions coming in the release version. This feature also allows me to introduce bounty: A small credit reward for every kill, based on a ship's difficulty.
If you've previously played but struggled with the controls, maybe give them another shot! As always I hope you enjoy this update and let me know what you think about it!
Hello!
I've got the first October update coming and there are some notable changes:
Unity version has been updated to fix the recently discovered engine vulnerability before it can be exploited. This was a rather small update for me and has not created any issues on the development side, but I cannot guarantee that no new bugs have appeared on account of it. Fingers crossed!
Drone upgrades have been added to the demo. This feature was originally intended to only become available once the full version launches but based on feedback I've moved it forward and implemented it now. Together with a slight renovation of the ship select interface, two new upgrades have been added: Drone hull and Drone armor. These are relatively expensive to account for the power of armored and tanky drones, but should be attainable for drone-focused players during mid-endgame.
Forges have been nerfed somewhat. Specifically, the scaling factor of health-related stats like armor has been reduced to reign in the extreme exponential potential of successive forge upgrades. While this change should not affect balancing throughout the beginning of the game too much, it will restrain builds going into the highscore-relevant endgame.
Missions have been updated to show a preview of the credits gained upon completion. While this reward has always been based on area difficulty, doing the math manually is an unnecessary step that this update removes. In addition, enemy composition has been tweaked to allow greater numbers of stronger enemies to appear as mission targets, especially in later encounters.
There are also a number of smaller changes and fixes to UI:
-a notification for switching between control modes has been added
-a UI hint reminding players to choose a ship has been added to the ship selection menu
-an issue where the minimap would appear when exiting out of the ship select menu back to main menu has been fixed
-added confirmations to both quit and suspend functions from pause menu
I've also changed the default control scheme to bind throttle to Z/X and yaw to Q/E. These bindings should be more familiar and comfortable for new players.
I hope you have fun with drones in this update, and let me know about any further suggestions and feedback you have!
Hey there!
I've uploaded an update with the following changes:
Overview Text has been improved to properly match camera rotation in all modes, significantly improving the usability of ship-aligned camera mode (formerly "fighter mode").
Indirect control has been expanded with a new mouse pointing control. Simply click on a point in space while in indirect mode to immediately move the steering pip to that position. The graphic of this UI element has also been changed to be more readable and clear.
Throttle control has been enabled during indirect control mode. Previously, a bug prevented the normal, incremental throttle adjustments (default bind Q and E) from working properly in this mode. Together with this, a small adjustment has been made to turning behaviour in this mode to make it more less variable based on angular distance from the steering pip.
Tutorial flow has been improved by adding always-visible markers to all tutorial buoys. This should reduce confusion about where to go early on.
Photo mode now properly disables the minimap display when selected (and enables it again when exited).
Additionally, some slight UI tweaks have been made to the ship selection flow to make it clearer which buttons lead to gameplay. This update (as well as the last) also include some early performance optimizations that should reduce CPU and GPU load by a small amount.
I hope you enjoy this update!
A small call for feedback - if you're someone who's played a significant amount of the demo (3hr+) and have not been in contact with me yet, I'd love to hear from you! Whether on the Discord, here in the discussions or via DM, I'm very interested in your opinion on the game so far and any ideas or input you may have for improvements!
Hello!
I've uploaded an update containing the following changes:
Item comparison is now implemented. Colored + and - icons will show next to attributes like range, damage or ship stats like armor and shield when viewing both weapons and modules. These icons show whether a stat is better or worse than the existing, already installed item. On weapons, hovering over an installed weapon will switch the comparison so it is always relative to the selected weapon. Note that not all attributes are compared: Set bonuses, perks, burst behaviour and ability values are still as-is. This change was one of the longest-requested from way back during private testing - I expect it will help ease some players into the loot game by taking a part of the cognitive load of item comparison off their shoulders.
Forge buffs have been updated to be exclusively bonus-based instead of the prior trade-off behaviour. While most forge buffs were already strict improvements, the upgrades to weapons contained trade-offs that made them much less desirable than almost all other upgrades. I have decided to remove the negative components from these upgrades entirely so that all forge buffs are now improvements with no drawbacks. This will make the choice of which buff to pick more engaging and raise player power by a small amount overall.
Material and scrap costs for upgrades have been slightly tweaked to make the health-related upgrades more affordable. Shield, armor and hull point upgrades have had their scalars reduced, meaning the increase in their scrap cost per upgrade purchased is reduced. The armor point upgrade has had its exotic matter cost converted to plasteel cost - this change is intended to address the pre-armor-regen early game situation, where flat armor is nearly useless compared to regen and no real choice is possible because both upgrades cost rare and valuable exotic matter. While armor regen will remain a crucial stepping stone in the transition from early to midgame, players can now invest into flat armor to make incremental survivability gains before the "big jump".
