Been another very busy month for us. We now have a "real" release date of 12 December. If you visit the store page, it will show the actual date for your territory. We're pretty confident about this date but we won't hesistate to delay this if we aren't happy with the quality.




The major theme for the month has been resolving longstanding bugs and improving optimization. We made major changes to our core systems and noticed huge improvements in framerate on servers and clients. There is still a way to go, but we're now seeing great results. Threading the games various systems has helped a great deal.



This has allowed for some really fun gameplay during our development tests, as you can see above!


Closing out our core game loop involves operating a small mothership with your team, exploring your sector, and using your find to increase your station. So you need weapons. We have implemented torpedos to help do this. You can check out more on the Rocketwerkz Youtube channel devstreams.




Putting too much power through a cable now causes failure. Heavy cables allow a great deal more power to be put through them. You can also burn cables directly with a welder to achieve this effect. More on this will be in this weeks development stream at my twitch channel (follow me on twitter for more details).



Power generation got some improvements as well, we now have a Solid Fuel power generator, running for example on coal. We are also planning more generator types, such as fixed gas generators and ultimately complex nuclear power setups.




We're developing the "monster" you will face in the sector, we've setup language support to localize the game, and more and more bugfixing!

See you all for the launch!

Been another very busy month for us. We now have a "real" release date of 12 December. If you visit the store page, it will show the actual date for your territory. We're pretty confident about this date but we won't hesistate to delay this if we aren't happy with the quality.




The major theme for the month has been resolving longstanding bugs and improving optimization. We made major changes to our core systems and noticed huge improvements in framerate on servers and clients. There is still a way to go, but we're now seeing great results. Threading the games various systems has helped a great deal.



This has allowed for some really fun gameplay during our development tests, as you can see above!


Closing out our core game loop involves operating a small mothership with your team, exploring your sector, and using your find to increase your station. So you need weapons. We have implemented torpedos to help do this. You can check out more on the Rocketwerkz Youtube channel devstreams.




Putting too much power through a cable now causes failure. Heavy cables allow a great deal more power to be put through them. You can also burn cables directly with a welder to achieve this effect. More on this will be in this weeks development stream at my twitch channel (follow me on twitter for more details).



Power generation got some improvements as well, we now have a Solid Fuel power generator, running for example on coal. We are also planning more generator types, such as fixed gas generators and ultimately complex nuclear power setups.




We're developing the "monster" you will face in the sector, we've setup language support to localize the game, and more and more bugfixing!

See you all for the launch!

Last week we headed off to PAX Australia and showed off our basic progress on Motherships. Things had, really, only just come together that week. So we were pretty relieved to be able to show anything off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T61hcI0cY2I
Motherships represented the culmination of three months worth of refactoring and the game is substantially better for it.




As you move your motherships around you will need to defend it. We have our first combat turrets making an appearance in the game. These are manually moved by the players, so you need to hop in one and shoot. They are lasers, so they use quite a bit of power.


Now that we can have motherships we need reliable ways to move them around. Rocket engines come in large and small sizes, and when combusting gas they provide thrust. You mix your fuel (in the case below, different ratios of oxygen and propane) and they produce thrust. How much thrust changes based on the pressure setting of the thruster (what pressure it fills the chamber at).

Rocket Engine with clean burning fuel mix:



Rocket Engine with non-clean burning fuel mix:




Our current focus is completing a basic game loop with the mothership. This means you start the game with a prebuilt mothership, and travel around with your friends doing small away missions, gathering resources, and making your mothership better.


Motherships was a major milestone. It gives us a very clear, if basic, game loop that is fun, enjoyable, and stable. This is our key focus for Early Access and allows us to then grow the game based on what makes the most sense, using community feedback.

We're now pretty confident that December 2017 is a realistic release date.

Last week we headed off to PAX Australia and showed off our basic progress on Motherships. Things had, really, only just come together that week. So we were pretty relieved to be able to show anything off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T61hcI0cY2I
Motherships represented the culmination of three months worth of refactoring and the game is substantially better for it.




As you move your motherships around you will need to defend it. We have our first combat turrets making an appearance in the game. These are manually moved by the players, so you need to hop in one and shoot. They are lasers, so they use quite a bit of power.


Now that we can have motherships we need reliable ways to move them around. Rocket engines come in large and small sizes, and when combusting gas they provide thrust. You mix your fuel (in the case below, different ratios of oxygen and propane) and they produce thrust. How much thrust changes based on the pressure setting of the thruster (what pressure it fills the chamber at).

Rocket Engine with clean burning fuel mix:



Rocket Engine with non-clean burning fuel mix:




Our current focus is completing a basic game loop with the mothership. This means you start the game with a prebuilt mothership, and travel around with your friends doing small away missions, gathering resources, and making your mothership better.


Motherships was a major milestone. It gives us a very clear, if basic, game loop that is fun, enjoyable, and stable. This is our key focus for Early Access and allows us to then grow the game based on what makes the most sense, using community feedback.

We're now pretty confident that December 2017 is a realistic release date.

Check out our new Youtube video with an update and a look back on the past, present, and future for Stationeers Development. Been a very busy month for the team! It's now been one year since we officially started the project, when we originally only had two on it (Scott and myself). Now we have twelve people on the team full-time!

