Over the past few months, we’ve been designing Predestination’s main races and working on core gameplay mechanics like ship design, tactical combat, galaxy generation, and planetary colonisation. A lot of really cool features are now in the game, but it’s difficult to show how they work without a user interface, so this month we’ve been working on building a solid UI framework into the game engine and rolling it out on the galaxy map screen.

Our goal for the Galaxy Map is to make it look and feel like an advanced astrometrics lab, with all of  the information your race has about the galaxy at your fingertips. We want you to be able to do most of your turn-to-turn empire management without leaving this screen, and to be able to immediately tell what’s going on in the galaxy by keeping an eye on the map. When designing the Galaxy Map interface, we had a few rules in mind:

• Every window or information pane should have a specific place in the UI, so that your screen doesn’t become a mess of open windows.
• The player shouldn’t be overwhelmed with information. Information should only appear when necessary and text should be kept to a minimum.
• The UI must be scaleable and easy for players to mod.
• Every UI element has to have a smooth animation or transition and a corresponding audio cue. The audio is not currently in the game, but placeholder cues have been inserted into the code for every action.

Dev update video:

Feedback:

We’re still finishing up parts of the galaxy map UI, such as the quick fleet movement and mini-map, and will then begin rolling out the new UI framework into the planetary colonisation and tactical ship combat parts of the game. Head over to the official UI feedback thread to let us know what you think of the UI so far, and to let us know ideas you have for the UI or problems you’ve noticed in other 4X game UIs that you’d like us to avoid.

Cheers!

– Brendan, Lead Developer

April is over and development on Predestination is going well. This month we completed the internal workings for the ship design and weapon technology systems, finished hooking the tactical combat system into the main game and tidied that system up. We implemented tons of your ideas into the ship combat system, like smart-missiles that deploy mines around the target, weapons that fire clouds of charged plasma, and deployable minefields for planet defense. Thanks so much for all of your great ideas and feedback!

Character artist Connor Murphy has finished our final core race (the yet-to-be-named Aquatic race) and completed a fantastic visual reboot of our first robotic race, The Starforged. You can see the new artwork for both races below! We’ve also been working with Connor on figuring out the best way to approach the backer-sponsored race artwork.

Based on your feedback, Connor has already started to revamp the feline race we showed in last month’s update with more realistic artwork that matches the rest of the game’s visual style, and I think you’ll be pleased with the results when it’s finished. Once that’s finished, we’ll be in touch with all of our race designer backers to get started on getting them into the game.

The yet-to-be-named Aquatics are our sixth and final core race apart from the backer races, and we’d love to hear your ideas on what they should be like in-game. We see them as aggressive militarists who see ownership of every ocean planet in the galaxy as their sovereign right. We see them as a dictatorship that interacts with other races through intimidation and military threat more than diplomacy. Industry and research would probably take a hit from working under water, but their natural hunting instincts would make them excellent ship pilots.

The Aquatic race will definitely start the game with some kind of mech suit that grants bonuses to ground combat, as they needed this technology to achieve space flight and interact with other races. They are just as at-home on Terran planets as Ocean, but would probably actively flood Terran worlds to make them less useful to other races. They may also have developed technology that can thaw out a tundra planet by injecting radioactive elements into the planet’s core and flooding the atmosphere with greenhouse gases.

Rather than deciding on the race’s abilities and name ourselves, we’ve decided to open the Aquatics up to the community! We’d love to hear your suggestions for a name for this race, stats or traits you think they should have, and any special technologies they should start with. We’d also love to hear your ideas on what technologies and special traits you’d like all aquatic races in Predestination to have. Leave a comment here or head over to the aquatic race feedback thread on the forum and let us know what you think! We’ll publish a full race reveal in two week’s time when we’ve picked our favourite suggestions!

Above is the rebooted artwork for The Starforged, the first race we revealed during the Kickstarter campaign. Connor felt that the art needed an update to match the visual quality of newer races like the Sauros, and I think he’s done an amazing job on the reboot. The Starforged soldier unit is on the left, the scientist is in the middle, and the worker/civilian robot is on the right. We’ve nicknamed the worker the “Espresso machine”

Combat resolution: One of the things we implemented this month was the combat resolution system that decides when fights happen and what the battlefield looks like. Fleets in Predestination move in FTL once per turn and only meet each other at destinations like stars and temporal rifts. When two fleets meet, both players can select from four courses of action and the combination of options selected determines what happens:

• Attack Planet: Attempt to attack a selected enemy planet in the system. The enemy must have a planet in the system for this option to be highlighted. You start on one side of the battlefield, and the enemy planet is visible in the background on the other side. Planetary defences like starbases and orbital cannons are automatically placed on the enemy side.
• Defend: This puts your fleet into a defensive posture and does not engage the enemy fleet. If the enemy fleet selects to attack a planet in the system that you own, your fleet automatically defends that planet and is included in the combat against that planet.
• Intercept: Attempts to intercept the enemy fleet early and engage. If the enemy fleet selects Attack a planet, this option will instead engage the enemy in open space (no planet bonuses). If the enemy fleet selects to Defend, there’s a 50% chance that you’ll catch them in open space and start combat and a 50% chance that no combat will happen at all.
• Retreat: Attempts to retreat and set course to the nearest friendly star system. If the enemy fleet selects the Intercept option, there’s a 50% chance of catching your fleet and beginning combat in open space and a 50% chance they get away safely.

