PayloadStudios
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Based in Hammersmith in London, Payload Studios is the award winning developer behind TerraTech – the ultimate exploration and combat game, set on the off world. TerraTech started life in 2012, and the Payload team started to assemble in late 2013 before successfully surpassing a £35,000 funding round on Kickstarter in summer 2014. Now enjoying life on Steam Early Access, the game – described by The Guardian as ‘the next Minecraft’ – charges players with creating their own vehicles out of a host of different building blocks both to harvest whatever resources they can find from recently discovered exo-planet and to take down rival Techs also out to sap up the world's resources.
My Blogs
In the biggest update to TerraTech yet, we have some awesome new toys for you to play with!
Version 0.6 is now live on the Steam store here (Store.steampowered.com), and 30% off in the Midweek Madness Sale too!
Main new features include:
- The SCU (Singularity Containment Unit) Storage block makes its debut. This handy little thing will pick up any stray blocks surrounding it and add it to your new in-game inventory. To get a heads-up on how the new SCU block works, check out our tutorial video here: Youtube.com
- Block Painting. When the block palette is open, all blocks available in your inventory will be at your very finger tips - ready to be placed on to your Tech in the most streamlined building experience to date. R&D owners will also have access to the Block Palette along with an infinite quantity of blocks to build with.
- Base Bombs. Enemy Techs, replacement SCU's and player Techs will now all appear in the form of a base bomb hurtling towards the planet from the skies above!
This, plus a metric Tech Ton of bug and crash fixes, crafting table tweaks, a GeoCorp makeover and new Venture blocks – 0.6 is shaping up to be one giant leap for Intergalactic Miners!
Skydome & Day and Night transitions
By Jason Howard, posted 3rd March 2016
Since getting back after Christmas, Chris (the Lead Coder) and I have been trying out some new Skydome VFX. Many months ago we switched the game over to having a day and night cycle but in the process we lost a lot of detail in the sky. The old skydome used a 2D cube map with planets and clouds in it but with the sky changing color dynamically this was no longer possible so everything went away except for the sun.
Day & Night
The new day and night cycle uses gradients to control the color of various components of the skydome.
These are set up for each of the Biomes so that, the Grasslands, Desert, Mountains and the Salt Flats can all have different ambient lighting and sky.
Chris has set up the colours to controlled by gradient ramps in the Biome Data so that the artist can vary the colours over the course of the day.rather than simple blending between a colour for day and a colour for night.
As well as having the lighting changing over the course of the TerraTech day it also means that we can create wonderful "Golden Hour" effects during dusk and dawn.
Sun
There is now a sun in the sky and though we had a sun before the light now uses scattering to create haze and atmospheric perspective effects.
This uses techniques called Rayliegh & Mei scattering but you'd have to talk to Chris about that if you wanted to know how it works, I just play with the sliders till it looks pretty ;)
Clouds
There are now clouds in the skydome. These are dynamic based on a wind speed parameter and cast shadows over the ground. In time Chris and I hope to be able to add weather which will change the density and colour of the clouds.
Moon
As well as a sun there is moon that rises and sets too. The moon has it’s own season so as time goes by it’s rising and setting will go out of synch with the sun.
Planets
Chris and I have also added some planets to the sky dome. These are not quite as functional as the moon and the sun but there are geometry that is lit by the sun and we are planning ot have a little more fun with them if we get some time.
Stars
There are now stars at night too.
Fog
Chris also found some time to look at the fog settings which has reduced the amount of geometry that can be seen drawing in as you explore the world or TerraTech.
...and that it for now, depending on how things go this year we hope to add randomisation to the planets adding more variety to them and also try and add weather. Still we’re happy to have the skydome back to looking a little more interesting! ;)
Dev Diary January 2016
By Jamie Finch, posted 25th February 2016
Jamie
Hi guys! So it's been a very busy start to 2016 for us...but now the new website is up and running - we can resume the Dev Diary goodness! Here is what we got up to in January.
One awesome thing that happened this January was TerraTech being in the first wave of Games In Development released over at GOG.com!
Chris
Horizon? What horizon? Super secret feature leak.
Jason
Venture Radar GeoCorp Cab Animation
Added a little tiny drill to this guy!
Drew up a couple concepts for some improvements that could be made in R&D. Things like ramps (that work), targets that track how much damage they’re taking, cool speed laser things... you get the idea.
Made some colour blocks for R&D. Looking forward to seeing what people make with these!
Anton
I’ve been making a ton of blocks!
Venture Battery Venture Cab Animation
Venture Shield Venture Regen
Venture Tractor (See Stig's concepts) GeoCorp Buzz Saw
Stig
Drew up some concepts for the Venture Tractor Lock. The idea behind this being that resources are able to ‘lock’ in place and remain still at high speeds - perfect for Venture wheels!
As a lot of you are aware - our website and forum have been having a load of troubles recently. Sai Wun pulled the website down to investigate what was going on and it seemed to fix the forum's dropping connection issue, so we decided to keep the website dead. I’ve been working on a design for the new website which you should be visiting the first iteration of right about now!
Kris
Graduated several blocks from EXP to their corporations:
- GSO Small Plough
- GeoCorp Plasma Cutter
- Venture Zoomer Wheel
- Venture Pip Machine Gun
- Venture Battery
Removed Cab-cab from the game.
Reduced the value of selling all uncraftable blocks to BB100 each.
