Once again it's our Friday patch! And this week we've been cooking up quite a lot of internal changes. The following changes are based mostly on some significant tweaks to the main engine.
First up, most of you will notice two new tile sets, Glass and Reinforced hulls. The glass hulls are decorative, whereas the reinforced hull provides a greater resistance to meteors and bombers.
The reason we added these new tiles is because we've changed how the game can read and use sprite sheets for indoor tiles, with walls. This means you'll also notice walls are collapsable and will disappear when you hover on a room.
Many people have asked for internal walls as a main feature, and this is the first step towards that. (The current walls hog an entire cell, but we'd like them to line the outside of the cells instead)
One tile use to have around 280 sprites just to cover all of the possible angles, including the roof sprites, but now it's been reduced down to about 15, which also makes it much easier for anyone wanting to make new tile mods for the game.
The other major addition is something you wont see much of just yet, but again opens up a lot of possibilities for modding. we've added an example mod to show exactly what that is.
You can now setup your own type of logic networks, such as the already familiar circuits and fuel lines. This means you can create a new and custom network (or several) such as steam power, radiation or conveyor belts, and pivot the gameplay around these networks. You can get a glimpse of what is possible with the new example mod, where we introduce a new network (liquid form brothium) and introduce a new furniture item that compresses it to create the Globomite resource, which is normally a long refinery process.
With these few alterations to the game's engine we hope to speed up the process of bringing more content.
We still have many more plans coming, and love hearing all of the feedback and suggestions from the community. Don't forget we're very active on our discord channel, if you have questions and queries, feel free to stop by, we're all friendly! ;)
Once again it's our promised weekly patch with new additions to the game. Amongst many bug fixes and such, we've added three new and noticeable features which will be paving the way for some more complexity later on.
Doctors and Injuries
We've added in a new meeple job, Doctors! So long as they have basic medical supplies on hand, they'll search out wounded meeple and treat them. Wounds can be acquired from clumsily putting together equipment, getting into fights with other meeple, or the all time favourite... getting shot.
Once treated, wounds will require some time to heal and frequent redressing by doctors. We've also added in a feature for meeple to faint and collapse under too much pain if their wounds get the better of them. Not to mention, untreated injuries, like lacerations and cuts, can become infected, which can further injure your wounded meeple.
For now injuries are quite simple, a metric for viewing a Meeple's physical state, but we've left room for growth, and plan to extend it further by adding diseases and the possibility for prosthetic limbs or organ transplants (Borg!)
New Docking Structures
Another large change is the addition of Docking Gantries. Airlocks will no longer serve the purposes of trade, now you'll need to build a slightly larger and more costly docking structure to accomodate trade ships. You'll also notice that when clicking on the docking structure, there is a menu with some (currently) locked features we are working on, which will allow you to swap your trade dock into your own shipping dock, to construct and manage vessels of your own!
Job Affinities
The last major addition you'll see this week is the affinities tab. Above the meeple menu you'll notice two extra tabs, one for health and another for affinities. You'll now be able to view which meeple are good at what jobs. You can figure these things out on your own of course, but this quality of life feature should help fill in the gaps and get you micro managing your crew more efficiently.
We are constantly bringing in new changes, and are very excited for the future. We have a great deal of amazing people to thank, and and encouraging community of modders.
Everyone is welcome on our discord server! Don't be shy, stop by and say hi, let us know what you think of our game :)
As promised, we are doing updates every week, adding new content. And will continue to do so through Early Access. This week, amongst a bunch of smaller things you'll notice a couple of new content additions. First up, we've added a Dilithium reactor to the research tree, this beauty will consume your dilithium fuel in exchange for large amounts of advanced power. Very handy for keeping your turrets active.
Friends!
Next up you'll notice a new tab on the Meeple menu, "Friends" and "Traits". We've added a new feature where you can view Meeple's likes and dislikes toward others based on their social interactions. We've also adjusted their behaviour to favour conversations with meeple they like and seek out friendly conversation from their closer acquaintances.
Lastly, there have been some significant additions to modding capabilities which opens up the possibility for more sophisticated furniture and modules, namely production. We've added an example mod this week to demonstrate one of the many possible features you can mod with furniture.