Battlefield generation: The battlefield will now take into account the star system you’re in. Battles in systems with asteroid belts are likely to take place inside the belt, while battles inside a nebula will be filled with nebular gas clouds. Battles over a planet will also display the planet in the background behind the defending fleet, and orbital cannons and starbases will be placed on the battlefield.

We have a few more ideas up our sleeves for more natural battlefield modifiers, like pirate hideouts in a system or even space monsters interrupting your battle! The battlefield size will also scale up with the number of ships involved and the maximum range of the ships involved. This way every battle will start with the opposing fleets placed between one and two turns worth of movement away from each other. This should stop snipers from dominating as nobody will be in range to fire on the first round.

Ship placement round: Before each combat begins, you’ll place your ships and structures on the battlefield. We plan to make it possible to pre-design a layout and save it with your fleet for future battles, but right now that feature is not implemented. Battles in orbit of a planet will have starbases and orbital cannons in fixed positions if the planet has built them. Researchable technologies will also add deployables like mine fields, shield bubbles, cloaking fields and nebulae so you can come up with a clever strategy for system defense and design your ships around them. The ship placement phase is a blind phase, so you don’t know where the enemy has placed his ships or structures until you submit your layout. Think of this like setting up a chess board, except you get to decide where each piece goes.

First combat round: The first round of combat after placing ships in Predestination will be mostly movement. The longest-range ships will not be in firing range of the enemy fleet yet; missiles and drones can be fired but will take at least two turns to reach the enemy. This lets you set up strategic positioning to counter the enemy’s selected fleet layout. For example, you may notice that the enemy has laid a minefield in front of its snipers and decide to send ships around the side to avoid them.

The rest of the combat: The player’s and enemy’s ships will will take turns as usual for the rest of the game, like a game of chess where each move is a reaction to the other player’s. For example, the enemy may fire missiles at your large battleship and you may move some point defense frigates into positions where they can shoot down the missiles. Combat ends when all of one side’s ships have been eliminated or are no longer on the battlefield. Ships can retreat at any time during the battle by activating the Warp Drive module (built into all ships). This has a charge-up time of one full round, making the ship leave the battlefield on its next turn.

We’ve been working on a lot of the core planetary and fleet combat code of Predestination so far, but it’s difficult to show off interesting ship weapons or galactic exploration without a good user interface. The next step for us is to work really hard on those user interfaces and get as many of them into the game this month as possible. As a side-effect, we’ll be able to show you more of our progress in videos and live demos, giving a clearer impression of how the game will actually play when it’s finished.

So far we’ve focused on trying to put together one big monthly update for our Kickstarter backers and fans following the Predestination development blog. We’re doing a lot of work steadily throughout the month but then trying to cram it all into one roundup article like this or a race reveal post. We’ve had a few requests from backers for more frequent updates and more community engagement, so I wanted to put this question out to the community. Would you like to see more frequent updates containing earlier work-in-progress artwork, game development, user interfaces, buildings etc? Our options are essentially:

• Monthly updates: One big update every month summarising that month’s progress (like this post).
• Frequent updates: Posting early work-in-progress artwork, buildings, gameplay and user interfaces separately with just a few lines or paragraphs of text explaining each one.
• Both: Do the smaller updates, and then summarise them each month in a smaller roundup article on the blog and Kickstarter.

We’d love to start doing more frequent updates if that’s what the community wants. The updates would be a lot more rough and subject to change, but it would let us collect feedback earlier in the development process. Please let us know in the comments or head over to the official update poll on the forum and vote!

Cheers,

– Brendan, Lead Developer

The past month has been jam-packed for the Predestination crew. We made a lot of progress with the fleet combat part of the game, designed our first reptilian race (The Sauros), and hosted work experience weeks for two students aiming for careers in the games industry. We also moved to a new house with more office space to work in and applied for some government funding to help your pledges stretch further.

Update notes for fleet combat:

• Added projectile weapons such as mass drivers, with their own graphical effects.
• Added dumb missiles that travel to the target hex and explode, or explode early if they enter a hex with another ship or object in it.
• Implemented smart missile AI that locks onto a ship and follows it, avoiding obstacles.
• Added interceptors. They use the smart missile AI and attack the target ship every turn until destroyed.
• Implemented area-effect weapons (smartbombs, area missiles).
• Implemented proximity mines and cloaked proximity mines.
• Created some basic explosion effects with screen shake, and a timing system to synch explosion graphics and screen shake with sound effect volume.
• Implemented a module system that lets us create interesting non-weapon ship technologies. Modules added so far include: Holographic Projector Matrix (creates decoy holographic ships), Afterburner (double movement for one round, then takes a round to recharge), Shield booster (consumes movement points to boost shield hitpoints), Cloaking device (ship is invisible until its next turn, but then takes a round to recharge).
• Fleets can now engage each other in the galaxy view, which switches to the fleet battle screen.
• Ships can now retreat from combat. They will wait for one full round without moving or attacking and then warp out.
• Combat now detects the winner when one side’s ships are all destroyed or warp out.
• Ships destroyed in combat are now removed from the galaxy view.

Dozens of backers have now given us their ideas for interesting weapons and ship modules over at the Predestination Community forum. If you have any ideas, feel free to post them in the official fleet combat thread!

