Video Devlog
We play imprint-X
Discord Giveaways
We’ve had some pretty nice discussions over at Discord about game development, design, philosophy, space, webdesign, Lunar Soil, games, Unity and getting stuff done. It’s really nice to see and share creativity with other people. We also had a couple of fun steam key giveaways. We’ll probably have more of those in the future, so come join us.
Delayed new site
We’re still waiting for some technical things to come in place for the new site before we can ship it, unfortunately no ETA yet. Right now we are just waiting. =)
Design changes in Lunar Soil
There where a couple of problems with the way we designed the space station which is your main hub in Lunar Soil. See an early graybox/whitebox version of it here. The medbay or medical room functioned as a resurrection area, if you happened to pass out by losing your health out on a mission you would then wake up onboard the spaceship again.
This prevented a couple of things. It removed some of the consequences of preserving and gaining fuel for your exploration ship as you could just try to die and get re-spawned at home with minimal penalties. It also prevents us from stranding the player on a distant moon.
So instead of a medical room we’re redesigning it to be a more advanced technical room with a late stage teleportation device. So if you research the appropriate technology and build a special device on a moon you will be able to get back easily. We don’t want to have that enabled at start as its part of the progression.
We’re also looking into the NPC characters that work on board the spacestation and how they play a role in your Space empire, more on that later on.
Reaching the great plateau
The main plan for Lunar Soil is still to reach a state of pre-alpha which we can start sharing and in order to do that we need a meaningful plateau of gameplay. We want to have a minimal set of features ready when releasing the alpha and then add to it. That requires a couple of things like patch-friendly save-data, enclosed levels, robustness in items, buildings, energy system, character progression and your friendly AI crew will also need to be at a little bit more stable and ready.
The workload to reach that plateau is quite hard and slow as we’ve to finish a great deal of game systems. We’ve had a couple of vertical slices of the game in order to know and iterate on how the gameplay feels and behave.
So right now we’re planing what the first shareable plateau should contain, and hopefully it will be something we can share per invites on the Discord. Kill your design darlings and all that.
For the first plateau to be reached we’re looking into making the sulfur crater more or less feature complete as an area with resources to mine, interesting things to explore, environmental storytelling with the mysterious drill-cave. After that we need to finish the spacestation.
