Hi Folks!
Last month we were gifted with the incredible footage from the Perseverance rover landing as well as the news that the Chinese spacecraft and the UAE probe all arrived safely to Mars, and we can’t get over how cool it looks. We’re looking forward to the day people will get on the red planet themselves and send over pictures and videos of their new home. In the meantime, Terrafomers will hopefully give you a small taste of that. We wish Perseverance and the scientist team behind it a fruitful exploration!
Perseverance landing on february 18th.
Exploration artworks
All these images from the real Mars make us dream of the landscapes we would find there. Which is great as Tiago and Ludo have been working on more discovery artworks.
One such discovery is an incredible viewpoint of a canyon landscape, suddenly opening before the explorers’ eyes after traveling on rocky plains.
Explorers marvel and a great canyon on Mars.
Another discovery is of a pitch black sand-dune field, stretching as far as the eye can see. The explorers are pondering how to explore it further and are trying to get a better view from a tall dune.
The original sketches of a field of back sand-dunes on Mars.
An improved draft of the above artwork.
We have more such discovery artworks being prepared which you’ll have to discover for yourself in the game :)
A month of improvements
On the development and design side, a lot of effort went into polishing multiple aspects of the game and tackling some long standing quirk and bugs.
We worked on UI improvement and polish, adding tooltips, UI animations, breakdown panels and other quality of life improvements for the player. We improved as well the planet lighting and how borders looked. We were happy with the regional border system Seb had put in place, but we never came around to solving the issue of when 3 or 4 regions met together leaving a bit of empty space. It’s finally solved and looking much better.
The old borders with empty spaces at the junctions.
The new borders, fully in contact.
We have also been iterating on some aspects of the game design such as: single action per turn and auto-passing the turn. This will improve the overall flow of the game to happen more naturally. We are also working on a better way to propose technologies to the player each turn as well as some early tutorial aspects (giving tips and objectives).
Target release window
As you might have seen a couple weeks ago, our publisher Goblinz Studio has leveled-up to Goblinz Publishing! Which is a better and clearer form for all the stuff they are doing and we are super happy they managed to do it. For the occasion they released a small trailer with their upcoming games and when they will come out. Thus we are excited to announce that our current plan targets a release for a late Q3 2021. Though, as always with development, and especially with indie developers, don’t take this for a hard date yet and wait until we have a proper release to announce before getting too hyped up.
And that’s it for February! Thanks for reading and until next month for more artworks and news!
Terraformers team