Continuing on from last week’s post about Community-driven development on TerraTech Worlds, we wanted to share some recent changes we’ve been making to the Tech Yard!
The Tech Yard is an integral part of TerraTech Worlds: it’s your home base, where you’ll return to again and again after a tough day of pew-pew’ing enemy Techs and narrowly avoiding being crushed by falling trees. We weren’t 100% happy with the version of the Tech Yard that you would have seen in the Next Fest demo, and so we’ve been working on changing it based both on player feedback and our internal test sessions.
Here’s a look at some of the initial concepts we’ve been exploring, focused around portability and projection (the first image shows some original concepts we had for the Tech Yard’s new holographic function, whilst the second shows the Tech Yard in its ‘stored’ state–please note that both of these designs have since been iterated on and that the Tech Yard will look closer to the screenshot you can see a little further down this page!):
TerraTech Worlds’ Principal Designer Andy Harmon explains some of the thought process behind the recent development work on the Tech Yard:
“The design changes to the Tech Yard have been focused around 2 main ideas:
1. ‘The (current) Tech Yard requires too much work and infrastructure to use.’
2. ‘The Tech Yard is an important structure and it needs to grow in importance as the player progresses.’
First, we’re going to make the Tech Yard a ‘true’ structure, one that’s functionality isn’t dependent on putting down ramps. This new Tech Yard will still have an ‘active’ area as before, but that area will now be a virtual space adjacent to (and projected by) the Tech Yard. This will project on terrain or platforms, and will be easier to interact with. Next, we looked at the progression of the Tech Yard and the features around it that we still want to explore and expand on. The Tech Yard in the demo was functional but not as identifiable/distinct as we wanted it to be, and the experience of upgrading the Tech Yard with more storage and further upgrades wasn’t what we were really looking for.”
This piece of concept art shows what we’ve currently settled on, with the blue beam being the ‘active’ projection area that Principal Designer Andy talked about above. No more needing to build a ramp and carefully drive up it to restore any lost Restore Charges!
And this is how it looks in-game:
Let us know what you think of these new changes/ideas in the comments below: we’re always keen to hear your thoughts in the lead-up to Early Access. And remember to wishlist us over on the Steam Store page if you haven’t already, to stay up-to-date with all the latest news about Early Access!
Until next time!