Hey, Today we will talk about Update 0.9.0 and the stuff that we did in the past 2 weeks. I will also introduce you to the planned Moon gameplay (how it all will work), and mention EarthX 2 at the end too.

To the Moon! Update 0.9.0

As you know, the latest update was 0.3.3; So why not make 0.3.4 now? That's because 0.9.0 will be the last content update before we fully release the game on Steam. But don't worry! There will still be bug fixes from time to time as needed. I told you that 0.9.0 would release in late 2021, but the plans did change. I had a lot of time and motivation in the past two weeks, and I also got pretty much all models from rykllan and Lucas. That allowed me to work on EarthX almost every day since the last teaser. The update now aims to release in October or November. After 0.9.0, we plan to release a series of regular patches that improve the game and fix the bugs. In one of them, I will rework the tutorial a little (add subtitles, etc.) and record it again with Karolina. This time, amateurs like Adrian and me will not touch the files anymore trying to improve the quality in Audacity. We will handle the job to professionalist SPATE, who knows sound mixing from the bottom to top very well.

Do you have any more of them... update progress?

Of course, I have. rykllan worked very hard on his new Superheavy and Starship models. They look great and now all vehicles in the game are in similar detail/style (Medium Poly).
As you can see, there's a new LaunchPad with Mechazilla (catching arms) on the tower. It's made by Lucas and he did a great job!
The Superheavy and Tower of course got their new catching animation. It's not possible to upload videos on Steam, that's why you will be able to find a WIP catching demo on Streamable under this link: https://streamable.com/ctazn0 To my surprise, rykllan also made two new Droneship models. Refreshed OCISLY and ASOG. ASOG will not be added to EarthX because I don't want to rewrite Droneship scripts to support more types, but I did replace the current Droneship model.
(new vs old) I also re-added Fairing payloads.

Moon

I'm writing this here because I saw some players expecting Moon gameplay to look like Mars gameplay (colony/terraforming). I want to lower your expectations, because if I do Moon like Mars, then Mars would get boring. EarthX has been always about Mars and I will let it be that way.
The Moon gameplay will be relatively simple. You will be able to fly to the Moon and build buildings on it (Solar/Small Habitats/Landing Zones only). The Moonbase size will be limited, as you will not be able to produce Moon Materials by yourself. The plan is to add an Artemis-like contract, that will give you a dozen Moon Material payloads that you can launch to the Moon. Landing humans on the Moon will be required to unlock Crew Spaceship, however, you can completely ignore Moon-gameplay if you want to build a non-human city on Mars. I don't know yet if that's a good idea, but I will validate it during testing. All of this means that on the Moon, only Moon Materials will matter. You will not have to worry about Oxygen or Water, as these features are reserved for Mars as I mentioned earlier.
That's it for EarthX progress so far. I still need to design & script a few features, but I'm starting to finish and polish everything.

EarthX 2

I have got a few questions about this project and I want to answer some of them.
EarthX 2 is currently during the very early planning phase and we're just taking notes of what works and what could work. We didn't start any work on it yet, except low-quality concept arts that were made for fun. The game is set to release in 2024+ without early Early Access as we did with EarthX. There will be Early Access about 3 months prior to game release. But don't worry, we will not be silent for 3 years. The development of this game will be fairly open. We will post monthly devlogs on Steam and do closed tests from time to time to gather some feedback. I got some questions about what EarthX 2 will be about. I don't want to talk about it yet, but I will say stuff I said on our Discord server:

• It will be pretty much like EarthX, but with deeper mechanics and more content. For example, there will be individual countries, the scale will be 1:1, and the time will be calendar-based.
• While EarthX is only about SpaceX, the sequel will also include Tesla.
• Mod support wasn't quite possible in EarthX because the game wasn't built for that. EarthX 2 will be made with mod support in mind from the ground up. You will be happy.

That's it for now, I will talk more about this project after EarthX's Steam Full Release. Can't wait! Have a good weekend everyone :) Denis

[ 2021-09-10 13:02:03 CET ] [ Original post ]