Mods? Why?
Some of you may be thinking "Eh, a mod, that's too complicated" but hold on a second, we've actually designed meeple station to be extremely flexible and effortless when it comes to mods. See that "mods" button on the title screen? click it. See a mod you like? click subscribe. You're done!
now assuming your internet managed to download 10 kb, all you need to do is start playing a game. That's how simple it is to use a mod, no need to restart or browse the web, just click and play, no fuss.
We often introduce new content through example mods, very simple little mods that add a bunch of new stuff to the game. Don't be shy, go and have a look! Checkout this week's example mod, Auto refiners! New modules that automatically refine basic minerals for you.
What's next?
Next week we are planning to add in more detailed stats for meeple, a comprehensive health and injury system as well as an affinity tab to view how meeple are progressing with their skills and what jobs they're best suited for. We also plan to have Doctor meeple to treat those nasty injuries.
What are affinities you might ask? The longer a meeple does a job, and the better suited they are for it, the greater their affinity. You'll notice when a meeple has a mood such as "Enjoying work" it means they're relatively good at their job, and they like being good at their job.
And here's a little teaser for some upcoming content to our SS13 fans out there (HONK): Look familiar?
Meeple Station - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Steve Hogarty)
Meeple Station is a game about building a space station and keeping its residents alive, a task made all the more challenging by those residents having each been cursed with simulated emotional states, which can become so fraught that they ll hurl themselves out of an airlock rather than face another second living aboard your creation. So, more accurately, Meeple Station is a game about convincing little pixel people not to fatally catapult themselves into the void.
We've heard you, and we're fixing! Over the weekend I received 400+ bug reports (Obviously a lot of repeats, and a couple people who just wanted to say hi) But these reports have gone a long way to helping us track down some pesky bugs. Thanks to all of you for being so diligent! Below is a representation of us working to fix these bugs.
This week we're making an update to numerous bugs concerning UI as well as tutorial clips to help get new players through the startup scene. There will be much more coming, and we're working day and night to get everyone's feedback written down. There are also two notable bugs which some of you were unfortunate enough to encounter. One of them being a corrupted stats file which halted the load screen, which is now fixed. The other being a pathfinding bug where Meeple would stand outside your airlock and refuse to come inside.
These are some very rare bugs, so hopefully most people didn't encounter them. Now you can be sure you wont!
Don't be shy, if you have feedback or bugs, or ideas for mods. Come hang out on our discord! Modding is not as difficult as you might think!
New management and building game Meeple Station has a coolpremise for those who’ve sunk hundreds of hours into colony builders like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld: space stations. (It’s me, for the record. I’ve sunk the hundreds of hours in.) Meeple Station is a new game from Regions of Ruin developers Vox Games and released into Early Access this week. In it, players manage a space station from nothing to thriving enterprise by mining, trading, growing hydroponic crops, generating power and life support, and exploring uncharted star systems.
Its developers describe it as “an open-ended space station simulator in the vein of Rimworld.” At present it has “around 20%” of its complete content, but some of the promised material is a doozy: Like a co-op mode scheduled to become available as an alpha in March. According to the developers, it already works. That’s a holy grail for colony builder fans, and something that has never been done successfully with the genre.
I spent a few hours with the game and fighting off pirate raids and trading are both fun, as is building the station, though there’s not a ton more to the game right now than that. Scrounging up goods to trade is pretty neat, but so far my favorite thing is definitely space-squids, which will murder you and everything you love. Upcoming content, like building your own trade ships for expeditions and more aliens for your crew seem very promising—and this is a developer delivered its previous Early Access game, mind you.
Really, I think I can’t help but be charmed by this one because it uses the word meeple, tabletop slang for little wooden pawn people. (See here for an extended love letter to those things.)
