As we start to design and work on the third and final act of the game (which is going to be pretty involved and take longer than any update we've worked on thus far) I wanted to push out a small patch with a few bug fixes and balance changes we've been working on.

...plus a bonus new Act 3 panel :D




These come in one of two colours as an Act 3 panel. We're looking forward to seeing the designs you come up with using these!

• The electricity meter now only displays 4 full bars when the panel has the maximum electricity it can use. Previously the electricity amount was rounded which meant when you had 99% of the electricity needed it would display 100%.
  
• Steam engines now emit steam!
  
• Increased the size of particles in the wind gust effect to try and help players notice it effecting other panels more.
  
• Improved the carrot explosion particle effect.
  
• Added particle effects to Ellen during the race.
  
• Added sound effects to Ellen during the race.
  
• Added some new backgrounds which are used in the Act 3 challenge modes.
  
• Changed the scale of act 2 backgrounds.
  
• Bumpers no longer require electricity and now fire objects and the player at a predictable constant speed.

• The power of effect caused by lasers is now effected by the square root of the length of the laser rather than the raw length. This is to encourage and reward players to use the beam directors rather than just building long straight paths.
  
• Challenge modes are now all unlocked using stars. Previously the sandbox modes required you to submit so many daily and weekly challenges. We have felt bad about that initial design decision for a while, in particular the kinds of behaviours it encourages.
  
• Drop rates of panels in story mode have been completely changed. You will now see act 2 and 3 panels in act 1 and 2 in the pre encounter truck stop.

• Fixed a bug where placeholder assets were used when the flywheel and gravity wells got destroyed.
  
• The laser sound effect no longer activates when you try to turn the laser on without enough electricity.
  
• Fixed a bug where the game calculates how much money you *could* have earnt in the story mode. We use this to effect how characters talk to you and some of the dialogue options. Prior to this patch the calculation was under estimating how much money you could earn, this meant the characters always thought you were spending all your money all the time!
  
• Boulders no longer spawn into the player.

A few weeks ago we were kindly invited onto the Vox Ludio podcast to talk all things indie games. They asked some really interesting questions that made us reflect and think. Be sure to listen below to learn more about our development process!

For this update we focussed on adding act 3 panels. Our general idea is that act 1 panels are all about player movement, act 2 panels about automation and act 3 panels are wild sci-fi techy stuff! Most of these panels you'll have to check out in the challenge modes since act 3 is not in the game yet.

As well as adding more panels we've rebalanced the existing panels based on how we've been seeing people play with them. Our aim was to make the panels more powerful from act to act, but relatively balanced within a single act. ...but when you figure out how to get panels to work well together it deliberately throws that out the window and rewards you for discovering that stuff. We've also removed the requirement to unlock a set number of stars before you transition to the second act. Looking at our data we found that people often stopped at the end of act 1, we also saw a few streamers feel a little bummed when they found out they would need to start again. So now you can just move on as soon as you want to. There are still lots of reasons to loop round again, to try new challenges, unlock more panels, stars and story.





The set of panels which are going to have the biggest impact this patch are the lasers. There are 6 panels associated with them, the laser itself and 5 beam directors... ...it's up to you to experiment and figure out what the laser does.




The solar sail generates thrust from the laser and the longer the laser beam that hits it the higher the thrust... ...but you need to hit the sail from the correct direction!




The flywheel stores energy when your vehicle is slowing down. At any point you can convert that energy back into thrust by activating it.






Watching the wild boulder builds you have all been experimenting with led us to these two panels. They are gravity and anti-gravity generators tuned specifically to the frequency of boulders. They require electricity and the amount of electricity changes the size of the force.

• Increased minimum distance of daily challenges.
  
• Bonus effect of boulders hitting props now decreases over time. This avoids situations where you could use the boulder to start a prop spinning and still get the bonus when you spun it with wind.
  
• Slightly reduced the size of boulders to make them easier to use.
  
• Corrected the spelling of Propeller in a number of places.
  
• Upgraded to latest versions of third party libraries (Unity, Rewired, Ink).
  
• Reduced cost and weight of sails.
  
• Reduced mass of horizontal bellows.
  
• Decreased cost and mass of steam engine.
  
• Increased steam engine thrust.
  
• Decreased cost of water tanks.
  
• Decreased cost and mass of rocket engine.
  
• Increased thrust of rocket engine.
  
• Decreased price and weight of waterwheel.
  
• Decreased cost of dehumidifier.
  
• Decreased cost of fans.
  
• Decreased cost and mass of boulders.
  
• Decreased mass of bumpers.
  
• Decreased price of pea shooter.
  
• Decreased cost of cannon and catapult.
  
• Decreased cost and weight of trampoline.
  
• Decreased mass of time dilation device.
  
• Changed text on end of act blueprint selector to make its function clearer.
  
• You no longer need to collect stars to unlock act 2.
  
• Increased par speeds for all legs.

