Happy Holidays everyone! 🎄
We hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season so far and finishing the year off right! Before the year ends, we have some updates to bring to you all based on the feedback we’ve been receiving, as well as to show off some things that we showcased in our monthly AMA that we held last week. If you missed our AMA, make sure you read to the end to see what all you missed and how you join our next one. Now let’s just jump straight into all of it!
Portraits
We have heard your feedback about the portraits! And we will continue hearing your feedback and making adjustments as necessary. Firstly, let’s take a look at the progression of the beloved Aaron.
As you can see, his original portraits were a bit more of the rugged pixel art style that we turned a bit more HD for the original E3 trailer. We then progressed to the concept art we showed off to yall a couple of months ago. We took in all of the feedback that you all gave us and made some adjustments to the HD version and added in some new facial expressions.
Here you can see how the original portrait looks in game versus the new one
Before
After
We also did this sort of process with our community mechanical engineer (and Santa lookalike 👀), Jimbob.
Before
After
Overall, the previous portraits for these characters just weren't exactly doing the job that we needed them to, so they needed a bit of upgrading so we would be able to include more facial expressions as well as general readability. The designs you see above are still in progress and not final designs, so we will definitely still be taking in criticism.
Interior Design
We’ve been working on updating the interiors of the landers! Not quite like our portrait upgrades, so don’t fret! We would still love to hear yalls thoughts though!
We’ve updated the lighting a bit to give it a more cozy feeling inside, as well as adding in some various objects around the space to give a more lived in feel.
In other interior design updates, while we haven’t updated the lighting in Linny's cabin just yet, we have finished up the interior.
Discord AMA
As per our monthly tradition, we did an AMA with our game director, Emmanuel Floret, in our community Discord. This month, we had the special treat of having our art director, Johan Balan, joining us as well. While we had a smaller turn out due to the holidays, we were still able to show off a lot of awesome news stuff for everyone, including a lot of the above work and talking through any questions or thoughts that they had.
Q: While fishing, can you catch trash?
A: No, no trash, but you will be able to catch other things.
Q: Is there going to be a vendor to sell mine items?
A: You have a merchant dedicated to prospecting to buy upgrades. The vendor also supplies the suit which you need to survive.
Q: Since there’s a drone for fishing, will there be a drone to help me care for the animals?
A: Awesome suggestions as we did not think about that. The barn is basically what will take care of animals. For maintenance and petting, we will think about it. Since we already will have drones for crops, it is not that far of a bridge.
Q: Can the drones be named?
A: We have not planned for that at the moment. As we grow the universe and worldbuilding, we plan to slowly introduce different world-based brandings/logos so we aren’t sure if we will be able to rename drones. #lorebuilding
We don’t have a date just yet for our next monthly AMA, but definitely join our Discord to keep in the know for when we do schedule it!
Thank you all for your continued support and patience as we continue working towards EA next year.