A lot of you have been asking "Is there more?" yes! In fact, we do have a mountain of content underway and in the pipeline (And should have been more open about it sooner). Generally speaking the game currently has around 20% of the content we have lined up for it,
I'll be going over some of our planned features and those that will be coming in soon. It is hard to estimate these kinds of features, and some will take priority over others depending on what people are voicing to us. For example, we planned to have Cooperative done by launch, and Modding introduced afterwards, however we've done the exact opposite, because of our very ambitious modders (Seriously, we already have a dozen mods)
Cooperative Gameplay
Yes, this has been announced and we already have a lot of the ground work complete. We have internal testing lined up for February, and players should be seeing it in the ALPHA around march, (If everything goes to plan).
How will it work? The premise for coop is to allow two players (or more) to work on the same station simultaneously. You can both give your own orders around the station and micromanage together. Alex and I have played several other games that have done this, and personally we find it incredibly fun.
Modding Capabilities
But modding is already in the game right? Yes, but this is only a fraction of the capabilities we have planned. Currently you can rework tiles and furniture, create new modules and structure types for your station, you can rewrite existing ones and even change recipes. But this is only the start of what we have planned. This will likely come in stages throughout the year, piece by piece, as our modding community (looking at you) get more and more ambitious.
Tutorial and Campaigns
We did have a tutorial a few months ago, but during the enormous changes we had undergone it became obsolete. In the span of a month we changed all of the Meeple's personalities, Research Tree, Officer behaviours, trade ships and even added a galactic map, so the tutorial fell utterly short.
What's the solution? For now we've implemented tips that pop up during gameplay to help fill in the gaps. There is also a wiki with descriptions for most of the game's content (top right ? button). But this is only temporary, we plan to introduce tutorials through a series short campaigns to help you get acquainted with the game's mechanics and features. There are quite a few features which are not immediately obvious to most people, we really want to point those out early.
Galactic Map
The map currently feels a bit lifeless, doesn't it? Don't worry, that's a fairly major feature we are also going to be bringing to life. At the moment it only really serves to move around and find new resources. So what will be changing?
Docking Bays You can currently accomodate numerous trade vessels, but why not build your own trade ships? Well that's exactly what we'll be doing. We are introducing a docking bay construction that will allow players to construct their own ships to send out for trading and/or exploration. See those little (?) markers on the map? ever wonder what those were for? You'll soon find out! ;D
Invasions! Bombers! Tired of being attacked by pirates? The good news is that you'll be able to bring the fight to them! You will be able to send crew off to board and invade pirate stations, or better yet, build your own bombers and wipe them out, without mercy. This is something we've wanted to introduce for quite some time but didn't want to rush.
Meeple, Drones and Visitors (Squids?)
We also have quite a few additions to your crew and those funny little aliens that continue to board your station. They're mostly harmless, however, Meeple can be quite fond of them. Meeple will soon have an extended menu to view their relations with one another, and we'll also be adding in a small affinities menu so you can see how good they are at certain jobs (eg, "good at engineering" and "Terrible at being a janitor"). Some Meeple may also like certain squids and perhaps they'll form a natural bond, you'll be able to view pets around the station as well.
Drones? Squids? Huh? Most of you have noticed the trade ships have a blank window with soon to come content. This is where we are putting together a unique trading menu, traders will bring exotic pets, drones and workers who can help you around the station. What about a giant squid that cleans mess wherever it drags it's jelly-blue tentacles around? On top of this we will also be introducing visitors who will occasionally hop off a trade ship to look around, maybe chat with some Meeple eat some of your food and run off again (Honk).
Aren't you being a little bit over ambitious?
Some people may not realise this, but Meeple Station was first conceived a little under 11 months ago. In February we started toying with some ideas, but in March we begun development. What you see now is the result of 10 months of development. Most of that time was setting up the base engine, which is now highly moddable. We want to spend another 10 months in Early Access, What do you think?
Our last game was Regions of Ruin and we did the same. We released with 20% of the game's content and finished the remaining 80% over 6 months in Early Access.
I'm the sole programmer and I'm very passionate about making games. We happily take feedback and encourage people to do so. Please jump on our discord, we are all there daily! Want to create a mod? come join us! We're fun people! ;) https://discord.gg/ZJdVu7z
Meeple Station - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Matt Cox)
On the first day God created light, and saw that it was good. On the 18th trillionth day he created mods, and saw that they were better. ModDB, a site that serves as a nexus for mods of every flavour imaginable, has branched into publishing. “Modularity is a new games publishing division”, they say, “with a focus on investing in and supporting games that are created by modders, inspired by mods, or have strong modding support themselves.”
