Feb 17, 2023

Devlog №3: Thank You for Your Demo Feedback!

I Am Future: Cozy Apocalypse Survival - George Kulko

Hey, future-dwellers!

It's time to look back at the launch of our demo and assess the results! Steam Next Fest ended this Monday; the demo was battle-tested and received tons of feedback from the players.

We have to admit it was a little intense to prepare for our first public demo release, but the result turned out to be awesome. Almost 50 thousand players tried the I Am Future demo version, and the numbers keep growing daily!

Having a lot of players obviously means getting a lot of feedback, right? Comments and suggestions from our community appear on our forums faster than weeds on your rooftop! Whoops, not the best comparison, but you get the meaning.😅

We’d like to warmly thank each and every one of you for sharing your ideas and suggestions. For us, it will be a busy couple of months processing the feedback and making incremental improvements to the game. As you probably remember, it is coming to Steam Early Access on May 18th, so before that, we've got to implement the key suggestions and make sure they synergize together.

We can already say with certainty that we will add/tweak the following features/mechanics:

Hunger (buffing the effect of some foods)
Fishing (adding a more detailed tutorial, polish the process of fishing)
Controller support & key rebinding (adding to the Early Access version of the game)
Inventory management (making improvements)

During the pre-Early Access launch period, we plan to hold one or two closed playtests on our Discord server. It would involve testing the full version of the game, not the demo. For that, we will select a small group of players and provide them access to the work-in-progress build.

Now, how about some teasers, future-dwellers?

One of the most interesting mechanics we're hard at work on is Expeditions. You've already had a chance to get a glimpse of it in the recent demo. However, today we want to tell you a little more about it.

The diorama you see above shows one of the locations you will be able to explore while embarking on expeditions. It's a sunken plane that conceals valuable resources/items and... secrets. The crash site will be interactable: by rotating the diorama, you will discover fascinating details and parts of the plane (debris, wing, cabin, lavatory, etc.) Text events will guide you through the examination process as you are trying to complete a quest.

But wait, there's more to it. In some of these locations, you will find NPCs you're going to be able to bring to your base and have them help you build it!

One more thing, folks. You might have noticed that the little robot guy from our main artwork (see the clickable image above) wasn't in the demo. Wondering what he is doing? Well, he is there to help you automate your routine! You will be able to program your little helpers to water crops, gather resources, cook, fish, exterminate leeches and do all sorts of tasks! We will tell you more about it in one of our upcoming devlogs.

That wraps it up for today's entry, folks. Follow I Am Future to stay updated: in the next devlogs, we will cover more interesting aspects of the game. Also, join our cozy Discord to get notified about future closed beta tests.

READ OUR PREVIOUS DEVLOG ENTRIES:
Devlog №1: Lore
Devlog №2: Disassembly (Video)

DOWNLOAD THE DEMO (Yes, it's still available!):

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1658040/I_Am_Future/

If you want to share your thoughts on the demo with us, please don't hesitate to do it here.

Join the community:

DISCORD
TWITTER
FACEBOOK

Feb 17, 2023

KOTCL Developer Diaries: hey look, a bear scratching its muzzle!

Knock on the Coffin Lid - TroublesomeFurious

Knock-knock, adventurers!

The days fly by so fast that we don't even notice when it's time for our next meeting. Park your worms, put buckets on your heads and let's go!

Celebration of love in the middle of the week

Valentine's Day is celebrated in the Frontier too, you know! However, not all ways of celebrating Valentine’s are all that nice, one example being the cult’s use of sacrifices.
But we won’t follow the cult’s example. Instead we’re giving you valentine cards for all your needs – you can pick them up in this post. Once again Happy Valentine’s Day!

The carousel of events

Despite the spirit of love floating in the air, we nonetheless continue working on event animations. As always, the animations undergo serious preparation, get polished up and are cut for processing. These guys below (a dentist's dream, by the way!) are ready to be animated, so we’re looking forward to seeing the results.

And this hero from our past diaries is ready to fight with you now. All that’s left to do is to add his animation to the game. By the way, that’s what our programmers are doing right now, so please show your support for them in the comments!

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Champion’s Movements

While some are busy with the events, others continue finishing off the animations of the enemies. The elven champion and his bear are nearly ready to join the game.

The bear is scratching its sweet little muzzle in one of the animations below. That’s so cute, isn’t it?

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The Thing is also getting ready to enter the playing field and work on your nerves. It’s already snout-sniffing for an unwary traveler. Be careful – the Thing is highly contagious!

All's well that ends well

Unique endings are also being drawn up. In fact, there are way more of them than you can possibly imagine! Very soon you’ll be able to track them all down and receive achievements!