As always, please leave any feedback you have either in the discussion forums or on the discord, and I hope you have fun!
Hello!
I just pushed an update with the following changes:
A weapon and module selection menu has been added after embarkation. This menu allows players to pick a weapon type for the first slot as well as spend credits (250 per) to start with a module in each slot. In addition, playing the tutorial now guarantees that the first weapon is a laser. This change was made to address the frustration of bad starting weapon RNG, particularly when spawning with all launchers. It should allow some mitigation of this issue as well as build planning when used in concert with some of the pre-embark temporary bonuses. While weapon selection is free, modules have a small credit cost to offset the power boost from weapon selection and provide a credit sink.
Resolution options have been tweaked to properly show the current running resolution as well as be visually coherent with the rest of the UI. The resolution dropdown now offers resolutions based on your display instead of the previous hand-written list.
Small UI tweaks have been made to improve tutorial flow and make the cruise button more "buttony".
There's also a secret change that allows the secret achievement to be earned, but obviously I can't say much more about that!
I hope you enjoy this update and feel that it makes your runs more consistent going forward.
Hello!
I've pushed a new build that includes the following new features and changes:
Photo Mode (returns): You can now enable a photo mode from the pause menu. In this mode you can move the camera freely using your controls for Pitch/Roll, Yaw, Throttle, View and Zoom. When activating photo mode, time stops and all UI elements are made invisible. Photo mode uses a traditional WASD+Mouselook setup for movement that may be awkward using custom keybinds, specific photo mode keybinds will come at a later date. Keep in mind that the modifier key used to rotate the camera in normal play is required to move the photo mode camera as well. The mode can be exited by using the respective pause menu option. Note that there is no built-in photo taking function, please use Steam's built-in screenshot option or other capture software. Be aware: Photo Mode has a technical limitation that I haven't yet been able to fix - when entering photo mode without having the sun in your field of view, its lens flare effect will be missing inside of photo mode. Conversely, when entering photo mode while having the sun in your field of view, its lens flare will be duplicated on the other side of the skybox. This is something I hope to be able to fix before release but remains an issue right now, so I decided to ship photo mode regardless.
New Achievements: I've added two new achievements: Navigator for those that defeat the demo's final boss, and Shipwright for those who unlock all ships in the demo. These will unlock retroactively, so if you've already done these things just start up the game and they should pop up. Regardless of how you unlock them, you may need to exit Catharage to get the Steam notification.
Dreadnought buffs: The Dreadnought has received a fifth weapon slot as well as slight buffs to its speed and maneuverability. This is intended to help it stand out as a more viable option next to the battleship and mothership, both of which have clearly identifiable strengths that the dreadnought has struggled to match. I'm collecting feedback on the ship-ship balancing and will tweak it further as release nears, so make sure to let me know what you think about your favourite (or least favourite) ships!
I hope you have fun with photo mode and can get some cool shots, and maybe chase one of the new achievements!
Hey everyone!
I just pushed an update containing a number of QOL and polish features:
Free floating scrap and credit chests now track to the player like materials do.
Scrapping loot now shows a preview of the potential scrap value gained. This value is now influenced by rarity, and most items are worth more. This should make it easier to gain scrap throughout normal play rather than just in large bursts when collecting Keystones.
Suspending now correctly stores and restores individual drone slots, meaning the Odachi hybrid battleship and runs with at least 2 Summoner set bonus points can be suspended without losing drone slots.
Targeting Overlay layering has been improved. Target Icons remain layered behind normal UI elements as they currently are but selecting them will move the expanded detail view in front of all other UI, making it no longer obstructed by things like weapon slots or the radial targeting menu.
Throttle and Agility UI has been altered to be bar-based instead of text-based. A two-bar display now sits where the Throttle Text used to be, reducing the reliance on numbers. Throttle and agility behaviour is unchanged.
Small UI tweaks include a unit display for weapons to show which unit fire delay is measured in (ticks for lasers, seconds for launchers/guns). In addition, the reset button has been moved from the pause menu to the main menu, distanced from other buttons and has had a confirmation window added to prevent accidental save game deletion. Module slots now show even if the module has no ability or set bonus.
I also want to touch one some changes that are currently work-in-progress but will arrive before launch (and ideally quite soon):
-comparison mode between new and old items is proving more complicated than anticipated and will be coming in a future update
-individual axis steering adjustments for outlier ships like the Destroyer is incoming, but not finalized as this is a very "deep" change that touches many systems
-a "reverse" throttle mode is potentially coming, depending on whether I can figure out how to make it work with trails properly - there's some work that needs to be done with trails as is
-cruise particle issues persist with certain ships, and this is an issue that I currently cannot reproduce so it remains difficult to solve
That's all for today, I hope you enjoy the new update!
