Featuring the new Sunflower-class Solar Panels
It is a great day on Mars! The team is currently spending a bunch of play test time in terrain test zone #42 taken from the Xanthe Terra justy north of the equator and centered on 312 E longitude.
The team is expanding and we have new folks across a number of roles: community & marketing ramping up and more muscle on both art and code.
While training up new team members, we also did a lot of clean-up, the project is cleaner, we reduced about a quarter of the outstanding TO-DO items, and planned out our next three months of work into 3 projects. Our development focus for the next two months or so is to really make our terrain sing and to polish the core game loop of crafting, power, storage and rover management. While behind the scenes greatly enhance our online capabilities and infrastructure.
Release Notes for the May 4th Build:
- Super cool ‘hexagonal sunflower’ Solar Panel added
- We need more testing with driving rovers around, and to encourage that we are paying homage to Moon Patrol with a spacebar to jump the rover.
- Fog has been tweaked - it is a bit farther out from the player, a bit thinner, and more performant (on Macs in particular)
- The wind effect on the Xanthe terrain (Sky Castle testing /goto #42) has been toned down a tad so it does not look like an active dust storm, but still a nice sense of motion.
- The night time sky box has been updated to have a much more crisp view of the night sky
- The mini state icons for idle are no longer being rendered (but remain in the code to facilitate turning it into a player side option)
- Initial music volume has been turned down
- Added in new SFX for the crafting buttons
- Removed a ton of digital cruft from the project, more to come
- Now using verbose full resource names instead of resource ids in order to both speed up development and reduce bugs
- About 20 TO-DO items addressed from tech debt - mostly moving hard coded constants to use the game constants manager
- Cleared ALL of our build-time warnings - now we have a squeaky clean builds!
- Behind the scenes a huge amount of improvements to build out our multiplayer and online infrastructure
Science Article
Water, we believe, will be the most highly sought after commodity on Mars. Water is key to rocket propulsion, energy storage, in-situ chemical manufacturing and of course the suite of life support systems. Every week it seems like more and more water is discovered on Mars. Here is the latest:
https://www.livescience.com/mars-arcadia-planitia-glaciers.html
Throwback Screenshot
It is really fun to go back in time and see how far Million on Mars has come. Below is one of the earliest screenshots back when the game was built in Python and we were exploring the core power and crafting loops. This shot was before we even got into Kivy.
Cheers,
-Erik