Kickstarter Backer Reward Update:

As part of the Kickstarter campaign, many people selected rewards such as your own custom-designed commander, missile, building, singleplayer level or core game race. Almost everyone has now submitted their commander and missile ideas, and our race and level designers have let us know how they’d like to be contacted to discuss their ideas. We had hoped to get back to all of you by now to confirm your selections, but are unfortunately running a little behind schedule due to moving house.

Those of you who have submitted commander, missile, or building designs will be emailed by Tina soon to confirm that your designs are good to go. Level and race designers will be contacted personally to get a brief outline of their ideas, but don’t worry if you haven’t got much of an idea yet as we don’t need the full details just yet. If you wanted to upgrade your pledge for any of these rewards but missed the end of the campaign, you can upgrade your pledge at our Paypal Upgrade page or send us an email with your inquiry.

One of our big goals with Predestination is to help kickstart the Northern Ireland games industry and help emerging talent get into game development. With that in mind, we’ve spent part of this past month organising work experience weeks for students aiming to get into the industry. Our latest student was the extremely talented budding concept artist Nuala Mc Garry, who is already producing fantastic character art at the age of just 15.

In addition to giving Nuala some experience in the industry and advice on education paths, we were able to send her home with a new graphics tablet and an upgraded PC to help her continue developing her talents. This would not have been possible without all the support and pre-orders pledged through Kickstarter and Paypal. Your support has made a big difference to one talented young artist this month, and on her behalf we’d like to say thank you!

As part of her work experience, Nuala created her own race with unique concept art, technology and lore. They’re a species of intelligent feline humanoids whose culture revolves around entertainment and gadgets and treats fighter pilots and scientists as celebrities. The race isn’t named yet and we’d like to open that up to the community. If you have any name ideas or just want to give some feedback, please head over to the race’s official thread or leave a comment here on the blog!

Background Lore:

The [Suggest a name] are a feline humanoid race discovered on a Terran planet near the Human empire’s borders. It’s not known whether the species is natural or the result of genetic experimentation, but they predate the Human empire and have shown incredible intelligence and adaptability. Their society revolves around entertainment and research, with great technological accomplishments being spurred by competition to make the ultimate gadgets and televised sports.

The race to achieve space flight, break the lightspeed barrier, and colonise other worlds were all sponsored by entertainment megacorporations looking for the next big show. When first contact was made with the Humans, the event was televised across the homeworld and eventually led to an alliance between the two empires that persists to this day. Not to be underestimated, the [Suggest a name] have repelled several attempted invasions of their space by turning the war effort itself into a form of entertainment. Fighter pilots became celebrities overnight, and research labs competed to make flashier and more inventive defensive technologies.

When the Revenants were unleashed on the galaxy, the [Suggest a name] were the only race able to sometimes successfully evade the attacking ships. Using clever holographic modules to hide ships and project decoys into space, pilots were able to evacuate millions of citizens from colonised planets across the sector. It’s thanks to their efforts that so many ships survived to take part in the final battle with the Revenants. Now sent back in time, they seek to explore space, find their former allies, and develop technology that can stop the Revenants once and for all.

Possible race stats and abilities:

As a humanoid race, the [Suggest a name] are most at home on Terran worlds but can adapt to live in other environments. Their diminutive stature makes them poorly suited to ground combat, but quick reflexes makes them excellent fighter pilots. The celebrity status their society grants fighter pilots attracts a lot of legendary ship captains, and normal ship crew are more likely to achieve legendary acclaim following a successful battle. Their culture emphasises openness and honesty, increasing morale on all planets but making them vulnerable to spies. They also freely trade their entertainment programmes with allies, adding a free empire-wide morale boost to all trade agreements with other species.

Example stats: (not finalised, just to give an idea of the abilities we think they’ll have)

• +10% Morale On All Planets
• +2 Research Per Turn From Research Labs
• -20 Ground Combat Rating
• -10% Spy Mission Success Chance
• Cultural Traders: Your empire freely exchanges its culture and entertainment with other nations. Trade pacts with your empire increase global morale across both your empire and the empire you’re trading with by 10%. This effect can stack for each new race you establish trade agreements with, up to a maximum of 50%.
• Natural Fighter Pilots: Quick reflexes make your people natural fighter pilots who favour small hulls over larger ships. +50% beam and projectile defense on small and medium sized hulls, but -25% beam and projectile defense on larger ships.
• Legendary Pilots: Double the normal chance for a legendary ship captain to emerge following a successful fleet battle, and ship captains will cost half as much per turn to employ.

Possible starting technologies:

Each race starts the game with several advanced technologies that are either not available for research or can only normally be researched late in the game. Possible starting technologies for this race include:

• Camera Array (Ship module): An array of high-definition cameras are fitted inside and outside the ship, recording footage of fleet combat to be used as propaganda. If your fleet wins a battle with a ship carrying this module, all planets in your empire get +10% morale for 10 turns.
• Holographic projector (Ship module): Holographic projectors are hooked directly to the ship’s power core, allowing the ship to project fake versions of itself into space. This ship module can be activated in combat to split the ship in three, moving the real ship into one of the three hexes directly ahead and placing decoys in the remaining two hexes. Decoys last for one full round and are instantly destroyed if fired on, but are otherwise identical to the original ship.
• Cultural Hub (Building): You can only have one of this building in your entire empire. The city it’s built in becomes a huge cultural hub, completely eliminating all morale penalties on the planet. This allows higher taxation and prevents revolts and unrest.

