Welcome back, kind followers, to the dev blog/newsletter that each week gives you front row-seats for watching the making of Dawn Apart. In this edition of Weekly Apart we want to give you an update on our upcoming demo. Tldr: It's coming along nicely!
While we can't share a launch date yet (it will definitely come out sometime this summer), we do want to give you an update on all those small and big boxes that we ticked on our Miro board in the past weeks and months, each one moving us closer to our goal of giving our first adopters finally something to play!
But before sharing what we've been working on, once again the weekly reminder to follow us on our socials and specifically to join our Discord server. While we eventually are going to give the demo to all interested Steam users, our Discord followers will have dibs on setting their feet on Aurora and set up sprawling factory complexes there first!
On a side note: We were actually able to pick up the pace, not least because in early May we received reinforcements in the form of a very talented developer who has joined our team as a full time dev working from Portugal. Our game, it turns out, has morphed into a truly transnational endeavour with dev duties equally shared between Berlin, Portland and Porto.
Anyway, in no particular order here are the most exciting features that we were able to implement since laser focusing on delivering a demo:
- Basic Ranged Attacks and shooting animations
Pioneers can get drafted and commanded to engage in shootouts with enemies. Turrets can be placed that fire automatically on everything that moves.
- Smart Feeders
Feeders/cranes that pick up resources from conveyor belts and place them into machines or stockpiles (and vice versa) can now be programmed into selecting up to four specific items
- Adding the It'ak
We have received various credible reports of It'ak sightings, Aurora's mysterious indigenous humanoid alien lifeform. We can confirm that you are likely to spot them in the upcoming demo as well.
- Event Modal System
Receive a steady stream of messages, events and quests via a top left button in the GUI, that you can scroll through, filter and sort by date.
- (Visualized) Agent Pathing
Engineers and space marines now move smartly from point A to B avoiding roadblocks and finding the fastest way. Their planned route is also visualized by a green line.
- Stockpile System
Store your precious resources in warehouses in stockpiles to steadily increase your sphere of influence on Aurora. The storage capacity of a stockpile is limited by the number of tiles and slots available. Each tile contains four slots that can hold up to 100 pieces of the same item, for a total of 400 items per tile. To expand the storage capacity of a stockpile, players can add more tiles vertically and horizontally, but this requires additional energy consumption costs.
- Agent Goals
The Kobayashi-Schwarz contractors roam the planet freely, establish a daily routine and engage in fun extracurricular activities, including felling towering alien trees to get the resources needed for expansion; hitting those comfy bunk beds for a well-deserved cosmic siesta or preparing tasty meals for your colony's canteen
- Overhauling our interfaces
We gave our UI a much-needed facelift by adding and updating panels, screens, as well as GUI buttons.
- Speech system
Animated Pioneers tell you in a detailed view what has been on their mind lately along with a more detailed profile of his or her look and personal stats including their weapon/item loadout as well as an status update detailing sleeping, eating, health and bathroom habits over the last 12 in-game hours.
- Workbench system
Deliver resources to workbenches and have pioneers craft amazing stuff according to specific recipes!
As you can see some of those aspects we already discussed in depth in previous posts, while we may further explain other systems in upcoming newsletters. We know that reading that stuff is not nearly as fun as actually playing the demo but we hope this keeps you excited until we let you download a playable build - we can’t wait to hear what you think! See you next week!