Greetings, scientists!

May is over, and with it comes our Dev Log for the month! We’re really excited to share the progress we’ve made this month with you. So grab a seat, a nice cup of coffee, and let’s jump in!

This month we focused heavily on expanding the game’s current features, and polishing it in preparation for the next steps of development. This included expanding the current map’s terrain (we may or may not be looking into procedural terrain options ;) ), releasing tooltips in the mining UI to provide more information, and a major lighting overhaul that required us to completely rework the way the scenes are built into the game. But, let’s jump into those new features shall we?

Terrain Expansion:

As mentioned, we expanded the terrain greatly, and now the players will have 9 times as much terrain to explore and build on! This includes more variations in the terrain (including mountains and dunes), and more constructible terrain: The hex grid we showed off last month will be generated all the way to the edge of the map.

To accommodate such an expansion, we adjusted the camera: It now has more zoom levels for you to admire your base and assess your next production lines!

Tooltips and Highlights:

A lot of time was spent expanding and refreshing the highlights and tooltips in LithoBreak. The biggest one being, you are finally able to show multiple tooltips on screen simultaneously! This allows you to compare the input/output for multiple buildings and makes it easier to set production lines, or plan your next mining operation.

From a developer standpoint, we reworked the tooltips to be easier to implement and maintain in the long run, meaning we can expand or change them quickly and efficiently.

To be able to do so however, we will need your feedback! It will be crucial to let us know what needs changed or where more context is needed. You’ll get a chance to help us out in our upcoming Closed Beta! But more information on that later. ;)

Lighting Update:

The lighting for the entire station has been overhauled. This not only improves the game graphically to provide a much more thematic experience depending on which room the player is in, but also provides a huge performance boost. We shifted our internal workflow for using lights, allowing more flexibility in setting lighting sources up, and a more stable framerate while exploring the space station.

That’s a wrap for this month everyone! The feature rework and polishing we focused on will allow us to have a much more stable platform for the next steps of our development, meaning a lot more changes coming in the upcoming months. Stay tuned on Discord, and keep your ears open, the upcoming closed beta is rapidly approaching, scientists!

Catch you in the Verse,

Tau Ceti Labs