Aaron made an awesome video that takes a look at where the project came on, why we've taken longer, and where we are going too from here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFiulsdCpXo
A year ago we had a "dreams" list of things we wanted to do. Every single one of those has either been developed, or is still on our key milestone list. The biggest is "motherships". We've touched on their role a little, but we'll be demoing these officially at PAX Australia on 28 October 2017. Be sure to check in for our session there as there will be a Q&A.

Many have noticed that we have, again, shifted this to December this year. We're much more confident about this, however we still will not release the game until we are happy even if this date comes around. Is this annoying? Yes! But it's really important that we get our release right.

Our key priorities that must be met for release:

• Core gameloop; At least one full game loop. Likely to be the "away missions" or "events", together with basic survival building and maintaining of your mothership and associated bases.
  
• Stability; No catastrophic failures (i.e. no broken saves, robust backups, obvious messages when servers start failing).
  
• Performance; At least ten players, 60 FPS on good clients. Lots of settings for clients to adjust their performance.

Most of our focus has been "behind the scenes" for the stability and performance priorities above. We completely redid our water system, to work together with the voxel system. Lots more content going in for character customization. Work is now ongoing to redevelop the AI movement system so that it can work with voxel terrain - enabling our "bug" aliens which are going to be our first AI antagonist.

There has also been more redevelopment of the UI to bring us forward towards release. More usability work. Lots more stability work. The only thing really holding us back has been our work on motherships, but when trying them out so far you can already see the huge difference it will make to the game loop.

Check out our new Youtube video with an update and a look back on the past, present, and future for Stationeers Development. Been a very busy month for the team! It's now been one year since we officially started the project, when we originally only had two on it (Scott and myself). Now we have twelve people on the team full-time!

Aaron made an awesome video that takes a look at where the project came on, why we've taken longer, and where we are going too from here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFiulsdCpXo
A year ago we had a "dreams" list of things we wanted to do. Every single one of those has either been developed, or is still on our key milestone list. The biggest is "motherships". We've touched on their role a little, but we'll be demoing these officially at PAX Australia on 28 October 2017. Be sure to check in for our session there as there will be a Q&A.

Many have noticed that we have, again, shifted this to December this year. We're much more confident about this, however we still will not release the game until we are happy even if this date comes around. Is this annoying? Yes! But it's really important that we get our release right.

Our key priorities that must be met for release:

• Core gameloop; At least one full game loop. Likely to be the "away missions" or "events", together with basic survival building and maintaining of your mothership and associated bases.
  
• Stability; No catastrophic failures (i.e. no broken saves, robust backups, obvious messages when servers start failing).
  
• Performance; At least ten players, 60 FPS on good clients. Lots of settings for clients to adjust their performance.

Most of our focus has been "behind the scenes" for the stability and performance priorities above. We completely redid our water system, to work together with the voxel system. Lots more content going in for character customization. Work is now ongoing to redevelop the AI movement system so that it can work with voxel terrain - enabling our "bug" aliens which are going to be our first AI antagonist.

There has also been more redevelopment of the UI to bring us forward towards release. More usability work. Lots more stability work. The only thing really holding us back has been our work on motherships, but when trying them out so far you can already see the huge difference it will make to the game loop.

It’s been a month since our last Devblog and we’re really excited to show you the latest developments in Stationeers!

First things first;


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.


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.


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.




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.




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.




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.


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

It’s been a month since our last Devblog and we’re really excited to show you the latest developments in Stationeers!

First things first;


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.


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.


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.




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.




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.




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.


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

For quite a while now we've been showing off the game in devstreams on twitch, later uploaded to youtube. Now we're starting the final road to the Early Access Launch we decided to get more focus by producing Devblogs here on the steam page.


Good question. Internally we are pushing for the end of September, but we won't hesitate to delay the launch until we are satisfied the basic game loop is complete; and it's stable with good performance. Basically it will take as long as it needs to. We'll give plenty of feedback here about how we're going, and you get to see how design decisions get made (and changed!) here in our development blogs.


We've got a whole new UI look coming in and it looks amazing! I think this is now the 34th variant that Shaun has done, but it's well worth it. Not only does it look great, but it's easy to read and use. Look out for it in the next devstreams!








Kevin added dynamite. We're working on how weapons, explosions, and the general damage model affects the world, and items in it. More to come.


One of our core issues with the game has been completing the game loop. That means, giving you a nice "loop" in the game that gives you a repeating sense of fun. Things like building, exploring, crafting, fighting, and so on. One of our big obstacles to this has been "how do we provide lots of events and things to do, and how do you get around to them".

We came up with the concepts of shuttles, where you use them to go on away missions. These were going to be custom made parts that clip together, like vessels in Kerbal Space Program. The problem is: that is a lot of design, programming, and content work - not to mention it is a whole new system that needs to be taught and explained to players.

So... we have decided to try taking all the existing mechanics for construction and allowing them to apply to building "motherships". A mothership will be a station that flies. This means we can make new features once, and have them able to be used both for static stations, and then used in the same way for your moving mothership.

The static stations will be much "safer" than the motherships. We anticipate your mothership will get damaged, a lot, during away missions. Maybe even destroyed. So it allows players to manage their risk.

I should say here: the mothership concept is an idea currently, we're going to try implement it, and if it works, we won't do shuttles as we were. If it doesn't work, we'll keep going with the old shuttle idea.


Due to the above, we're not going to be streaming this week so I can have a play and keep focus. Normally we stream 1PM Saturdays NZ time, but not this week!