Our dear Meeple, we know we've been very hush-hush for a few months now, but it’s been for a good reason! We're excited to announce that we're close to the full release Meeple Station, in fact we're aiming to release 1.0 on March 30th 🎉

*Due to a member of the Meeple Station team contracting COVID-19 and being forced to rest and recover for a few weeks, we've decided to push the release date of the game back two weeks to April 10th. We hope you understand during this strange time and global pandemic that we're all going through, and you can read more about the release date push here.*

That’s right! The team has been sitting on this for quite some time now, but they're jiggling with anticipation to finally be releasing the complete story mode for Meeple Station. Along with the campaign, 1.0 will include loads of other fixes and features. The combat and conflict systems have been revamped and a whole new system for custom events has been added, which will create more meaningful interactions with the surrounding star systems.

We don’t want to give too much away about the campaign, so we’re not going to be dropping any story spoilers in this announcement! ;P

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So What's New In 1.0?

New Tutorials! Believe it or not over the past two years the team has had to re-make or completely revise the game’s tutorial at least a dozen times. However, now that the game’s major features have been locked-in, the team has been able to finish a long-requested comprehensive series of tutorials to guide new players through the game’s basics once and for all.

Mods have also finally gotten some long-needed TLC, now with backward compatibility for older mods and refreshed support for dealing with all of the new features and content. You know how much mods mean to us and it's been amazing to see your creations during early access on mod.io, and we can't wait to see what you cook up following the full release later this month.

Another huge additions is the introduction of the Hyperdrive. Tired of your boring old home system in sandbox mode? Just up and leave, find a more interesting one! You can now build power hungry drives to move your station over to entirely new systems. We’ve been developing this behind the scenes since the Planets Update and are overjoyed to finally be able to open up the gates on this and make use of the procedural star systems tech we created for the game.

With Hyperdrives also comes a more interesting stellar landscape. You’ll notice a whole lot of new markers and effects around planetary bodies. Hazardous meteor storms and debris orbiting moons and planets. These help identify points of interest (and danger!) on the map. Scouts will also be able to explore wreckages to bring back new technologies or refined materials.

Speaking of destructive meteors- we’ve also changed how brutal bombers and meteors used to be. They no longer mercilessly obliterate large sections of your station in the traditional firey game-ending fashion and send your poor crew into an admittedly difficult-to-salvage and vicious death-spiral. Instead, they now destroy only the single tile they hit and instantly auto-create a repair job for your engineers to run to try to patch back up.

Speaking of running- the Meeple AI behaviour has had a lot of meaningful upgrades, such as finally having a basic sense of self-preservation, which they can now use in conjunction with the new running movement speed behaviour in urgent situations, such as: suddenly being exposed to vacuum, or the bad intentions of pirates, or to avoid starving to death, or even just legging it to the bathroom for that incredibly urgent poo. The result being far higher crew survivability in general!

Next up we’ve introduced Pillboxes and rally points. This allows more meaningful and direct control of your combat units. Pillboxes act as a way to tactically place dedicated guard posts, while rally points evacuate non-combatants from a room and calls all of your available guards to rush in and secure the area.

Another interesting addition to combat is pirate invaders. We’ve worked a good bit on their AI to include morale and thievery as their main modus operandi. Once pirates board your station, they’ll look for your storage containers and grab as many resources as they can carry before legging it for the airlock.

We’ve always been slightly irked that pirates in video games seem to always be there to fight to the death and that’s just not what pirates do! They’re there to rob and steal your goodies! They’re not in the business of getting slaughtered so if too many of their comrades are injured or vaporised, you may see the rest flee and return to their station, preserving their numbers to fight again another day. All in all, pirates behave much more interestingly now.

Reaching The Finish Line And The Future

Several months ago the team decided to just put their heads down, and dedicate a huge effort into smashing out a giant backlog of major and minor persistent bugs and implement new and partially-implemented features that have been on the backburner waiting for the parts they needed to be complete. All of the bug-fixing, optimization, and polishing they've accomplished go along-side with this huge crop of new features [like the events system] that were needed for the new Campaign Mode.

It's an exciting time and we can't wait for you to experience all these new features and jump into the fully fledged campaign mode! But what about the future you ask? Following 1.0, we plan to maintain the game, continue issuing bug fixes and will still be throwing in a few new things here and there as time goes on. But this is the team's final push toward getting Meeple Station into a fully finished and playable state for 1.0 release. They've worked their butts off for the past two years and put blood, sweat, and tears into making a game that we hope with all our heart will bring you all some joy from start to finish.

All of that said, we’ll be taking these last few weeks to test the ever-loving heck out of it and make sure nothing untoward falls out. Until March 30th, remember to follow us on IndieDB, Twitter, Facebook for some teasers, and join our Discord community to help shape the game and get involved in the development. We'll be seeing you soon space captains!

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Meeple Station is published by Modularity Games, a video game publishing label by DBolical, the founders of ModDB and IndieDB. Follow Modularity Games on Twitter, Facebook and join our Discord community to learn more about the games we publish, fund and help bring to the world.