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That's it for today. Don’t forget to visit our social networks, where we communicate with you and read your suggestions for improving our game.

See you in the next diary!

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Feb 17, 2023

Generating Power in the Crystal Caves Biome

The Riftbreaker - voidreaver

Hello Riftbreakers!

Setting up the energy grid is one of the key challenges you must face when setting up an outpost in a new biome in The Riftbreaker. All biomes have different weather conditions. The kind of resources available usually dictates what type of tech we will have access to. It is no different in the Crystal Caves biome. Given that we’re going to be underground all the time while exploring this biome, our most basic power generation options - Wind Turbines and Solar Panels - are not the first choice that springs to mind. However, a true Riftbreaker will always find a solution.

Hated by some, loved by few, Carbonium Power Plants will help you get things started.

There might not be plenty of sunlight or air currents underground, but nature makes up for that in other meaningful ways. The first thing you should do while choosing the right spot for your base is look for carbonium deposits. There is plenty of them - more than enough to get away with sacrificing room for a couple of carbonium factories and building carbonium power plants instead. They will help you power your equipment early in a Survival run. Later, you can move to Crystal Caves' next significant power source - Geothermal Vents.

Finding a spot like this is just like hitting a jackpot. Geothermal vent PLUS a wind tunnel!

There is plenty of geological activity going on beneath the surface of Galatea 37, a relatively young planet. While exploring the cavern systems, you will encounter many geothermal vents that can be utilized as a power and water source. A steady stream of clean, free electricity will keep your power network juiced up for quite some time. Later, you can utilize the water from these power plants to cool some more advanced buildings, such as nuclear power plants. Given the naturally occurring uranium deposits, they are a real possibility here.

What could go wrong if we put a massive nuclear reactor underground?

Setting up carbonium and geothermal power plants is an excellent foundation to build on. Still, they won’t be enough to power a base with dozens of turrets, factories, and other facilities. To fully master this biome, you must take advantage of several phenomena and anomalies that occur in the Crystal Caves regularly.

First, it is not entirely true that you can’t utilize Wind Turbines and Solar Power in this biome - you can do so but to a limited degree. There are places where the terrain formation causes strong air currents to form. We call them wind tunnels. The area they affect is relatively small, but the turbulent air they create makes your Wind Turbines spin quicker than usual, making for a lovely addition to your power network. They won’t keep you online on their own but might make the difference between repelling an attack and losing half of your base.

Natural skylights allow you to make use of Solar Panels. We originally didn't plan to make that available, but a lot of our Twitch chatters expected this to work, so we obliged.

You will also have chances to utilize Solar Panels in the Crystal Caves biome. Because we are just a couple dozen meters below the surface of Galatea 37, it is pretty common for natural ‘skylights’ to appear. You can clearly see where they are by looking at the ground during the day - the areas below these skylights get much brighter, allowing you to position your Solar Panels for maximum efficiency.

A couple of hammer swings will kickstart your self-sustaining biomass chain.

Another way of boosting your electricity production is to make use of biomass. There is little light or nutritious soil in Crystal Caves, but, as we know, nature always finds a way. Mushrooms thrive in this environment and grow unexpectedly fast. You can set up a network of plant harvesters to gather the mushrooms and turn them into usable fuel for your Plant Biomass Powerplants. Alternatively, you can have some fun and go biomass hunting yourself. We heard that chainsaws and hammers work really well! (And yeah, we know that mushrooms are not plants, but thanks to advanced Rift Technology™, anything is possible!)

This is just a working prototype - the final building will have its own model and effects. However, the functionality is there already!

But, of course, we wouldn’t leave you without any new technologies! Here’s a sneak peek of the latest groundbreaking invention in World Expansion II - Energy Pylons! These huge structures act as long-distance energy connectors. You set one up in your base and connect it to your primary energy grid. It will serve as your transmitter. Then, you can build another one in a location further away from your base. The second pylon is a receiver - it will collect all the energy sent by the transmitter, allowing you to connect both locations to the primary power grid without needing the standard, fragile energy connectors. One caveat of this technology is that Pylons on both ends need power themselves to stay operational. The cost is high, but the potential - endless. Also, please note that what you see here is just a working prototype - the final building will have its own model and will likely change in functionality a couple of times during development!

As you can see, the power situation is far from hopeless in Crystal Caves. There are plenty of solutions to choose from, and if you manage to use them all at once, you should end up with a stable energy network without much issue. You will need it to face all the creatures lurking in the darkness! Join our streams for previews of Crystal Caves - www.twitch.tv/exorstudios - we won’t spoil everything, promise! We also promise to hold a beta testing period for this biome. It will be announced at www.discord.gg/exorstudios. Don’t miss it!