They’ve already teamed up with devs Vox Games to launch Meeple Station on Steam Early Access, a cute-looking space station sim styling itself after RimWorld.
ModDB has been around since 2002, and it's hard to remember where we got mods from before then. Websites grew up around specific popular games, like The Morrowind Chronicles (the site that later evolved into Nexus Mods), but how did every computer at our LAN parties in the old days have Ninja Quake installed on them? Which hero was responsible for that and how did they find it? There was definitely an aura of underground knowledge around mods, especially in the late '90s when you could fire up a Doom .wad with Transformers in it and blow some kid's mind.
Scott Reismanis, the creator of ModDB who traces his passion for them back to the War In Europe mod for Half-Life, recalls the era when he founded the site. "Google was around," he says, "but AltaVista I think was the dominant search engine and people forget how hard it was to find information. It was scattered across hundreds of sites. All we did was go, 'IMDB's a cool site, DeviantArt's a cool site', so we brought those together to create a mod database. And that's where we went to make it easier for us to discover mods to play at our LANs with friends."
We very much want to create an alternative to Steam Workshop
Scott Reismanis
17 years later, ModDB hosts thousands of mods and Reismanis and the staff he's built up around the site and its spin-off sites are launching something new. Modularity is a publishing label with two focuses: indie games that are heavily moddable, and games made by modders who want to turn pro. Their launch game, Meeple Station, is a perfect example of the first kind of project—a space station sim that looks a bit RimWorld and a bit Spacebase DF-9, which has scope for modders to create both cosmetic additions like new furniture pieces as well as more drastic overhauls.
Mod fashion
Finding mods for Meeple Station will be easier than using AltaVista thanks to mod.io, a tool Reismanis launched last year to help developers get mod support into their games and also help players find them. "We very much want to create an alternative to Steam Workshop," he explains. "Developers want to bring their modding community to other platforms and stores and as part of that we realized that integrating mod support into a game, it's not necessarily a straightforward process."
Though indie studio Vox Games' Kickstarter for Meeple Station failed, an early version released on itch.io has done well (it's number three on the site's top sellers list at the time of writing), and Reismanis and his team have spent the last four months assisting with it. Together they created a Unity plugin that made mod support much simpler. "We think that's really going to shake up how Unity games are modded and if that's successful then we want to bring it to Unreal and other engines [...] Mod.io allowed them to drop in a mod solution for the UI, did all the other work, and it took only a couple of hours with the Unity plugin that we've got now. It's been really helpful, they've helped us develop that out and we've helped them with an easy drop-in solution."
The idea for Modularity actually came from the developers at Vox Games. "It came about because Meeple Station was happy with the help we provided them and suggested this. At the time we were focused on their game and mod.io and they're like, 'It makes sense to formalize something to give the same help you've given us to other people'."
We definitely do have no intention of impacting free mods.
Scott Reismanis
And that's what Modularity aims to do. But describing exactly what they want to be didn't come easy. "We don't want to just be another publisher because there's tons of really good indie publishers," says Reismanis. "We wouldn't actually call ourselves a publisher if there was a better word to use." After casting aside 'investor', 'fund', and 'label' they decided publisher would have to be it. "We're not a traditional partner publisher like Devolver Digital, TinyBuild and all these other ones, because of our very narrow focus. We're never going to be a volume publisher—I don't imagine we're just taking on lots of games. We're gonna take on games that we have the capability and capacity to represent well. The next 12 months for us, we'd probably like to start building up a roadmap with an aim of I'd say two to three games a year. We'll ramp up accordingly based on what's happening so that's by no means a hard limit, but we don't want to bite off more than we can chew."
And what kind of games can we expect from Modularity? "Games that have mod support, that's probably our first and foremost priority because we feel the engagement modding brings leads to successful games and games that last a long time and really resonate with their users."