Added our all new colour blocks to R&D
Greg
I've been working on some mission and challenge prototypes recently. Just some ideas and proof of concepts really - none of this is guaranteed to make the cut. But they look fun nonetheless!
Gap Jumping Challenge prototype
Landing Target Challenge prototype
Ring Flying Challenge prototype
R&D Racing Challenge prototype
Hmm, this looks interesting...
Katt
A little play around I had with Block Painting and the new Colour Blocks in R&D!
We’re pleased to announce today that TerraTech will now be available on GOG.com, via their newly launched ‘Games in Development’ programme!
We’re really proud to be among the first wave of games on here and excited to see another platform supporting the community driven approach that has served us so well. In order to celebrate the launch, TerraTech will be 30% off for the first five days! Yay!
You can find it here: Gog.com
We’re still totally committed to our Steam and Humble players, but we can’t wait to welcome some of GOG’s great community into ours too. We’ll be updating the game just as regularly over there as we currently do on Steam, so pick your platform and come and join the fun!
We wish our friends at GOG huge congratulations for the launch of Games In Development, and lots of luck for its future success.
We recently celebrated the 1-year anniversary of successfully completing our Kickstarter campaign. (You can find our campaign archive here, if you’ve joined us since then by the way: Kickstarter.com)
One of our higher tier backer rewards gave our supporters the chance to design their very own in-game block. This is no easy task but our first ‘Corporation Vice President’ gave us some great ideas to work with and over the last few months we’ve been bringing his vision to life.
Simon Allen’s Fireworks Launcher block is now usable in the main game and we’ve documented the story of how it came to life.
It may seem like a simple process to come up with a new vehicle block for the game and get it working, but there are way more stages involved than you might expect. From the core of the idea, described in an email, Simon worked with designer Kris and artist Stig to visualise a concept of how it could look and operate.
The concept stage almost always starts with pen and paper, before transferring the ideas into Photoshop to refine the look. It’s important that every new block is able to function and attach to existing blocks in a way that’s consistent with the rest of the pieces and doesn’t break any existing rules or conventions so we tweaked the design until it fitted those criteria.
From there, our 3D artist Anton took over and started to model the block in 3DS Max, not just to start locking down the look and feel, but also to start experimenting with how it will move and animate when it’s in use.
In many cases, we know which in-game corporation a block is best suited for before we start work on it, and in this case we felt that Venture was the best fit for the rocket launcher’s distinct abilities. So as soon as we got the block textured in Venture livery we dropped it into our internal R&D mode to start experimenting with combining it with other blocks and adding it to techs to see how it looked.
Our lead programmer worked his magic on it too, putting all the systems in place for it to function properly in the main game, including all the firing and particle effects that come from each firework launched.
Anton also got to work on designing and modelling the look of the actual rockets themselves, and lots more experimentation in all the game modes followed, including that all-important design balancing to make sure that it sat well alongside all the existing blocks but was still fun and entertaining to play with.
We were eventually ready to include it in the full R&D arena for our early Canary testers to start experimenting with. We tried to stay true to Simon’s vision of what the block could do, but our testing and R&D process with the community is vital for any new block we introduce.
Once we’d integrated all the community feedback and thoroughly tested it out, it was ready to go into the main game. We exclusively revealed the block on one of our daily Twitch streams and added it to the latest Steam build for the world to play with.
Every new block goes through this process and often it’s even more complicated and drawn out than this, depending on the nature of the block and what we need it to do. But that’s why we love the way TerraTech is being developed - the whole team works together to make sure that even the smallest piece of new content in the game is cool and fun. This one was pretty special though - without our amazing Kickstarter backers last summer we wouldn’t be where we are today so to finally have our first backer-designed block live in the game is a great moment.
A huge thank you to Simon again for his support of the project and for working with us to come up with such an awesome block.
Check out the full video of the process here: Youtu.be
Ever wondered just why TerraTech asks you link up your Twitter account? Ever speculated just what we do with that information, or whether there’s any advantage to you handing it over?
Are we planning to take over the world, secretly posting pro-TerraTech tweets from your account when you’re asleep, converting each of your friends one by one? Or are we accessing your photos, printing them off in the office and drawing rude captions on the amusing ones? Sadly, that’s a rarity.
In fact, there’s a good reason why we’d encourage you to hook up your Twitter account to your adventure on the off world: You’re getting more game for your money.
With the latest update to TerraTech, linking up your Twitter account not only allows you to easily take a snapshot of your creations and share them with the world – now a staple for our biggest fans – but doing so now also means you can dispatch specific vehicles to pop up in other people's games.
The launch of the new Invasions system, which utilises the game's awesome AI to let you send off Tech to take on rival player' bases, is also tied into sharing on Twitter. Every vehicle you share on the social network (using the game's built in tools) will then automatically start popping up in other people's games, taking them on while you're doing the washing up. Or sat on the bus. Or, dare we say it, while you're wrapped up in your own game on TerraTech.
We also now have a process in place for us to manually review and promote the best invaders to be included in the preloaded set of population Techs that can spawn in player's main game, too. So if they are deemed 'good invaders', they have a chance of living on permanently in the game.
As a result, if you want to fully immerse yourself in the TerraTech universe, feel free to plug the game into your Twitter account to let your Tech start taking on the world lovingly crafted by our development team while you get on with living in the real one.
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