Star Sailors V2 is publicly available...sort of

(and so begins my long-await return to Dev.to)

Hey. Welcome. Bonjour. My name's Liam, and we've just published the first pre-release version of #Star-Sailors Version 2. So I'm going to be talking a little bit about that here.

What is Star Sailors? Well, the simplest way to put it is that it's a series of protocols and practices for meaningful citizen science games. Right now, its main form is a web application that allows you to visit different planets and collect all sorts of resources and data. We've used the highly appropriate domain name starsailors.space which I am still surprised was available when I registered it in September 2023.

I've been working on Star Sailors for a number of years, and last year I came out with the first version of...well, anything. Before that, it was a few years of code snippets and not much else. Version 1 of Star Sailors was a website that showed you lightcurve data from exoplanet candidates and allowed users to classify them. It had a simple interface and some basic gamification and community mechanics.

One day I will go into more detail about what I was doing in the years prior, but right now I want to focus on the big announcement: Version 2 is available for basic testing.

What is version 2?

It's still a web application
Users still get given data to classify

But...

It's more like a game (now)

There's resource management
and more stuff
like

1. More citizen science modules (mars rover data, martian cloud spectroscopy, wildlife tagging & conservation, etc)
2. Collaboration between users
3. Missions to complete
4. Vehicles to travel in
5. Bases & structures to build

What does "pre-release" mean?

Essentially
we have something working
that I want to share

but...

it doesn't meet the goals/features I want for Version 2 (all the features described above, and a few more surprises)

Right now, Star Sailors is going through the fifth season (our third overall) of Buildspace's Nights & Weekends incubator.
As part of this incubator, we have to get users to test out what we're building
Additionally, we don't want to put in the huge amount of work to get to V2, release it, and find that it has a bunch of problems or users find it confusing

So...
We're doing pre-releases

We publish a new version weekly
With new content, items, things to explore, and hopefully some fixes/improvements from the week before

This will culminate in a full release in about 4 weeks (from time of publishing - 01/07/24)

But you can start playing it now

So, please do

And let us know what you think

And come back every now and then to see how we're getting along

And, feel free to get in touch
[e-mail]