Welcome to another installment of Weekly Apart! You may have noticed that this week we don't address you as Pioneers anymore. This is actually a deliberate choice as we did a little market research and found out there are way too many games on Steam with 'Pioneers' either in the title or in their lore.
That's why we asked our trusted Discord community which name they'd prefer and collectively decided to use 'Prospectors' in the future (to be fair there is an upcoming sci-fi game which also uses the term but who knows if and when it comes out:)
This name change actually is part of a greater refinement of Dawn Apart's (purely optional) lore, specifically that of the Kobayashi-Schwarz, the interstellar mining megacorp. that sends you to the planet Aurora to set up a flourishing Lucrum mining business. So while one part of the team was busy fixing AI bugs - like stopping Prospectors from blindly walking into fire and then running through the compound like a human torch burning down the whole colony in the process (see GIF above) - the other half redesigned the corporate identity of KS.
A fresh coat of paint
The first step was to create a new company logo including an accompanying font. We had already decided on red and white being the primary colors of all 'Assets' belonging to Kobayashi-Schwarz (that includes spacecraft, machines, and, yes, employees or Prospectors). Red, a color that regularly signals evil, represents KS's ambition, aggression, and power, while white is usually chosen by companies to symbolize purity, innocence and simplicity, yet often involuntarily conveys a certain coldness.
For the logo we opted for a shape that mixes triangular and square elements which combined not only evoke mountains, rocks, and mining but also aggression and a militant attitude. Overall, in combination with the new font (spectrashell) we went for imagery that is assertive, powerful and solid rather than fluid.
We want you!
We tried to nail the tonality and bring it all together in the form of a recruiting poster above. In order to attract engineers and fortune hunters KS launched the "Prospector" scholarship program, a tax-exempt charity designed to give impoverished youth the chance to travel through the galaxy and work on distant planets - think of the Peace Corps but with ulterior motives.
What do you think of our new art and lore direction? Let us know in the comments or become an official Prospector by entering the Glass Factory on our Discord server and get development and art updates in real time. See you next time!