Thanks for your feedback!

A huge thank you to everyone who has supported Predestination on Kickstarter or via Paypal, and a special thanks to fans who have contributed feedback on updates and shared their ideas on our forum. As always, we’re eagre to hear any feedback you have on this update or any ideas or questions you have relating to it. Head over to the official feedback thread or leave a comment on this post!

Cheers,

– Brendan, Lead Developer

The Sauros are Predestination’s first reptilian race! The race is composed of three distinct sub-species:

• The purple Monitor Sauros: The shamanistic ruling caste and diplomatic contacts for the empire. They are native to the desert regions of their home world and are worshiped as if they were gods.
• The white Albino Sauros: A rare breed possessing an immense intellect. They are native to desert regions and are responsible for all scientific discovery in the empire.
• The green Jungle Sauros: Have been selectively bred to be the perfect labourers and ground combatants. They are native to the jungles of their home world and make up the majority of the Saurosian population.

Background Lore:

The Saurosian Empire is one of the oldest and most feared cultures in the Predestination universe. The desert-dwelling ruling caste conquered the jungles of their homeworld, enslaving the primitive jungle race as a worker force and military army. In breeding massive slave armies, the Sauros soon overpopulated their home planet and were forced to expand into space. The empire slowly grew without interference for millennia, producing colossal armoured hulk ships and protecting its borders from intrusion.

The Sauros watched as other species emerged into space and began colonising the stars, but rejected all attempts at contact and co-habitation. No-one dared enter Saurosian space, and they liked it that way. When the Revenants were unleashed on the galaxy and started destroying their hatchery worlds, the empire finally broke its silence and led the younger races into war. But despite their advanced technology, even the ancient Saurosian hulks couldn’t stand against the Revenants.

At the final battle with the Revenants, the last surviving hulk was torn apart by temporal rifts and pulled back in time, crash-landing on a terran world. Now cut off from their empire, the Sauros have only a few scraps of advanced technology remaining and several technological relics whose secrets remain to be unlocked. The Sauros now aim to rebuild their civilisation and stop the younger races that might foolishly wake the Revenants again in the past.

(Sauros story trailer still to come)

Race stats and abilities:

As a reptilian race, the Sauros are at home on Desert worlds and have a penalty to living on Ocean and Tundra worlds. Military expansionists by nature, the Sauros have a bonus to armour hitpoints, ground combat and diplomatic intimidation. The species’ isolationist ways give them a large diplomatic penalty with other races, and their starting planet contains ancient artifacts left over from the crashed ship. Example stats for the Sauros are below: (Stats are not finalised but are intended to give a general idea of what we’re thinking of)

• +10% Armour Hitpoints
• +15 Ground Combat Rating
• +10 Intimidation (bonus to diplomatic extortion)
• -20 Diplomacy (penalty to friendly diplomacy)
• -50% Population Growth Rate
• Ancient Artifacts: Home world contains ancient artifact resources that increase research output. Once your race reaches a certain tech level, the artifact turns into a usable item.
• Low Metabolism: Population use half the normal amount of food per turn.

Sauros starting technologies: Each race starts the game with several advanced technologies. The Sauros start with a number of technologies left over from the crashed hulk ship:

• Assault shuttles: Armoured shuttles are fitted with shaped charges and fired at enemy ships. They pierce the enemy’s hull and deliver marines that try to capture the ship and kill its crew. Enemy shields must be down for the shuttles to penetrate.
• Reactive armour: An inert polymer is inserted between two layers of hull armour. Dissipates some of the impact energy from projectiles, increasing the effective toughness of the armour. Reduces damage from projectile weapons by 10%, and cannot be penetrated by assault shuttles unless the hull is exposed (armour hitpoints are all gone).

Reptilian race archetype:

Unique gameplay: Each of the four race archetypes in Predestination (Humanoid, Aquatic, Reptilian and Mechanoid) has its own unique gameplay that will hopefully feel iconic to that type of race. Reptilian cities feature a unique hatchery for storing and hatching eggs, and an organised breeding area to speed up their usually slow reproductive habits. Players can decide what percentage of the hatchery building to dedicate to each particular sub-race of their species: Workers/Ground troops, Scientists, or the Diplomatic ruling caste. This will in turn provide bonuses to Production, Research, or Morale/Tax at that colony.

Unique tech field: Reptilian races have access to a unique technology field full of upgrades to the hatchery to let you specialise each city to a particular task. A few ideas we’ve had for possible upgrades include:

• Heat Lamps: Improves the population output of the hatchery by 25%.
• Farm Upgrade: Uses up one food resource linked to the city, but gives a large bonus to population output of the hatchery.
• Training Center: All workers are trained as ground troops and give a bonus against invasion. *We could also have training centers for scientists and diplomats
• Forced Breeding: An emergency option to produce extra ground troops.
• Euthanasia: Can kill existing population and replace them with another species. For example, can kill workers and replace them with scientists. Has a huge morale penalty.
• Genetic Manipulation: Can convert existing population units from one subspecies to another. For example, can turn all workers into scientists. No morale penalty.

Have your say!

