At this point it doesn’t look like we are going to get the update out in May or the full release in June. Instead of a vague delay notice I wanted to try to explain where we are in development and what problems we are facing. There were 3 major upgrades decided and 2 major problems because of them: Upgrade DOG animations and provide an informational 3D HUD – Complete. Break up the levels and stream them – Complete but caused April’s update to be delayed. Upgrade Androids animations and AI – Complete but has a bug straight out of hell.

Reason for the changes

The original idea was for these monitors to carry a lot of the backstory:
The problem with this is a lot of the concepts just can’t be explained on a 2D flipboard monitor. One of the big ones was the purpose of the skylift. It isn’t just an elevator but a generator. When it is night (farthest side from the sun) the skylift payload has the gravity from both the planet and the sun so it “falls”. When you swing back around the gravity from the sun pulls the weight back out into space. They are essentially harvesting energy from the rotation of the planet. They then use the energy from this skylift (and 1000s of others on Mars) in an attempt to reignite the planets core. This is why they are having all the earth quakes. Explaining how the stutter assembler collapses wave functions on a quantum level is another big one. Because of this we decided it would be best to revamp the environments as well as the android animations With more freedom to edit the environments we were able to make that information a lot more optional. You won’t be confined to long hallways of dialog anymore but instead you’ll have the option to go check out the communications room or Laboratory and see what the androids are working on.

Environments:

The levels are now broken into much smaller chunks that are streamed as you play. This allows us to create much more complex scenes because it decreases the time it takes to build the lighting. To give you an idea the first level in the current build contains the base, surface, and mine. Building lighting for the map alone takes about 16 hours. Lighting has to build if any static mesh is moved or edited. The current version splits it into 3 levels with the base taking 6 minutes to build lighting, the surface taking 6 hours, and the mine taking 3 minutes. The load times to start the game are also drastically decreased. Problem with Environments The original idea was to release an update each month regardless of how much or little progress was made. Splitting the levels completely broke this because they all needed to be stitched back together.

Animations

To do this we added almost 100 additional animations to the androids and completely redesigned the animation blueprint used. This allows for much more diverse actions and movements that are a lot more fluid. Whether working at a station or pointing out an area of interest the Androids should be a lot more immersive. Problem with animations You’ll notice the android model is not that same. Mid-April we started consolidating these animations and producing a blueprint to handle all of them. Those assets were then migrated into the main project thus creating the saga of a very elusive bug. We haven’t been able to nail down exactly what is causing it mainly because of the nature of these animations. They aren’t compiled so the debugger is useless. The “Android_C” (the character you know as Android) compiles without any errors, warnings, or indications. On top of that the errors don’t present themselves in the editor or in a stand-alone build of the game but only the published version. That’s why we didn’t catch it until recently.

Conclusion

Because of this we are going to push the release date into August. It is still possible we’ll be able to get this latest update out this month and I’ll update this post once we get the kinks worked out. I know that Steam Early Access games don’t have the best track record for completion. Because of that I wanted to try to explain exactly what the situation is both out of respect for your support but also because it’s very hard that we haven’t been able to share our progress with you. I believed in this project from day 1 and I still do. Rest assured that even if there are hiccups in development we are still 100% committed. Lastly (and as always), we love to get your feedback in the comments regardless of whether it’s good or bad but if you want a response please start a thread in the forums. It gets very messy very quickly to try to respond inside the announcement. Thank you again for the support and feedback, ːionizedgamesː

Update May 26:

The project has been successfully purged of all the contaminated assets. The Android has been completely rebuilt and is working perfectly. Next step is to carefully bring the animation assets back in and rebuild the animation blueprint.

Update June 1:

Rebuilding materials for Android so his face flashes when he talks. We've tried to "tie" it to the amplitude of the audio file so it's timed up correctly with his speech. Unfortunately we've yet to find a way to reference .wav files for amplitude. More to come.