02 Dec 2021Developer post

Version 0.9.4.21 is Live! -- Starmap and Interstellar Trade update

This new update brings a complete overhaul to interplanetary trade: * You can now redirect trade ships to new planets if you decide they'd be more efficient there. Or if, you know, unexpected situations arise that make a planet need a little more help than usual. * Trade routes c

24 Nov 2021Developer post

Version 0.9.4.20 is now available in the Experimental Branch.

Happy (pre)-Thanksgiving! I've just uploaded v0.9.4.2 to the Experimental branch. It features: * A brand new Galactic Map, which I think is a bit of an improvement over the previous one... * Improvements to Trade - You can now send more than three types of resources between plane

22 Jun 2021Developer post

Update 0.9.3.5

Happy... Tuesday? Sorry, I meant to publish this on Sunday, but life got in the way. =) The 0.9.3.5 update is now live! And it introduces a raft of new research projects which will unlock new upgraded versions of the game's buildings. I've also refactored how the game handles nar

Happy... Tuesday? Sorry, I meant to publish this on Sunday, but life got in the way. =)

The 0.9.3.5 update is now live! And it introduces a raft of new research projects which will unlock new upgraded versions of the game's buildings. I've also refactored how the game handles narrative events, and fleshed out the writing in the game's objectives and dialogues.

Also of note: certain research projects now have prerequisites -- things which you must do before the research is possible. Domesticating alien creatures, for instance, will require that you actually have a lab on the world that creature is native to.

Also, also: It is now possible to reroute trade ships to new planets, after you've constructed and assigned them. Hopefully this make building an extensive trade network 95% less cumbersome.

And, of course, a bunch of smaller usability tweaks and bug fixes have gone in:

Inventory for the current planet fits the screen better now.
Ship construction menu tells you what resources are missing, if any are missing.
Research menu UI is improved (though there's still plenty more work to do on UI...)
Health and Happiness are now hard limits on a planets growth, instead of tedious modifiers to how _quickly_ the planet grows.
...but happiness producing buildings can be upgraded now, so you have that going for you. =)
Fixed some mistakes in the dialogues where the characters don't accurately describe your next objective.
Fixed a bug where new settlers on a world would sometimes refuse to work.
Colonization menus now show how much is packed on this ship, so you have an idea of what still needs to be done before it launches.
Fixed some stray exceptions in the UI for resource-producing buildings.
Fixed the mission objectives pop-up to not appear over the buttons for placing buildings.

Building upgrades are purely functional at the moment, so the upgraded version will still have the physical appearance of an un-upgraded one, at least until you mouse over it at which point the tooltip will explain that the building is upgraded. That's not great, I know! So my mission now is to create new building art and improve the old models, as well. More on that in the next update!

Original post

28 Mar 2021Developer post

Update 0.9.2.2

Good morning folks, and happy Sunday! Before we get started, I want to mention that I also post updates on Twitter! So if you'd like to hear news about the game that way (or if you're interested in the other random prototypes and tutorials that I sometimes throw together), Follow

28 Feb 2021Developer post

Quick update (v. 0.9.2.1)

So this was a bit of an oversight, but up until now I'd forgotten that you'd need a way to delete old save files.* This update fixes that. =) * Okay, I didn't actually forget. I just figured hey, making the UI is hard and if people want to delete saves they can always do it manua

11 Feb 2021Developer post

FX Update (v.0.9.2.0)

Happy Thursday Everyone! Just a small update today, featuring new visual effects for rockets taking off, landing, crashing, and exploding. Plus new sounds for menu interactions and a subtle sound for when characters are speaking. Also a small but important optimization: The plane

09 Jan 2021Developer post

The 60-FPS New Years Update (0.9.1.9)

Happy Saturday, Everyone! I dug into the game's rendering and discovered a lot of room for optimization. Many of the models in the game were being rendered individually instead of in batches, causing the game to waste time on unnecessary draw calls. To put the problem in perspect

28 Dec 2020Developer post

Christmas Update - 0.9.1.8

Merry Christmas everyone! Version 0.9.1.8 is now live, and it introduces a couple new mechanics and features: * Roads and Bridges are back in the game! They'd been in a much earlier version, but hadn't affected gameplay much. Now they're back and buildings which are adjacent to a

Merry Christmas everyone!

Version 0.9.1.8 is now live, and it introduces a couple new mechanics and features:

* Roads and Bridges are back in the game! They'd been in a much earlier version, but hadn't affected gameplay much. Now they're back and buildings which are adjacent to a road get an efficiency bonus proportional to the percentage of buildings on the planet that you can reach along that road. There's also a new special vision mode which highlights how much of a bonus each building is currently getting.

* The placement of your Outposts and Forts matter now. Buildings are considered 'defended' if they are close to a Fort or Outpost, and your colony's chances of withstanding an invasion drop with each undefended building you have. As with Roads, there's now a special rendering mode that lets you see how well defended each building is -- this is available in the Military menu.