Hello!
In this first devlog-style post I want to lay out the structure of the release version in more detail, going over how warping, objectives and unlocks will work as well as expanding on the "sectors" concept I mentioned in the demo announcement.
The Starmap
I'm currently working on the starmap, a central part of the release content system. This interface will appear when the "Warp" button is pressed, replacing the fully random warp with a player selection. On the map, a persistent, infinite grid of cells represents space, with colors denoting the dominant faction in the area. The central cell is the player's current location. Several cells will be highlighted (as shown above) - these are potential warp candidates. Players can hover over them to see the dominant faction in that area as well as a listing of neighboring faction influence. Clicking will initiate a warp to this new location. A cell's dominant faction as well as surrounding influence determine what types of POIs and enemies can spawn there. For example, an area with Sentinel control and Catharingian influence may spawn a Sentinel Fortress as its main POI, with a Catharingian Outpost as a minor location. Since faction POIs also hold the required objects, ships and mechanics for faction objectives, targeting specific regions of space enables players to control their game's pace and difficulty.
Concerning difficulty, the starmap will also incorporate an existing feature: Warping while on cooldown. In the demo, Warping incurs a cooldown displayed in red on the Warp button. It is still possible to Warp while this cooldown is active, but doing so will increase the difficulty of the next encounter by double the normal amount. So far, this was conceptualized both as a "skip" for strong players to reach hard content sooner as well as a punishment for using Warp as a way out of hard situations. In the new System, these functions will remain, but warping while on cooldown will enable players to jump longer distances on the starmap, making it possible to use this feature as a movement tool.
Faction Objectives and Unlocks
Different factions and free movement would be meaningless without a reason to go places, and this is where the new faction objectives will come in. In the demo, there is one set of objectives, that being the hunt for Keystones and the confrontation with the Scipio. These will become the Sentinel (blue faction) objectives on release, and new objectives in the same style will be added for all of the other four factions. On the new Objectives Screen the status of these tasks can be viewed. Like in the demo, completing individual tasks that are part of faction objectives will enable new POIs and enemies to spawn in the corresponding areas. Unlocks are similarly gated, such that progressing through each faction's objectives will enable the purchase of new ships and new permanent meta upgrades. Factions are somewhat themed, so players can focus on one to strengthen a specific playstyle. For example, finishing the Verdant Swarm objective chain unlocks the ability to permanently upgrade the starting armor of all drones - a very powerful tool for aspiring carrier pilots.
My aim is that this structure provides an understandable, approachable set of goals that players can attain on their own terms. Like many aspects of Catharage, the "extraction" spirit of player-driven agency and risk management plays a big role in the Starmap and Faction Objectives. While this is work-in-progress and subject to change, I hope I've given you an idea of what the final game will be like. As always, please leave feedback on the discussion forums or the discord!
Hello!
I've updated the demo to address camera handling, launcher performance and the tutorial:
Unified Camera Modes: Instead of the previous distinction between "normal" operation and the "fighter mode", the camera now has two separate modes of operation: Ship-aligned (the new default) and horizon-aligned (the old default). In ship-aligned mode, the camera rotation follows the player ship, and as a result, steering inputs are relative to the camera. In horizon-aligned mode, camera rotation is independent from the ship's rotation. The key previously used to switch to fighter cam (standard bind C) can now be used to toggle between these modes. Unlike before, Overview is available in ship-aligned mode and will similarly rotate with the ship. This mode preference is persistent across sessions. To account for these changes, the tutorial will no longer swap between reference frames and remain entirely in ship-aligned mode unless players choose to change modes.
Missile Launcher Buff: Missile launchers have occupied a weird niche in the combat sandbox of Catharage, being significantly less effective against most targets than both cannons and lasers, and being insufficiently specialized to fill their own role in a clear and understandable manner. While launchers already had a higher range stat than other weapons, this did not make up for their comparative lack of utility. I've increased both the base damage and the scaling damage components of the missile launcher loot equation, meaning launchers will now start with higher damage numbers and gain more damage as difficulty increases compared to lasers and cannons. This should help them solidify a role as hard-hitting long range options against larger targets.
Tutorial Tweaks: In addition to the camera-related change detailed above, the tutorial has been adjusted to show less information early on. To avoid overloading and distracting players, several UI elements are disabled until certain milestones in the tutorial flow are reached. The training drones that usually loiter in the staging area have been disabled as well.
UI Layering Tweak: The sensor contact display has been moved to a UI layer behind the rest of the interface. Previously, opening loot, displaying tutorial messages and the general interactive HUD were overlapped by targeting icons, which lead to text readability issues and could even disrupt the timestop behaviour of several windows. Sensor contacts have now been moved to a lower UI layer, meaning all standard UI elements draw above them. While this is a temporary solution that presents its own issues, it should alleviate text problems especially during the tutorial and item handling. I will work to develop a more sophisticated system for handling UI layering for the final release.
