Sea of Stars: Dawn of Equinox: A Yearlong Journey in Refinement

Like many other projects, Sea of Stars started with an impulse — an idea that we all gathered around as a team, something we got excited over, and agreed was a worthwhile creative pursuit. A unique flavor of a feeling, which, given proper treatment in the form of a video game, should compel players to participate in this impulse, experiencing and expressing in their own way what we found unique and worthwhile about Sea of Stars.

Like any other career, game development comes with curve balls and decisions. Short of a magic wand to make everything happen instantly, we become intimate with the notion that production is a team’s one shot at capturing that initial impulse, and that some things inevitably won’t go down as planned. And so, like any other form of art, there is an angle where a game is never finished, but rather surrendered.

After four years of production, we were fortunate enough to feel genuinely happy and content with what we had managed to capture, and within the first hours of its release, it became clear that the reception to Sea of Stars would far exceed our predictions. While the joy and gratefulness we felt can never be overstated, we also gathered around a sense of responsibility in response to this critical mass of players giving us the means to support ourselves.

Putting together this newfound freedom along with hindsight, player feedback, and the countless little tweaks and things we would have so loved to add to the game, we scoped out a major free update, giving our fans an entire year of full time work from the team to refine Sea of Stars into something that resonates even more strongly with the aforementioned impulse, which we now knew a lot of people did (and cared to) engage with.

Wanting to leave no stones unturned, we filed each item under three pillars: polishing, combat 2.0, and couch co-op.

The list goes on here, but the gist of it is that we revisited all areas of the game where we had to make some sacrifices or hard decisions on the road to the game’s initial launch. Setting aside the countless bug fixing and micro adjustments, the bulk of the work was simply to fully realize what was originally envisioned.

You’ll find things like a completely new cinematic cutscene to support a major story beat, a revamped first hour flow in which we’re finally able to do away with the flashback structure by implementing combat animation sets for the kid versions of our heroes, allowing us to go into the intro right away without sacrificing action. There are also a bunch of new Relics, including one for speedrunning, and difficulty presets for those looking for more (or less) grit to combat.

We also updated combat to make it what was originally planned. This one wasn’t for lack of time or conflicting priorities; we simply ended up opting for a lighter and more simple experience. Hindsight and player feedback are the MVPs here; there was indeed an appetite for combat to be deeper and more involved. The first main addition here is “Sticky Combo Points”, which now remain after battle, offering varied ways of opening in combat, as well as maintaining a more abundant resource pool for playing around with the 40+ unique skills and spells at the party’s disposal.

Another notable addition is the concept of “Mystery Locks”. Simply put, any new enemy casting a spell will display Mystery Locks instead of specific damage types directly, creating this gameplay loop around trying different moves to see what breaks each new spell, along with a new “Reveal” function added to some of the characters’ skills. Revealing locks permanently maps them on a per-enemy/per-spell basis, something which playtests quickly validated in terms of adjusting difficulty without relying solely on damage done/received, as well as ensuring more of the bosses special moves get to fly.

Regarding three player couch co-op, we followed a simple rule: player One isn’t special, everyone can do everything. While it was by far the most challenging to implement given the thousands of use-cases to manually implement or fix, this one simply speaks for itself with controllers in hand.

We couldn’t be happier with the Dawn of Equinox update. Now it’s time to fully shift focus on the upcoming free DLC Throes of the Watchmaker, which is on track to be released in the Spring of 2025.