* I've added an option for changing the style of the water between the classic look, and the new wavy look. Feel free to choose the style you like better. =)

* Now that the game has two special rendering modes that use red and green to highlight problems in your colonies, it seemed like a good time to introduce some options for color-blindness. Now in the options you can pick from a variety of color schemes for the game to use when it shows you how efficient the road network is, or how well defended buildings are.

* I've fixed a bug where you couldn't load very old saves from before the time that I introduced a story to the campaign. Now if you load a save that's that old it will be in sandbox mode (where there is no story).

* Also, a bunch of small fixes went in for missing localization and UI that wasn't working properly. For instance, the Interplanetary Trade menus should now correctly identify the names of the planets you're trading between.

Broadly, here's what I'm planning on looking at next:

Optimizations - There's still bugs where the game will slow down to a crawl sometimes, especially with large civilizations that span many worlds. I've also noticed that the game is generating far too many draw calls for what it's rendering - trees, for instance, are all rendered separately when they could be rendered as a single batch. Fixing this will make the frame rate a whole lot better. I want to look into moving the game's AI towards an entity/component model as well, which will further improve performance.

Story Rewrites - I'm not satisfied with how the story plays out at the moment, and that means two things need to change: 1) I want to rewrite how the engine handles story events, so it's easier for me to make changes without breaking peoples' existing saves, and then 2) I want to introduce more events and make the pacing a little faster in the beginning.

Building Upgrades - I'd like to add upgraded versions of existing buildings, which can be unlocked thru research and built with late-game resources.

That's it for now; Happy New Year everyone!
-Pouchmouse

Original post

06 Dec 2020Developer post

Weekend Update (0.9.1.5)

Happy Sunday, everyone! I've spent the past two weeks attempting to track down the crashes that people have been experiencing. I found two places where the game was allocating new objects each frame, and I suspect these were causing the game to eventually run out of memory and cr

22 Nov 2020Developer post

Weekend Update (0.9.1.4)

Happy Sunday Everyone- I've been experimenting with ways to improve the look of the ocean; trying to make it look more dynamic and wavy while still keeping to the game's polygonal art style. After a lot of experimentation with different shaders, I've finally arrived at something

25 Oct 2020Developer post

Weekend Update (0.9.1.3)

And just like that, it was time for another weekend update! For the past few weeks I've been working on improving the game's art style. This has been a bit tricky for me because I want to achieve a consistent look -- where all the terrain, buildings, plants, and creatures feel li

11 Oct 2020Developer post

Weekend Update - (0.9.1.2)

Good morning everyone and Happy Sunday! I've just uploaded a small update with two important changes: The UI for the Save and Load screens has been expanded, so if you gave your save files long, descriptive names they won't get cut off anymore. I hope. Unless you really wrote an

04 Oct 2020Developer post

Update 0.9.1.0 - Professions

Morning, everyone! Version 0.9.1.0 adds a much needed change to how workers are assigned to buildings. The problem up until now was this: A building has an ideal number of workers that you have declared should work there. And it also has an actual number of workers, which can som

09 Feb 2020Developer post

Update! 0.9.0.3

Hi all- Version 0.9.0.3 is live! This is a small update that addresses some of the suggestions folks had in the comments: * The Professions menu now shows advanced buildings that were missing from it before. * The Professions menu also correctly updates to reflect the latest worl

26 Jan 2020Developer post

Update 0.9.0.2

Hi all- Version 0.9.0.2 is live, and it fixes a few important problems. For one, the movement speed of your citizens wasn't being initialized until you looked at the world they lived on. So if you loaded a game with multiple planets, Peabs on each planet would be stuck in place u

18 Jan 2020Developer post

January Update - Story Mode

Hello everyone! I've just wrapped up a major update to Poly Universe, including a bunch of advanced resources, new building types, and a story/campaign mode. So here's what's in the latest build, which I'm affectionately referring to by its nickname "Version 0.9.0.0": * New advan

09 Oct 2018Developer post

Roadmap Update - Modding!

It took a bit of work, but I've gotten Poly Universe to the point where much of the content is moddable and the process for modding is (hopefully!) quite easy. To create your own mod, you can start by downloading the sample here: Place that sample mod in your local mods directory

09 Sep 2018Developer post

Game Roadmap Update! (number 1 of many)

I just realized I didn't really announce this in any 'official' capacity, but: Roads and Bridges have been added to the game! Roads and bridges can be found in their own tab on the central 'Build' menu, and come in two flavors. You can build stone roads, which let your Peabs move

10 Aug 2018Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Unknown Pleasures: Simply the Best Five New Indies on Steam

The grim prospect of shopping for PC components looms over my August like a looming, grim prospect. God I love writing. You might be surprised how demanding indie games can be on a slightly creaky video card, and not always because of ongoing optimisation. Although admittedly it’

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