Version 0.4.0 is now available to download. It is the first update since we launched in early access and is a chance to explain our approach to updates. We have talked to a lot of you about this and found that most of you would rather we released fewer, more significant, updates during early access. We want to try and balance our development time between adding new content and responding to player feedback. Our approach is going to be releasing patches when we have three new chunks of content ready for you to play with. A chunk of content might be a new panel, or it might be a new objective, or perhaps something else. The patch will also include all of the fixes, balance changes and quality of life improvements we've managed to cross off our list while adding new content. Our aim is to release an update like this around once a month.

Like always with game development plans change, but we wanted to be open with you and let you know our current thinking. If this changes at all we will of course let you know.

So lets get into the patch notes...




If you can generate enough energy and get your vehicle fast enough this baby will slow down time...




A suggestion from our community bumpers are powered by electricity and will fire you and objects diagonally with a little boost. The more electricity the more effective the boost... ...anyone fancy building a pinball machine?




Those of you in our discord will know we've been thinking about this for a while... We have decided to try the following structure for challenge modes.

• Three daily challenges (Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3) which are unlocked using stars from the story mode. With the daily challenges there is a chance that the leg may have a modifier which coincides with an objective from the story mode. For example, there might be bridges, carrots or bees...
  
• Three weekly challenges (Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3) which are unlocked using stars from the story mode. The weekly challenges will not have any modifiers and are all about vehicle design.
  
• Three monthly sandbox challenges with all panels available to you but different budgets ($500, $5000 and $10,000). These will be unlocked by attempting the other challenge modes.

We have also played with how panels are randomly selected to try and make things more interesting. Our aim with this structure is to give you an easy way to launch the game and play around designing a vehicle, while still leaving the enjoyment of discovery in the story mode. It will also allow you and us to test Act 3 panels and new hazards as we add them. Please let us know what you think about this structure.

• Price of water wheel and amount of water it consumes has been increased.
  
• Increased the max rotational speed of propellers and turbines and decreased their rotational friction. This means they require a little less constant attention.
  
• Increased suction force of coin collector.
  
• Solar panels now generate bonus electricity depending on the time of day (in addition to what they generated pre-patch)
  
• Bellows now decrease the velocity of objects which pass through them.
  
• Reduced mass of Auto Sails from 5 to 2
  
• Increased mass of all bellows from 10 to 13
  
• Decreased mass of electric engine from 10 to 5
  
• Decreased mass of haulage container from 50 to 35
  
• Decreased mass of headlights from 10 to 5
  
• Increased mass of boulders panel from 5 to 10
  
• Decreased mass of propeller and turbine from 10 to 8
  
• Decreased mass of sails from 10 to 7.5
  
• Increased mass of empty scaffold from 1 to 2
  
• Increased mass of water wheel from 5 to 15
  
• Decreased cost of wheels from 10 to 5 and decreased mass from 5 to 4

• Increased the hit boxes on all bellows to fix a bug where sometimes an object is travelling so fast the bellow doesn't detect it.
  
• All physical objects are now effected by the trampoline.
  
• Two music tracks now play during each leg.
  
• Music credits now complete in game.
  
• Moved suction point of coin collector forward.
  
• Increased vision range of bees to stop them hanging around at the front of long vehicles.
  
• Propellers and turbines no longer take the player out of a boost from a cannon.
  
• Cherry bomb fuse is now triggered a few frames before it hits the ground.
  
• Fixed the text rendering bug in the water tank description.
  
• Fixed the bug where the backwards facing cannon walls appeared mirrored in game.
  
• Added total weight indication to blueprint screen.
  
• Added linear drag to boulders.
  
• Fixed a bug which was stopping wind effecting sails correctly.
  
• Fixed a crash in blueprint mode caused by mousing over the add new column button before the player controller was initialised.
  
• Fixed the insurance fraud bug which allowed you to earn money when panels got destroyed in leg.
  
• The boulder panel now shows how many are left.
  
• Fixed the bug where the on schedule message would sometimes not display a time.
  
• Player dialogue no longer animates character by character.
  
• Fixed a bug which stopped the sail tutorial correctly triggering.
  
• Changed video codec to VP8 to improve Linux support.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused a the player to move when standing on an overpass.
  
• Fixed a bug whereby objects would move incorrectly when the player was not on the vehicle.

We have just about recovered from the launch of Making it Home a few weeks ago. Launches are always intense, and as much as you try you always ending up working on things right up to the wire. It has been positive so far. We are already hard at work on the first update which we are aiming to push out in the next few weeks. Our aim with each update is to include enough new content for you to really sink your teeth into along side balance changes and bug fixes.

Earlier this week we were invited onto the Tanked Up podcast to talk Making it Home and other things. They do some great work over there so please check them out. You can watch the episode we were on below or download the audio podcast on their website.

Every Tuesday at 8PM BST Dave and I stream over on twitch. We play a mix of games and talk a lot about design and what we can learn from them. This week we will be streaming Making it Home (and will also push the feed to steam). We'll be talking about what is next for our little vehicle building game.

Be sure to join us and ask questions!