What do you think about the Sauros? Head over to the Sauros thread on the Predestination Community forum to leave us feedback, and don’t forget to share this post on Facebook and Twitter if you like it!

Throughout February we’ve been working on Predestination’s planetary exploration and colonisation gameplay, designing the first Reptile race, and sorting through the ideas from our Kickstarter backers. With the core planet gameplay complete and the reptile race reveal  in the works, we’re shifting development focus to a part of the game we didn’t really get the chance to properly show during the Kickstarter campaign: Tactical fleet combat.

Every space 4X game has some kind of ship combat system, but most games have chosen to discard the MOO2-style tactical combat in favour of realtime 3D gameplay or even automated fights that you have very little control over. With Predestination, we plan to not only revive turn-based tactical combat but revolutionise it!

Read on for a breakdown of the Tactical Combat system, details of some fun new weapons we worked on with our work experience student Niall, and to submit your own ideas for awesome ship weapons and special abilities!

Key features of tactical combat:

Hexagon grid:-  Tactical combat will happen whenever any player gives a fleet the order to attack another fleet, planet or outpost in the same system. It’s also possible to order a fleet to intercept an enemy fleet and engage them in empty space, and combat can happen at temporal rifts and other space objects. Combat is turn-based and takes place on a hexagonal grid designed to give highly tactical gameplay, with each fleet starting at opposite ends of the battlefield.

Solving the first-turn problem:-  MOO2 had a problem where the first player to take his turn could get an overwhelming advantage by destroying several enemy ships before they even had a chance to attack. We’ve solved this problem by mixing both fleets together into a single turn order with the order being decided by each ship’s size, speed and maneuverability. Smaller and faster ships on both sides will tend to take their turns first, then medium sized ships, and finally large slow ships like battleships and orbital cannons.

Custom ships:-  You’ll be able to design your own ships by selecting a base hull size and adding weapons, engines and special modules. Ship hulls have limited power output, and each weapon or module uses a certain amount of that power. You’ll research new types of weapon, thrusters, shields and armour, and special modules like afterburners and scanners. The idea is to design a set of custom ships that work well together to execute whatever strategy you want, like having one big artillery battleship with no engines protected by a squadron of small point defense frigates.

Tactical terrain:-  Nebulae and asteroids will sometimes be on the battlefield, providing tactical differences to each fight. Asteroids could provide cover against projectile and beam attacks, and may even contain explosive compounds that could be ignited during the battle. One nebula type might obscure enemy sensors while your ship hides inside, another might deal damage over time, and another could super-charge the attacks of any ship inside it. The possibilities for tactical terrain are limitless, and certain weapons will even deploy new tactical elements on the map!

Weapon types in Predestination:

The main weapon types in Predestination are:

• Beams (e.g. Lasers)
• Projectiles (e.g. Mass Drivers)
• Missiles
• Drones (interceptors)
• Mines and deployables

Beams and Projectiles:-  Beam and projectile weapons instantly hit their targets and can only fire in a certain firing arc extending out from the ship. Beam weapons will be more effective against shields and projectiles against armour, but the difference won’t be so large that it leads to rock-paper-scissors gameplay.

Missiles and Drones:-  Missiles will travel to the target ship or map hex and explode, dealing damage to a single ship or in an area, while drones will travel to the target ship and attack each turn automatically until they run out of energy and need to return to the base ship. Both drones and missiles can be shot down but are difficult for large ships to hit, so you could use small ships for missile defense.

Mines and Deployables:-  Mines and other special weapons can be deployed on the battlefield and will automatically react to nearby ships. Example deployables may include damage amplifiers, shield bubble generators, target scatterers,  and cloaking fields.

Weapon modifications:-  Throughout the game, you’ll be able to research various weapon mounts that modify how a weapon works. An example would be the Point Defense mount for beam and projectile weapons, which reduces the weapon’s range significantly but lets it automatically get a free shot at anyone who flies into range. This is our Reactive Strike system that can be used tactically to lock down large ships and stop them from moving. Other examples include a beam capacitor that fires twice but takes a round to reload, or an overloaded missile modification that increases its area of effect at the cost of speed.

Special weapons and abilities:

As part of his week of work experience with us, student Niall came up with ideas for several new special weapons for the low-tech human faction. We’ve implemented his first weapon idea (The Junker) and just had to show you it in action!:

• The Junker:-  What do you do when your non-combat ships like transports are pinned down in a battle? If you’re playing the low-tech human faction, you open the cargo bays and jettison rubbish everywhere. The Junker is a special ability that can be used by certain ships once per combat to jettison junk in all directions, slowing all ships in the area (movement costs two movement points per square instead of one). The field of junk spreads out after one round of combat and then dissipates after a second round. The ship that fired the junk is immune to its effects, so you can use it to escape like a squid releasing ink.
• Orbital Junkyard:-  If one of your planets is attacked and you have a ship still under construction, it’s usually not going to be any use. The low-tech humans have the solution: fling your half-built piles of scrap at the bad guys! This is a module for space stations that gives them a special ability usable once per combat to fling a scrap ship in a particular direction. If there’s a half-built ship at the station, it will fling this instead and add a bonus effect. Some ideas for effects include rigging it to explode when enemy ships get near, or turning it into a giant magnet to drag small ships away from the station!
• EMP:-  Releases an electromagnetic pulse that scrambles nearby ships’ computers. The pulse is completely blocked by shields, so the enemy shields must be down before it will have any effect. The pulse disables one or more of the affected ships’ weapons or modules for a few turns, and has a greater effect against Mechanoid races.

