First things first;
When will the game launch?
The short answer is: not yet. The long answer remains: once we are confident the basic game loop is complete, stable and, of course, fun! We’ve made sizeable development decisions and have detailed these below to give you an idea of the progress we are making towards this goal. This work won’t be completed within September but does support our clear path towards Early Access.
Motherships
As mentioned in the previous Devblog we were exploring the idea of introducing motherships (or ‘space stations that can fly’) for Away Missions. Motherships allow space exploration, resource gathering and introduce their own element of risk to the player. The examination of this idea has been very positive and we are now in the process of implementing it. The introduction of Motherships to the game has involved refactoring and this takes time.
Why build a Station if you can build a Mothership?
Exploration via Mothership is more risky than short jaunts from the Station as the Mothership is exposed to additional dangerous environments and antagonists, however it does provide more reward for players. By maintaining a static Station (or two, or more!) and travelling for Away Missions using a Mothership, players can manage this risk. Limitations will be placed on Motherships (such as size restrictions) making Stations more suitable for living and large-scale manufacturing purposes.
Environments
There has been a lot of development work towards improving the look and feel of environments in the game. Terrain generation performance has been greatly improved, allowing players to explore much larger areas on the surface of planets. The placeholder water visualizer is soon to be replaced with one that better represents more realistic liquid behaviour both on planets and in stations.
Character Customization
There is now an even wider range of options for players to customize their Stationeer. This includes several faces and skin tones, with a wide range of facial animations that can be blended together to help players and NPCs alike react to the world around them.
NPCs
We are ready to show our first antagonists! These insects (see below) are a danger in both space and on planet surfaces. NPCs, insect and otherwise, are being worked on over the coming weeks.
Bug Fixing & Optimizations
Work in this area isn’t easy to show in gifs however it is an important step in the road to Early Access. Bug fixing is ongoing, especially following complex development like that of Motherships and terrain generation. Optimizations increase the stability of the game constantly and we’ve very pleased with how this is going - terrain generation, for example, is 70% faster than it was last week.
No dev steam this week
As Dean is recovering from being unwell there will be no dev stream this week. You can view some of the development mentioned above in this YouTube video.
- Steph
