Hades' Star Development blog

Today brings the release of the last update to Hades' Star Alpha, which has been live for almost 3 months. This update brings some final content we felt was necessary before going into beta (especially the Weapon modules, the Leaderboards changes, and the Warp Lane Hub buildings which should bring a new level of strategic planning to delivering shipments for higher level players). During this time we were able to significantly improve the game, largely thanks to the help of early players. If you participated in the alpha - thank you! For the next few months, we plan to slow down the rate of major features. There will still be some new modules, but the majority of the focus will be on balancing existing content and make yellow and red stars as fun as they can be. We are still on track to launching our beta version some time in March. The alpha version will be live until March 6, at which point the servers will be brought down for a few weeks as we prepare for proper launch in our ...

If you've been participating in the alpha, you may be familiar with the Leaderboards window, which shows the players who have advanced the most in the game: In its current form, the "Score" column is just the amount of XP a player has collected. XP is gained by doing shipments, upgrading planets, researching artifacts and completing achievements. Nobody ever loses XP, so it's an indication of how long someone has been playing, and their overall level of progress. There are major issues with using XP for the leaderboards: It rewards whoever is playing the most. If a player near the top doesn't log in for a day or two, they will most certainly lose their spot.  Players who started playing the game later don't have much hope of catching up.  Spending Crystals can directly translate into more XP (i.e. by buying more shipments or Artifacts, or buying the resources to upgrade planets).  There is no risk of ever losing XP, so there's little movement an...