Have any ideas for weapons and ship modules?

If you have any ideas for your own weapons and ship modules, head over to our new Tactical Combat ideas thread  on the community forum to discuss them! Do you have an idea for a missile, a mine or a special effect you’d like to see available to beam weapons? Maybe you have an idea for a type of nebula, or a special ship module like a tractor beam that flings asteroids around or a miniature black hole generator? No matter how crazy your idea is, if it relates to tactical combat then we want to hear about it! We’re building this part of the game right now so now’s the perfect time to develop weird and wonderful ship modules.

– Brendan Drain, Lead Developer

As we mentioned during the Predestination Kickstarter campaign, one of our biggest goals with the game is to help kick-start the game development industry here in Northern Ireland. There are currently no established development studios here able to offer  jobs, and so each year dozens of highly qualified university graduates are forced to move abroad to get jobs in the industry. We may not be able to offer full-time employment just yet, but we’re doing what we can to help build up the local games industry by engaging with students who are aiming for a career in game development.

Local student Niall Corr joined the Brain and Nerd team today for a week of work experience! We’ll be giving him a taste of everything that goes into making a game, from programming and 3D modelling to voice acting, storyboarding and concept artwork. Stay tuned for a huge update soon as Niall will be helping us with the reveal of our first Reptile race and the unique gameplay all Reptillian races will have in Predestination. We’ll also be following this up soon with a story trailer delving into the new race’s mysterious past.

EDIT: The reptile race reveal will follow later this week, hopefully at the same time as the reptile story trailer

The old system:

Planets are currently covered in randomly distributed resources and pre-defined city locations. Cities are residential colonies with lots of building space that is used for housing and big buildings like shipyards, while resources are small colonies with 6 building locations. Resources are only accessible in the resource towns themselves and the materials collected are stored in material silos. You’d need to design separate blueprints for each resource and for residential cities, and there’s not really much choice in where your colonies go or what they’re set up to do.

The new system:

The new system covers planets randomly in resources as normal, but players can decide where to build their cities! You can set up a city in any suitable location (on flat land for most races). Resources are no longer mini-cities with building spots, instead you set up an extractor like a mining drill and then tell it which city to ship the materials to. It’s up to that city to use all the resources that are linked to it. There may be a logistics cost for linking a resource to a colony far away, and you would be able to set up trade routes between cities to move resources around more efficiently.

There’s only one type of colony in this system so it’s up to you to decide how to lay it out and balance housing space with industrial output etc. You would only need to design blueprints for the different types of colony you want, for example you could have one for a production colony that uses 4 ore per turn or a residential colony that needs 20 food and 2 coal per turn. To keep things balanced, we would simply impose a limit to the number of cities you can have on a planet based on its size. Instead of having 5 residential cities and 30+ small resource towns pre-placed on a planet, now we’d just have 5 manually placed cities that split the 30 resources among them.

What do you think?

Which system do you prefer, and are there any other issues you can see with the new colonisation system?

• Upgraded planets, they are now 100% more awesome . (video)
• Added new colonisation mechanics.
• Designed the Reptile race (race reveal to come with finished art).
• Designed new buildings (building art update on the way).
• Added Sandbox mode with different galaxy sizes, ages and types.
• Backer Nineveh named our big bad alien race, “The Revenants.”

Screenshots of new planet grid:

Video of new planet grid:

Planet update highlights:

• The planet exploration grid is now visible from orbit. This will give you a better overview of what’s going on at a particular planet at a glance. (video)
• You can now select hexes from orbit. We can use this for quick colony management, scans, bombardment etc.
• Built the back-end for Races and buildings.
• Some buildings are now limited to certain environments. For example, you can’t build Housing on a Barren world, but you can build a Biosphere once it’s researched.

Stay tuned for a lot more regular updates with new game development and artwork. As always, please leave a comment with any feedback!

As part of the Kickstarter campaign, many of you picked the option to design your own commander, missile or building for Predestination. This post will explain all of the options you have to choose from for each. When you’ve made your selection, email the details to tina@brainandnerd.com along with your Kickstarter username. If you have any ideas that aren’t in this post, please post a comment here or include them in your email.

Designing a commander:

To design your commander, we need to know:

• Type: Decide whether you want your commander to be a Colony Leader or a Ship Captain.
• Name: Come up with a name, and optionally a title e.g. “Dr. Steve” or “Administrator Seth”
• Story (optional): What did your commander do before being stranded in the past? You can either write a short backstory for him or just give us some ideas and we’ll write it up for you.
• Portrait (optional): You can either draw portrait of your commander yourself or just give us an idea of what you want your commander to look like and our character artist will draw a portrait for you. Your commander doesn’t have to be one of the races we’ve revealed, he or she can be any kind of alien as long as it looks feasible. (minimum 256 x 256 pixels)
• Core Stat: Pick one stat from the lists below. This will apply to an entire planet for a Colony Leader or an entire fleet for a Ship Captain!
• Other Stats: Pick another 1-3 stats from the list below. These will apply only to the colony a Colony Leader is based in or the ship a Ship Captain is on. You have 5 points to spend between these stats, so you could for example put three into one stat and two into another.