EXOR Studios

Feb 17, 2023

Shapez 2: Roadmap, FAQ & Surveys

shapez - tobspr Games

Hey everyone!

We wanted to give you an update about the current state, plans and roadmap of Shapez 2.

First of all, if you haven't wishlisted and followed the store page yet, this is the best way to get notified about updates, giveaways, release dates and more!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2162800/shapez_2/

Roadmap & Funding

We want to develop Shapez 2 much more sophisticated than Shapez 1 - with a larger team, all kinds of new features, content, quality-of-life improvements and all-new 3D graphics.

This implementation would not be possible with our current resources, which is why we have applied for funding from the German government.

We hope to have the response by the end of February, which would allow us to start with the production of Shapez 2 in March. In case we get a positive funding response, the timeline & roadmap would look like this:

Steam Demo / Next fest: Either February or June 2024
Steam Early Access: ~Mid 2024
PC 1.0 Release: Mid 2025
Consoles Release: TBA

We would be self-publishing the game on Steam (except for the Asia region), but once we have the funding secured, we will also look for a publisher for consoles. Once found, we can also announce a release date on those!

Game Theme & Features

While Shapez 1 had a very abstract, minimalist art style, we want to re-work the art-style to look a bit more interesting and exciting. However, we'd like to point out again that we still want to keep all the core mechanics that define shapez - No enemies, no building costs, no stress, and so on. Making the visuals stand out a little more allows us to get more people excited about the game though - and personally, we really like the planned direction!

While we are talking about the theme and space stations, here's some concept art already - our vision on how we want the game to look and what we will aim to produce once we get the funding response. Hope you like the new direction as much as we do! (Please note: This is just concept art. We haven't started with the actual production yet, so it's still a long way to go until the game actually looks like this, if ever!)

Besides of all the new features (multi-layers, trains, blueprint library and so on) that we plan to implement, I'd like to highlight one specific feature: The blueprinting of entire space station platforms.
Later in the game, you will be unlocking the ability to copy & paste whole stations, so you can start building on an entirely different scale. For example, you can build a "cutter", "stacker" and "rotator" platform, and then move and duplicate those modules as required, building huge factories consisting of thousands of buildings with a single click.

Surveys

As a preparation for a potential production we prepared a few surveys, and we plan on doing a lot more in our Shapez 2 Discord!

We are really trying to involve you as much as possible - for example, the change to the space theme was actually driven by community surveys!

Here are a few past and actives surveys, to give you an idea what those are about:

Initial Art Style Survey
Cutters
Second Art Style Survey
Space Stations Survey
Miner Modules
Should we add multiplayer - Survey
Game Name Survey
Visual Style Survey
Grid Survey (ongoing)
... and much more!

As you can see, we are really looking to involve you in the development & decisions and are trying to make sure we are building a game that everybody loves as much as we do!

Giveaways

Once we have settled on a release date, we will run multiple giveaways for Shapez 2 keys on different platforms. To make sure you don't miss out on those, we recommend to:

- Join the Shapez 2 Discord
- Follow + Wishlist the steam page

FAQ

We frequently get similar questions, so we wanted to start a small FAQ!

Q: What will be the price?
A: We can't give an exact price yet, but our current estimate would be around 25-30$/€ on Early Access Release.

Q: What will be the state on Early Access?
A: We want to make sure the game is already very polished, playable and enjoyable on Early Access release (comparable to other major games in the genre). During Early Access, we will aim for 3-4 major updates instead a lot of smaller ones, which justify picking up the game again (in case you ever stopped).

Q: When will the game release?
A: If we can secure the funding, we would plan to release in Early Access Mid 2024.

Q: How can I support you?
A: If you like our games and what we are doing, we have a patreon which also gives you discord benefits!
You can also check out our other games, like Kiwi Clicker or https://store.steampowered.com/app/880580/YORGio/!

Q: Will my PC be able to run it with the all-new graphics?
A: We will be very focused on performance, and we are even considering to add a "low-spec" mode with largely reduced visuals. We are aware that a major advantage of Shapez 1 was that it ran on various setups, and we'll give our best to ensure Shapez 2 does too!

Q: What operating systems will the game support?
A: Shapez 2 will be available on Windows 7 or newer, macOS and Linux.

Q: Will I get a discount if I own Shapez 1 already?
A: Unfortunately, no.

Have a nice weekend!
~Tobias

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2162800/shapez_2/

Feb 17, 2023

DevBlog #7 - Bags, Fishing and More!

Darfall - Wrymn

Hello everyone and welcome to our 7th Darfall update. It's me Lukas and we are going to look at what we have been up to since our last devlog and what are our future plans.