Talking about modding it's impossible to avoid the divisive subject of paid mods. Would Modularity publish a game that charged for mods? "We just want to provide advice and recommendations based on what we see and the general industry and consumers will accept," says Reismanis. "But if a developer believes it's going to be better for their game's players and they've got really strong reasons for wanting to explore the possibility then, yeah, we'll support them and we'll go into bat for them. But it's a very complicated issue. I think that exploring paid mods with an established game that has these free communities is definitely what you want to avoid."
One of the criticisms of paid mods as a concept is that it could potentially draw modders away, diminishing the existing scene existing around free mods. Reismanis sees modders already moving away, however, because of how many of them move on to more traditional game development. "If anything I think that we are hopefully gonna help modders stay truer to their vision, what they tried to create through a mod by providing them assistance instead of them immediately going into the indie developer route and creating a completely different game using the knowledge they picked up as a modder. I like to think that we're helping in that regard. We definitely do have no intention of impacting free mods."
And while mod.io was explicitly created to provide an alternative to the Steam Workshop for in-game, one-click mod distribution, there's no plan for Modularity to compete with Steam as a storefront. Their games will be available through existing distributors, or direct. Meeple Station will launch on Steam. "We're definitely not going to make our own storefront. There's been a lot of really good movement in that area lately from some pretty big companies, I think you'd be crazy to consider that."
I'm here with all of my meeple
There's one topic that's more controversial than paid mods or competitors to Steam, however, and that's the correct pluralization of the word 'meeple'. OK, maybe that's only true if you're the kind of person who posts on Boardgamegeek.com, but still, this is something that starts arguments among a certain crowd. The word 'meeple', which describes the playing pieces used in board games like Carcassonne, is an abbreviation of 'my people'. The cute space people who totter around trying not to asphyxiate in Meeple Station are based on these pawns you usually see in European board games, which are played by the kind of people who argue about correct pluralization of words.
"It's funny because there was a really big debate about this that the team had," says Reismanis, "there's actually a huge conversation about that. In the footer of the website of Meeple Station I had 'no meeples were harmed in the making of this website' and they told me to change it. 'No meeple were harmed in the making of this website'."
Meeple definitely will be harmed in the playing of Meeple Station, though. It's the kind of sim where you assign orders to the crew, telling them to mine asteroids or build airlocks or clean the floor, and then hope they accomplish those things without starving to death or depressurizing or being hit by meteors or dying in some other horrible way.
It's a real risk. Reismanis gives an example. "In the trailer actually at about the minute mark there's a scene where pirates are boarding the station and the captain, the meeple captain, shoots two pirates then just turns and starts a conversation with another meeple, then gets shot in the back. They're not the most intelligent spacefarers in the world."
It's a game that's about building, and trading, and surviving in space, and it's easy to imagine new skins for the characters and new items of furniture being added in, maybe more jobs so you can go full Space Station 13 with it, but what does Modularity want to see modders do with their first published game? "We want to see total conversions," Reismanis says. "We want to have it to the point where—the game is not a tower defence title at all, it should never have tower defence in it, but we want to get modding to the point where you could build tower defence into it if you wanted to. It'd be a silly thing to do, but that's the goal. If you enable something to that state then really modders can do anything."
Hello all Meeple! The time has come for Meeple Station, a highly moddable space station building simulator to launch on Steam as an Early Access title for PC, Mac and Linux. We are also proud to add that the game has mod support and is the first game published by ModDB.com and IndieDB.com under the label Modularity, which we have also announced today.
We cannot thank our wishlisting indie loving fans on Steam enough. Your anticipation the past month once we started building our presence has been overwhelming. We look forward to continue to provide updates for you all to enjoy!
Inspired by deep and creative simulations like RimWorld and Dwarf Fortress, Meeple Station lets you build and manage a habitat for your meeples, all while surviving the dangers of deep space like meteors, pirates, and deadly alien encounters.
Players can expect to take the reins of a small but humble space station, and build it into something epic as they explore distant galaxies, mine precious minerals, take on daring missions and trade with other space inhabitants. Live a never ending adventure whilst trying to make the best of your ramshackle station, and remember your busy meeple are anything but intelligent, so good luck trying to keep them alive!