Example commander:

• Type: Colony Leader
• Name: Dr Steve
• Story: Dr Steve was a medical researcher for the Human empire before the great war, specialising in diagnostic medicine and epigenetics. He brings with him advanced medical expertise and research techniques that have been lost to your empire.
• Portrait: Please make Dr Steve a bald human male with a black goatee and a labcoat.
• Core stat:  +Colony medical facilities
• Other stats: +Research points per turn (3 points),  +Research yield from research outposts (1 point), +Colony morale (1 point)
• Comments: Would it be possible to make Steve randomly ask you for huge amounts of money for research grants with a chance of producing a new technology?

Colony Leader stats:

• +Mining yield from mining towns
• +Research yield from research outposts
• +Food yield from farms
• +Research points per turn

• +Maximum population
• +Power plant energy output
• +Power grid energy storage (stored energy is used for strategic weapons, ground batteries etc)
• +Storage silo capacity
• +Ship build speed
• +Missile build speed

• +Colony scanner range (increases detection range and ship movement range)
• +Ground troop defense bonus
• +Colony shield strength bonus
• +Ground battery damage bonus

• +Colony morale (can tax happy population for more and they’re less likely to revolt)
• +Colony police security (prevents revolts, thefts etc)
• +Colony medical facilities (population growth rate)

• -Freighter cost for trade routes with nearby systems
• +Planetary exploration bonus
• +Diplomacy with other species
• +1 seat on the galactic council

Ship Captain stats:

• +Armour HP
• +Shield HP
• +% Armour repaired per turn
• +Shield regeneration rate
• +Resistance to missile damage
• +Dodge chance vs beam and projectile weapons

• +Beam weapon damage
• +Beam weapon range
• +Projectile weapon damage (mass drivers)
• +Projectile weapon range
• +Missile damage
• +Missile move speed
• +Drone/interceptor damage
• +Drone/interceptor move speed
• +Big damage bonus on Reactive Strike (point defense weapons auto-firing at ships, missiles and drones that come into range)

• +Ship speed / agility in tactical combat
• +Ship FTL travel speed
• Ship can move safely through nebulae at FTL speed
• Ship is hidden from enemy scanners while in FTL

• +Damage/accuracy when bombarding planets
• +Troop bonus when boarding enemy ships or being deployed as ground troops
• +Crew morale (improves rate of experience gain)
• +Self-destruct damage
• Can see ships in nebulae and reduced attack penalty on ships in nebulae

If you pledged to design either a building or a missile, please send your ideas over to tina@brainandnerd.com and we’ll discuss them with you directly. Whether you’ve got a fully fleshed out idea with a backstory and sketches to show us or just some early ideas you’d like to make sure are feasible, we’d love to get that conversation started. If you’re designing a missile or a building and want your commander to grant that technology when he’s hired, be sure to let us know in your email.

**  Please make sure that your names, back-stories, portaits and designs don’t use any copyrighted material. These are also still very early stats so details may change to make your entry fit better with the gameplay or the Predestination universe.

Last week Predestination officially succeeded on Kickstarter! Thanks to a huge push in the last few days of the campaign, we managed to hit over double our initial goal and smashed the three biggest stretch goals. We’ll now have a full singleplayer story campaign, play-by-email and full online multiplayer for release.

We’ve decided to wrap up the campaign in the same spirit of transparency that we intend to keep up during Predestination’s development, so I’m releasing a ton of stats that are normally kept for the project creator’s eyes only and discussing some of the lessons we learned throughout the campaign. This kind of info from previous projects was invaluable when I was researching and putting together this campaign. I posted this originally as a Kickstarter update, but am posting it as a blog post so it can reach more future Kickstarter project creators. It’s a bit of a wall of text, but hopefully future Kickstarter creators will find it useful!

(More updates on the way)

How much does Kickstarter help?:

We were very surprised to see just how many pledges came from people browsing Kickstarter itself! Less than half of our pledges came from people following links from external sources like gaming blogs, social media, forums, google, and emails. Most pledges (421 backers contributing 36.47% of the total funds) came from the Video Games Discover page, and to be visible on that page you need to either be a staff pick or be in the top 15 most popular projects. We weren’t a staff pick, but floated in and out of the top 15 over the course of the campaign.

The lesson here is that if you get enough of your own funding quickly enough, you’ll get onto the Most Popular lists and Kicktraq and it will snowball from there. If you’re thinking of crowdfunding on your own website to cut out that 5-10% fee, think again! If you can secure enough of your own backing through traditional means, Kickstarter has its own organic community that will multiply it.

Backer rewards:

For game kickstarters, the most popular reward is always the lowest one with a copy of the game (usually $10, $15, or $20), but the most popular pledge across all of kickstarter is $25. Offering something good at $25 is essential, but just starting to offer the game at $25 could be too high if your game looks like it should be less than $25 at launch.

We decided to offer the game at the estimated launch price of $20, but added free DLC and expansions for life for just $5 extra. This just made the $25 pledge level a very good deal and so most people didn’t mind upgrading. Simply offering good value for money rewards really worked for us; we even added a free second copy of the game to the $40 beta access tier so that it was always good value for money to upgrade. As a side-effect, our graph now looks like a hand giving the middle finger!