We also hope you enjoyed the last World Map Update, where we showed you some details about our continent of Aganor and how the survival mode plays on this map.

What We Have Been Up To?

Over the past few weeks, we've dedicated most of our efforts to preparing the demo for release by addressing bugs and enhancing the player experience with quality-of-life improvements. So if you haven't downloaded Darfall demo yet, don't hesitate and play it now yourself.

In addition to development work, we've also been actively engaging in marketing efforts by participating in events like Steam Next Fest and Builder Fest. While these activities can be time-consuming, we recognize their importance in building awareness and excitement for the game.

We're thrilled to have recently launched the public Steam Demo, which allows players to experience Darfall for themselves for up to six days (or even up to eight days for more experienced players). We hope that this demo will give players a taste of the exciting city-building and strategy gameplay that Darfall has to offer.

(You can see the score of one of our Discord players, Pattat, quite impressive, right?)

You can compare your own score on our Discord as well!

We're thrilled with the positive feedback the demo has received from players. We're collecting and using valuable feedback via our in-game system to improve the game for our upcoming Early Access release later this year.

We've decided to keep the demo available to give players more time to try it out and provide additional feedback. We're excited to continue working on Darfall with the help of our community.

h the help of our community.

Backpacks - More, more and more items!

We've recently introduced a new feature to the game that allows players to craft backpacks at their Tailor building. These backpacks can be equipped on your hero, boosting their carrying capacity and reducing the need to return to base after a successful loot run.

With this new addition, players can now explore the game world more efficiently, collecting more resources and items without worrying about running out of inventory space.

We hope this feature will improve the overall gameplay experience and encourage players to venture further into the game's world.

Fishing

Fishing has been a highly requested feature, and we're excited to announce that it will be available in the next update. With the Fishing Hut building, players can catch fish for an alternate source of food, particularly useful on maps with reduced farm production.

Simply locate fishing schools in bodies of water, and employ a worker as a fisherman by building a Fishing Hut nearby. We can't wait to see how this new feature enhances gameplay.

Biomes - Desert and Swamp

The work is slowly starting on our 2 new biomes, Desert and Swamps, which will provide a refreshing change from the grassland biome. Our goal is to make each biome feel unique, with different strategies required to gather food, resources and fend off enemies.

For example, on desert maps, food will be scarce, so players will need to collect special fruits or catch fish in rare oases to feed their units. However, stone and iron will be abundant, making it easier to mine, build, and craft.

We're excited to see how players will adapt to these new challenges and are looking forward to sharing more details about these biomes in the future.

More Technical Details

For developers and Unity3D enthusiasts, I'd like to share some technical details about our project. We've been working hard to rewrite and improve many background systems to increase performance and make the architecture more robust for the future.

Terrain Generation

One of the changes we've made is to our terrain generation system, where we're generating chunks and meshes for the game. Part of the code is run through Unity's new job system, which has helped to improve performance. However, we've been revisiting this code as we believe that stuttering may have been caused by this system, particularly when corrupted tiles change into grass and the terrain needs to regenerate.

Overall, we're committed to delivering a high-quality gaming experience, and we'll continue to optimize our systems and code to ensure that players can enjoy the game without any issues.

User Interface Refactor

In addition to the technical updates, we've also made some improvements to the user interface. Previously, all of our UI was in a single scene, which was difficult to navigate due to the large number of objects. It was also a mess, which made it challenging to manage.

(As you can see, all of the UI is in a single scene, bunched together)

To address this issue, I have refactored our UI and separated all of the UI parts into separate "widget" prefabs, such as the inventory, minimap, build section or top bar. This has significantly reduced the complexity of adding or changing UI elements, and has made the scene much faster to load.

(example of ability book widget)

Project Structure

We've also made some changes to the naming convention of the asset files we're using in the game. To improve organization and ease of use, we followed the guidelines outlined in the Unity Style Guide found here.

By using this guide, we were able to create clear asset prefixes and group similar assets together. For example, we now use "SM_" for static mesh and "T_" for texture. As a result, our assets are now much easier to find and access.

For instance, we've grouped all of the assets related to the Knight unit, such as its mesh, icon, blueprint, and prefab, into a single folder, making it more convenient for our team to locate them.

These changes may seem small, but they have greatly improved our development process, and we believe they will enhance the overall quality of the game.

Prologue

We also have a Prologue Steam Page up you can check out!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2306730/Darfall_Prologue/

Add to your WISHLIST, as a prologue version will be released before Early Access with additional features you can play beforehand.

Thanks for reading, and we can't wait to see you in the game!

Martin and Lukas from beyond the darkness of Darfall.