Hi everyone,

First thanks to everyone who has either wishlisted or bought the game in Early Access. We're a small team and all your support has been touching and makes all the hard work worth it.

Usually when Dave and I come up with ideas for games the first thing on our mind is how we can make lets players say silly things on camera... With Making it Home I think we've nailed it, so I wanted to share a few videos from some great content creators you should head over and give some love!

We have been trying to keep track of all the videos in this playlist. If I have missed any let me know in the comments!

We're beyond excited to be announcing the launch of Making it Home in Early Access!

The game's in great shape already, with 2 of the 3 Acts playable in Story Mode and 7 different Challenge Modes to unlock! There's tons of panels to discover, animal friends (and foes) to meet, and loads of objectives to challenge even the best ladybugs out there.

It's been a wild ride so far. Over a year and a half of development, four(ish) months of closed beta, and we're finally ready to share our vehicle building ladybug game with everyone. We'd like to thank everyone who has helped us get this far. There's too many people to mention individually, but they know who they are.

We're hoping Early Access and the feedback from our players will help grow the game, and give the best experience possible.

So let us know what you think, right here on Steam, or find us on Twitter, Discord, Twitch and many more.

• Water tanks now start with more water, but can not be built during the leg using your workshop.
  
• Steam engines consume less water.
  
• Water wheels consume less water.

• Tutorial messages explaining the leg objectives sometimes didn't appear. This bug has been fixed.

It´s been a long road, getting from there to here.... it´s been a long time, but my time is finally near...

This Thursday (6th August) we will be launching Making it Home into Early Access and I just pushed the build you'll download on Thursday to Steam. Many of you helped out as part of the closed beta which ended at the end of May (which feels like 10 years ago). I wanted to put together some patch notes to let you know what has been added and what has changed. If you didn't take part in the beta then this is to help give you an idea of what to expect if you decide to join our community for Early Access. There is quite a lot so rather than explain everything in detail I'll drop in the odd gif or screenshot to wet your appetite for Thursday! ...I also want to let you discover the new objectives and panels on your own in the game.

• Honey Jar Objective - Collect honey from bee hives and try and get it into your workshop.
  
• Cherry Bomb Objective - Try and push these off your vehicle before they explode.
  
• Another Race - This time you're racing someone in a vehicle...

• Boulders - To help you start building Rube Goldberg machines
  
• Pea Shooter - All I'm going to say is "peas and carrots"
  
• Water wheel - Another way to generate electricity...

• Challenge modes are now associated with the panels you find in different acts. There are currently 6 in the game, a weekly, daily and monthly for each act. All with leader-boards for average and max speed.
  
• A sandbox challenge mode where you have all panels available is unlocked by competing in the standard challenges.

• Added flying text to thrust panels which tell you exactly how much thrust they are creating at any given time.
  
• Changed a number of sky boxes in Act 1.
  
• Reduced jump height to reduce how often player head butts the ceiling.
  
• Added a one second re-spawn delay after you fall off your vehicle. Players were often running straight off the back of the vehicle after re-spawning.
  
• Added arrows to map screen and changed colours of location buttons to make things clearer.
  
• You can now manually dismiss the tutorial window.
  
• If unlocking a blueprint would automatically unlock another this is communicated when you have to decide which to unlock.
  
• You can now customise the colour of your vehicle's walls.
  
• The bite radius is larger making it easier to eat carrots around turbines.
  
• Added a number of particle effects for impacts.
  
• Implemented steam stats and achievements.
  
• Complete refresh of panel sprites - during the beta we made the walls bigger which covered part of the sprite so we needed to edit them all.
  
• Implemented jump caching which means if you hit jump a few frames too early the game still registers it.
  
• Added a destruction effect to panels when they get destroyed.
  
• Added more sounds when objects collide with each other.
  
• Added a visual effect when you collect an item.
  
• Added a glass window to the back of each open panel to help reduce the visual noise in the game.
  
• Game now pauses when steam overlay is opened during the leg.
  
• Implemented steam cloud saving!
  
• Disabled buttons are easier to read.
  
• We no longer highlight options when you have dialogue choices (some players were always picking those options).
  
• Added bridge icons to the progress bar so you know when to expect them.
  
• Increased max zoom level of the camera in blueprint mode, and increased mouse sensitivity.
  
• Added milestones to complete for each act (which relate to achievements)
  
• Race wins are now measured from the front of the vehicle.
  
• Fixed some typos in Act 1 story.

• Fixed bug when detecting if there is enough water left in a tank, which meant the steam engine could sometimes run on zero water.
  
• Fixed bug where replacing a panel using the workshop in leg always ended up with no walls.
  
• Sometimes Ellen would stop racing the player (she would rest but not start racing again) this bug has been fixed.
  
• A few edge cases which resulted in the occasional super jump have been fixed.
  
• Sometimes the tutorial window would never leave, that bug has been fixed.
  
• Sometimes dialogue choices did not detect the mouse click, this has been fixed.
  
• Balloons would sometimes fall off, they shouldn't now!!
  
• The camera now resets correctly when you re spawn.