It’s been two weeks and it looks like Steropes is comfortably holding its own in the brutal world of Hellion. Now that we’ve made sure that the ship is safe we are going to cover the exclusive “Phone Home” event that preceded the Steropes update and two very important aspects you can expect in the near future. So read on!
Several days ago, SETI began picking up strange readings coming from an unknown source. Analysis revealed that it was in fact a highly sophisticated radio signal coming from a star over a 1000 light years away. However, the initial excitement quickly turned into confusion the moment scientists managed to decipher the first message… It only said: “Hey, what’s up guys? Peace out!” As puzzling as this message was it was nowhere near as crazy as some of the other things that followed:
“Halp! Epiktetus kitten need halp!”, “Send Sausages!!”, “Could I have a cheese sandwich?”, “42”, “And as always don’t let Clang get your wang!”, “Who put a Boston Terrier on the ship?”
The only conclusion the best and brightest minds at NASA managed to come up with was that the messages arrived from the future, warped by the GW170814 gravitational wave.
Phone Home Event
As some of you may know, we held an exclusive event on May 16th. This event, nicknamed “Phone Home”, had players look for a source of a mysterious signal that was broadcast throughout the Hellion system. Finding it wasn’t easy as the bits and pieces of info they received were scarce and scattered across the system. The final set of coordinates ultimately brought them to the Actaeon 34, a survey probe who’s original message identified Hellion as the most promising colonization candidate. Since the probe was dormant for over a century, Hellion survivors had to reactivate it before they could send a message back to Earth.
Needless to say, the event was a success and those who played through it had a lot of fun. In case you haven’t had a chance to watch one of the many streams that covered the event here are two videos done by dear players Epiktek and BaronQuertier. Enjoy their fabulous videos!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRvZBlVS0so
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hc6Lxb0wtYA
Story implementation
Original idea behind the Phone Home event was to use it as a “test run” of sorts for the implementation of Hellion’s background story and see how the community would react. The overwhelming amount of positive feedback was all the confirmation we needed for us to start considering a proper “quest” mechanic for Hellion. Now we know what some of you might be thinking. Quests in a survival game? Doesn’t that belong in an RPG or something? While this may be true, there is nothing saying that a space simulation with survival elements can’t have a proper story to accompany its gameplay and a system of quests to guide players through it. Afterall, we want to build an exceptional gaming experience and nothing less will suffice.
Up until now players only had limited access to story information from our website and several devblogs. But Hellion is a game, not a novel and having to browse the internet for lore elements or read through several pages of text is not a very immersive way to tell the story about the largest disaster in human history. The system required for this is still in early stages, but many of you will be happy to know that the first task of this “objective based quest system” will be to create a proper tutorial section at the start of the game.
Still the main purpose of it will be to tell the story of the “Expedition project” and provide players with a set of goals and objectives to strive for. Its second task will be to give players a sense of progress and accomplishment and award them with unique items and upgrades. And this leads us to our next topic.
Singleplayer mode
You know how programmers are somewhat crazy, right? And you can’t always tell what they are doing, especially if it’s part of their home project? Well, one of our programmers decided to add a “singleplayer mode” to Hellion so he could test various things faster and easier. As it turns out it was rather effective, so much in fact, that we’ve decided to adjust it and add it to the game.
So once you’ve selected the singleplayer option from the main menu the game will create an instance of a local server on your machine and connect you automatically. You will then have a choice between two game modes: normal and sandbox.
Normal mode is essentially identical to the online experience minus the other players and comes with the “gamer’s favourite” save/load system, while the sandbox mode also adds all dev commands into the mix. As you might imagine being invulnerable, able to teleport, spawn modules, ships and items or refuel and dock instantly can come in very handy when you want to test that station layout you were planning on building.
So that’s all for today’s devblog. You can expect the singleplayer mode to land near the end of June, along with several other fixes and improvements (that will not require a server wipe). Quest system is still in very early prototype stages and it will probably be quite some time until we are ready to deploy it in full.
Until next time keep looking at the sky and call NASA to finally send those sausages!
Zero Gravity team