Official website
Steam page
Starbase was released into early access on July 27th 2021. Starbase is a space themed sandbox MMO, emphasizing creativity and player interaction. In Starbase players can create spaceships using a very detailed in-game editor, build space stations, mine asteroids and engage in faction politics and PVP combat. The game uses Frozenbyte’s own in-house game engine.
I started as an user interface programmer in the project, but my responsabilities have also included gameplay and network programming. More specifically, I was reponsible for designing the architecture and implementing the code of our ingame bug reporting tool, the quest/tutorial system, ingame mail, and server side support for all these features. In addition, since June 2021 I have been the senior developer responsible for organizing the UI code team’s work. This consists mainly of writing documentation, mentoring new UI coders, and making sure every UI coder is adhering to our UI code best practices and patterns correctly.
The bug reporting tool was able to succesfully handle the massive amount of reports right after the early access release, and it provided us valuable telemetry data to discover new bugs. I worked closely with our support team to provide them the information they needed for automating support functions as much as possible. The tool includes functionality for creating surveys with various question types and the tool is connected to both ingame mod tools and a backoffice web application. I implemented the player facing UI of the tool and an ingame screenshot editor, the backoffice web application, and the server handling the storage, indexing and processing of the reports. The biggest challenge with the server was to develop efficient server side search and sorting functionality, so that our support team could search and filter the reports efficiently based on various criteria.
The ingame mail system allows players to send mail and credit attachments to other players, admins are also able to send items as attachments. I implemented the user interface of the system, integrating it with our other social tools, to allow the player to for example select friends, group members and clan members more easily as recipients. I also implemented the server side support for the mail system. The operations for sending mail, receiving attachments and returning attachments needed to be implemented carefully to ensure the atomicity of the operations to make sure no attachments are lost and to prevent for example duplication bugs. Both the UI and server side code needed to be heavily integrated into bank and inventory systems to allow sending attachments.
The quest/tutorial system consists of the quest backend, which is responsible for handling the lifetime of quests, checking objective completion and triggering different quest events, and of the actual quest gameplay logic that uses the quest backend. In addition, the quest system is tied to quest menus, which display for example objective information and hints. I was responsible for the implementation of the quest system, quest menus and the tutorial gameplay code. In addition, I implemented the necessary server side support for the system to for example track player progress in quests and handle quest rewards. The tutorial especially depends on many different gameplay systems, so implementing it gave me a very good overview of most gameplay systems.
- Team size: 50+
- Technologies used: C++, LUA, SVN, in-house build pipeline
Here are some screenshots from the features I have been working on.