It’s been a busy month of work on Predestination! We’ve fixed dozens of bugs and crashes since releasing the tutorial, and have been working hard on our last remaining big features before launch. We’re now at Version 0.9.0.0 and making solid regular progress toward release. This month we developed some big core features like the evil Revenant race, temporal rifts that appear throughout the game and spit out ships, and of course the first release of our building models. We’ve also revamped the Space Exploration era technology trees, added several new ship modules and weapons, implemented warp-capable missiles and customisable probes, and laid the ground work for fully customisable player-designed space stations.
Head over to the full dev update post on our official website for a detailed breakdown of this month’s biggest developments on Predestination, or read on for a brief summary and some screenshots of this month's work.
Throughout the game, new temporal rifts will continue to open and deposit more ships, debris, and technology from the battle with the Revenants into your galaxy. If you’re lucky, they will deposit working ships belonging to your race, pieces of advanced technology, or escape pods containing legendary ship captains. If you’re not so lucky, enemy ships could emerge or even a few of the Revenants themselves, who will head to the nearest planet and attack.
Rifts will begin to appear in the Space Exploration era and can only be seen when they’re in sensor range of your colonies. If you have the Astonomical Survey technology, you’ll be able to detect a temporal rift a few turns before it opens, giving you the opportunity to send your own ships to investigate. Whoever has ships at a rift when it opens will investigate it abd get all of the rewards from it, but also shoulders all of the risk. This feature has been completed, but has been temporarily disabled while we test balance and add some more positive outcomes for investigating rifts. We expect to re-activate it in about a week.
We have added the Revenants as a race in the game along with a series of Revenant-only technologies. Once we enable the temporal rifts feature, fleets of powerful Revenant ships will sometimes emerge and attack the nearest habitable planet. If that happens to be your planet, you’ll get a transmission from the Revenants warning that they’re coming to destroy you. We decided to preserve the mystery of the revenants by keeping them as shadowy figures, and their background graphics are filled with lightning and obscured by static and darkness.
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One of the questions we get asked most frequently is when the building models will be added. We’ve been using coloured hexes (like the one in the center of the screenshot below) as placeholders to represent our buildings for most of development while our 3D modeler and art director have been getting the models made. While we haven’t completed all of the buildings yet, we decided to release those that we’ve already finished in order to collect feedback as early as possible. Some important buildings like the Factory, Metal Silo and Research lab are being finished off as I write this, and we’ll be deploying each new model as it’s finished.
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With the addition of the new weapons in this patch, we streamlined the Ground Cannon, Missile Base and Fighter Garrison buildings to always use your best available weapons. Below is a screnshot of a military city with a Class II City Shield, missile bases, ground cannons, a fighter garrison and a lot of energy batteries to power them all.
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One of the big tactical weapons we had originally designed for Predestination was a series of warp-capable missiles that can fly to an enemy planet and bombard it if the planet is unprotected. We have now implemented this in a more friendly way by adding the “Warp Missile” hull in the 3D ship designer so that players can now design their own warp-capable missiles. Each missile can carry up to 50MW of weaponry and are limited to using only bombs, and they die immediately on bombing an enemy planet. Warp Missiles cost money and metal to build but don’t take up any command points so there’s no limit to how many you can stockpile. You can also design unmanned probes for exploration.
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We added a series of new weapons and technologies to the game with this update, which is too long to go into in this announcement. Head over to the full blog post on our official website for a full run-down of the new tech.
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We plan to add player-designed starbases in the near future, so to prepare for this we’ve revamped the Construction tech tree. We've replaced the specialised Shipyard Starbase, Mining Starbase and Research Starbase with a series of starbase bay modules that can only be added to starbases.
You shouldn’t notice much of a difference in gameplay, but under the hood it’s all working differently. All of the stats that used to be part of the starbase’s building are now provided by separate modules, which means we can introduce player-designed starbases pretty easily in a future update. Head over to the full blog post on our official website for a full rundown of the new starbase modules.
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I'd like to give a huge thanks to everyone for reading this development update, and as usual please do give us your feedback on everything here and feedback from playing Version 0.9.0.0, which is now live on Steam Early Access. We’ve promised to take a few days off over the holidays to relax, but we still plan to release minor patches to add new building models and fix any bugs that pop up. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the crash reports, so please keep sending those in! Development will ramp up yet again as we head into the new year, and 2016 will be the year of Predestination!
— Brendan, Lead Developer