Electric power grid in space news - Lunar Soil

Sale, merchs, building system, payment gateway and pink level-design; what a week.

Summary of this week’s devblog

• New couples’ videolog, with both of us!
• Ending week long 50% sale.
• Building with electric power in space
• Upcoming merchs and shop
• Payment provider problems
• Unity 2018 – Substance Material

Video Devlog

Short but sweet, we finally found a way to fit two people in one camera!

RymdResa and imprint-X

We have a gigantic 50% sale on both RymdResa and imprint-X over at Steam this week, up until monday morning.

Last minute chance to get the games on sale right now. (Help us spread the word <3 )

Building with electric power in space

A big part of establishing a new base on distant moons in Lunar Soil is of course the ability to build and take control of the areas’ resources. We’ve now added the first part of our energy grid. Effective resource mining requires machines, machines requires power, power can be transported through the grid. Each machine (like drills, refineries, pumps or others) consumes raw energy. Energy can be generated in a range of ways.

By connecting a solar-panel or wind turbine to a energy grid, the energy can be used to power connected machines.

We worked on the build-system’s controls as they differ slightly depending if you play with mouse, keyboard or gamepad. We want to make sure that you can play with only mouse if you want.

Merchs and the upcoming shop

So we want to be able to do a couple of things with the new site and login system. One is of course to be able to sell our digital games and let you download them securely, the other is to offer some endorsers related to our games as well!

One crazy example we could do is to unlock a t-shirt in the store for your account only if you have visited that art-piece in-game. Doing that is kind of a stretch but it would be possible. :-p

Payment provider problems

We’ve had quite some problems with Braintree (the payment provider we picked). We were basically done with the implementation and was ready to do a production test. Then out of nowhere then decided to shut down our account without explaining why. We actually called them and asked and they seemed to have no clue. We can’t really work with a company that can’t communicate. We did some more research on Braintree and found many nasty reviews.

So instead of sitting down and waiting for them we switched to Stripe! It took some time to get their 3D secure card payment flow to work in a server-less environment but we got it going now. The big downside is of course that there is no built in support for Paypal. When we where done with setting up Stripe, Braintree sent a mail requesting pictures of our passports, company documents and access to our development environment and more over the top detailed information. It would probably be best to stick with Stripe for now and add Paypal support later. Another fallback is to just use something like Klarna. A good shorterm solution would be to just give up and make a Shopify store but that’s not really what we want.

Unity 2018.1 – Substance Material

Unity finally released their 2018.1 version! It included a lot of loose and fluffy features, the release feels kinda rushed but it’s still nice to get new tools.

However, one of the biggest things for us was the deprecation of Unity support for Substance materials. Rip Shaderforge, hello unity material shadering thingy-mabobby-system or whatever they call it.

We have been using Substance for quite some time now and love it. Both designing our own procedural materials, finding high quality ones, painting textures etc. It’s a great workflow to create high quality textures. The problem with the deprecation is that we have lost all the references to our old materials. So 3d objects in scenes have simply lost all their materials. These materials need to be re-assigned…. Manually…

Luckily we have been gray/white-boxing lately but the bunker got hit hard! Will take some time to re-assign all the materials.