I hope you like these changes! As always, please leave any feedback you have on the steam discussion forums or the discord, and go shoot some missiles!
Hey everyone,
I just pushed a major update to the demo, based on player feedback and outstanding fixes and goals:
Suspend Feature: I've added a new option to the pause menu called "suspend & quit" that allows you to save elements of your current run to resume later. This button will save your current ship, all equipment (weapons & modules) and its stats including set bonuses. Your collected currency is also saved and restored. Fleet members you have recruited will not rejoin you. The suspend option is available from your first warp onward. If a suspended state is available, the "embark" option in the main menu will be replaced with a "suspend" option that will spawn you in the training area with your recovered ship, currency and items. While I've tested this system and already fixed a whole heap of new and exotic errors that came with it, some edge cases may still exist where stats or items are not saved and restored correctly. If you come across these, please report to me (with details) so I can investigate.
Fighter Cam Orbit Rotation: The "Fighter Cam" now allows for camera orbit rotation just like the main game cam. Press your camera orbit key (default Right Mouse Button) and move the mouse to rotate this view. These new controls respect the inversion and sensitivity settings in the options menu just like the main camera rotation does.
Persistence for Button Guide toggle: The game now saves the state of the Button Guide menu, meaning you don't have to toggle it every time you start.
I hope you enjoy these new features and get some long runs going, and if you've struggled with the movement and camera before, maybe the new controls can help you!
I've just uploaded a small demo update addressing some outstanding bugs and implementing feedback.
Changelog
fixed a bug where fleet members would show up on the targeting display despite being dead
camera switching is now possible from all states to all other states
sensor contact health display has been made independent from cursor hover state and can be viewed without hovering, as long as sensor solution is strong enough. This display is scaled by distance but will become full-size when hovered
added an "all weapons" button that assigns all weapons to the target
added text status displays under weapons that show the current state, such as tracking, firing, reloading and more
I'm continuously collecting feedback and will continue to update the demo with changes and bugfixes. If you have feedback or suggestions, please post them either on the Steam discussion board or the game's Discord.
Hello everyone!
I am very happy to announce that the public steam demo is now available for download!
If you are interested in Catharage, make sure you check it out and give your feedback. The demo represents an in-development state of the game that is not final, and all aspects are subject to change. To expand on the usual fare with these statements a bit:
Content - The demo includes the first "Sector" of content (a concept I detail below), which should last anywhere from 3-5 hours depending on your knowledge, skill and luck. I do not currently plan to update the demo with more new content.
Stability - The demo build is stable and relatively bug-free. My testing capacity is limited so it's likely that there are bugs and issues that have slipped through the cracks, so please let me know in the discussion forums or on the discord if you find any!
Performance - Catharage uses global raymarched volumetrics for its lighting. This is a feature that cannot be turned off, as it is critical for the look of the game. These volumetrics are demanding to render, so the game may run worse than you expect given its stylized look. Performance can be improved by using the "Volumetrics Downsampling" option in the graphics menu. I will also work on performance for the release version and you can expect that version to perform better than the demo.
Catharage is a complex and dense game. It is highly recommended to play the Tutorial before doing anything else, as it will familiarize you with core concepts that you need to survive in the game.
Note also that it is currently not possible to "save" a run in progress, and it is also impossible to end a run without either extracting, dying or quitting the game.
Roadmap and future of the game
I plan to release the full game in winter, likely around christmas. Until then I will continue to fix and refine core gameplay and develop new content. As mentioned above, the demo features one "Sector" of content. A sector is comprised of POIs, Ships, Upgrades, Weapon Perks, Abilities and Enemies as well as an overarching objective to complete. Since only one sector is currently in the demo, all these elements are available at the same time and in the same place. For the full release I plan to include 3 or 4 of these sectors and distribute them in a spatial, player-controlled way. I'm not sure yet how exactly this will look, likely something akin to a starmap, but it means that in the full version, you'll be able to choose what distribution of content your encounter and upgrade sheet will feature, and you'll be able to progress through different content sectors at your own pace. This structure will also enable me to release future post-release content packs seamlessly into the game. Depending on the response to the game it may end up being updated for a good while to come.
With that all said, have fun with the demo, kill some ships and make sure to let me know what you think!
Björn Michalski
About
This page aggregates Steam news feeds, patch notes, and developer announcements for Catharage, sourced from official Steam community posts.
Major updates, balance changes, and seasonal events often correlate with player-count spikes — cross-reference announcements here with the live charts on the main Catharage statistics page.
Articles link back to Steam for full changelogs. SteamScope refreshes news entries as new posts are published to the game's Steam hub.