Media coverage:

Predestination wasn’t picked up by the mainstream media, so our main sources of media coverage were indie gaming blogs and the four sites listed above. Rock Paper Shotgun, Space Sector, Blue’s News and Space Game Junkie all sent more than 5 backers our way (everything below 5 is no longer available in the stats dashboard).

Kickstarter fatigue in the media: Though gamers are more excited than ever about crowdfunding games, most gaming websites are sick of hearing about Kickstarter. That’s why things like Rock Paper Shotgun’s weekly Kickstarter Katchup are amazing. RPS will cover almost any PC game that looks like it stands a chance and was a big source of backers for us. Blue’s News was one of the few sites we contacted that ran stories on us, and Space Game Junkie has been following Predestination for a while and posted about all of our updates.

I’d still advise people to mail all the big gaming media, but focus on niche sites and blogs first and encourage your backers to post about you on any forums they frequent. The GOG forums and Something Awful were good sources of pledges for us as we were already members and both forums have dedicated Kickstarter threads. Posting links to Reddit is a bit of a lottery, some moderators will shut down threads as self-promotion and some won’t. We found it better to just wait for threads to be started by backers and answer questions in them.

Day-1 media coverage: I cannot stress enough how much it helped to build up an audience before Kickstarter and get day-1 media coverage! Space Sector had been following Predestination all year, and its day-1 coverage gave us an immediate push into the Video Games Most Popular section on Kickstarter. We also collected email addresses for a beta mailing list last summer at QCon (Ireland’s biggest gaming convention) and a lot of our friends pledged in the first week. If you want a project to succeed, you really need a big boost of pledges on the first day/week to get into the Most Popular lists and Kicktraq.

Big pledges and adapting rewards:

Change unused tiers: One of the biggest surprises for us was how many people pledged for our $500 and $1000 tiers. The $500 level-design tier started selling almost immediately, but nobody went for our original $1000 reward (the backer’s name inscribed on a plaque that would sit in our main office). After a few weeks, I changed it to designing your own race and level and made an update about it.

Within a week, several $500 backers had upgraded and several new people had pledged $1000. The rush of thousand-dollar backers and upgrades pushed us up to Kicktraq’s Hot 7 and back into the Most Popular list on Kickstarter, which got us a lot more pledges. My advice to anyone running a Kickstarter campaign is to watch the rewards and change any that aren’t touched within the first week or two. Big rewards that offer some degree of authorship in the game like naming something or designing something are hugely popular.

Keep your videos short!:

My first attempt at a pitch video was around 10 minutes long, and we managed to cut it down to about 6 minutes before launch. That turned out to not be good enough: Only 14% of people were making it to the end of the video! We took a hacksaw to the video and cut it down to just three minutes, frontloading the important gameplay stuff so that the main features were shown within 30 seconds. The number of people who got to the end of the video quickly rose to 20%; I have no idea if this is still terrible, but the edits definitely helped.

The big finish, Jeff McCord style:

Every Kickstarter campaign gets a boost at the end when all those people who clicked the “Remind me” button get their 48 hour reminder email. We capitalised on that by having a new art update waiting for then and announcing that we’d be doing a livestream for the final 6 hours. We really enjoyed taking part in Jeff McCord’s recent Kickathon event, so we did our own mini version and reached out to some other space games on Kickstarter to invite them to the stream. We were joined by the creators of Skyjacker and Galcon 2 and generally had a lot of Irish banter and Q&A.

Was it worth the effort?: If anyone is still doubting that a finishing livestream is worth doing, I’ll just say that we got well over $7,000 in our final day and most of it was during the livestream. But it was worth it more for the experience than the funding: There was a tremendous buzz, with people really pushing for us to hit our next stretch goal and posting links everywhere they could. A livestream will put a lot of your most dedicated backers in one place, and it’s a really fun experience. I seriously recommend it for everyone ending a campaign!

Upgrades: We experimented with offering stream viewers some last-minute bolt-ons: Add $15 to your pledge to name a star, $35 to design a missile, and $50 to design a building. This gave people who wanted to pledge more a good reason to, and it got us a lot closer to 50k. As we started to approach the 50k mark, I gave regular updates on the total (including Paypal) and how much we had to go. One of our $500 backers Alexander Sharts upgraded to $1000 in the final hour to get us very close, and at the last minute Ninevah worked out how much we needed to hit 50k and pushed us over the line with a massive $941 pledge!

Every backer deserves your thanks!

The biggest lesson of all that we learned was that the Kickstarter isn’t ultimately about your game or the gaming media, it’s about the people who have enough faith in you to back your project. They’re your game’s first community and the people funding your dreams, and they deserve your personal attention even if it means Kickstarter is your full-time job for a month. I think giving each backer personal attention was a big part of why we succeeded.

We sent personal messages to every single new backer to welcome them and ask if they had any questions. Just starting that conversation is the first step toward creating a community, and led to people running ideas by us and becoming more confident in our game and goals. We made sure to respond to every mail and answer every question in the comments, and some of the backers had awesome ideas we hadn’t considered. It’s definitely worth starting that conversation with a quick message to every new backer!

Thank you

Hopefully this information will be of use to people putting together Kickstarters in the future! If anyone has any questions, please leave them in the comments! I want to give a special thank-you to every one of our backers for not just supporting us but getting us all the way to 50k! It’s overwhelming to see so much support for Predestination, and we promise that we won’t let you down .

– Brendan Drain, Lead Developer