Our steam page went up last week and we want to thank you for wishlisting and following DAWN APART on Steam and Discord. We really appreciate you taking interest in the game and are glad to have you on board as early adopters!
In our first announcement post, we want to give you a quick technical overview, namely how the lush voxel world of Aurora is created and how you as a player will be able to populate, terraform, and destroy it!
Welcome to Aurora
Let's start with the basics: With very few exceptions, the world of Aurora will consist entirely of voxels (for this purpose we have specifically created our own voxel engine built on Unity’s Data Oriented Tech Stack [DOTS]). Each voxel is rendered through a process called raymarching, which gives us a lot of freedom to implement complex and dynamic effects while rendering large dynamic scenes without taking a massive hit to performance.
All objects and characters, including items, walls, conveyors and colonists are created by very talented voxel artists in the MagicaVoxel editor and then added to the game. The terrain on our 2D height map is dynamically generated, however: for each of the various biomes (for example grasslands, forests, deserts and so on) we specify a few different color palettes and the type of resources, trees and fauna that can spawn on it.
Although it is a cliche by now to say so, we really want the planet of Aurora to be its own character in our game – a living, breathing, beautiful and also very dangerous world that both shapes your experience and is shaped by you. For example, being huge fans of games like MGS Snake Eater or Ghost of Tsushima, we decided early on to add to the atmosphere by including grass, plants and trees that are not just simply there but affected by forces like wind, fire or player actions. To increase the interactivity of our world even more, we also plan on adding a grid-based terraforming system that will allow you to dramatically change the surface of Aurora.
Build and Destroy
One of the main features that sets Dawn Apart, well, apart from other colony sims and automation games is our enhanced destruction engine: each object that you encounter can be pulverized down to the last voxel. We can't really share more details on in-game events yet, but the interactions with both the native humanoid alien race inhabiting Aurora and your contractor, the Kobayashi-Schwarz Corporation, can ultimately lead to a partial or total destruction of the planet.
Here we took great inspiration from Teardown where voxels can have their own physical properties. Essentially we parse out the physical material type based on certain criteria. For static objects this affects how incoming damage fractures the object. For example, if a shot from a laser gun hits a wood voxel it should break and burn through it, causing other flammable voxels to catch fire, while if it hits a very heavy metal it might die and just visually heat up that voxel instead.
To be more specific: Each voxel physical type has a set interaction with a damage type and also a modifier for how much force it takes to interact with it. In the case of fracturing we dynamically calculate, among other things, the total mass and volume based on the physical type of each voxel that makes up the debris and send it on its way. In short: While we still have to put in a lot of work, we're sure the destruction feature will be truly awe-inspiring, so please stay tuned!
Also in case you haven't done so yet, please wishlist and join our Discord server – we have a very cool lore section on there where you can learn more about the history of your contractor, the dodgy Kobayashi-Schwarz Corporation, as well as polls where you can actively shape certain aspects of the game.