Tag Archives: planets

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January Dev Update: 3D Ship designer success and Predestination has been Greenlit!

  February 10, 2014 , , ,

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It’s been a crazy few months for Predestination, with our second Kickstarter meeting overwhelming success and Predestination finally being greenlit on Steam! We’ve opened the first two beta stages to our new beta backers, and work is continuing on the upcoming Galaxy beta.

We’ve made steady progress on the 3D ship designer and implemented several new features already. Cosmetic parts and ship items can now be rotated and scaled after placement using a simple slider and dial system (the UI below is temporary and will be improved on). Parts now have metal and powercore costs and are arranged into sections on the UI. The firing arcs of weapons fitted to the ship are also now displayed on the grid, and rotating the weapon rotates its arc.

This simplifies the selection of weapon arcs considerably, eliminating the awkward Left and Right arcs. Certain weapons will now naturally have wider or thinner firing arcs, and we plan to add weapon mounts or modifications that modify stats like range and firing arc. With over 100 applicants for the 3D modeling position we advertised, we’re still in the process of selecting someone to work with; If you haven’t heard back about the job yet, stay tuned as we’ll be mailing all candidates with a response even if they’re unsuccessful. Read More

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November dev roundup: 3D ship designer, iterations, and work on Galaxy screen

  December 16, 2013 , , , ,

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November was a very busy month for us, so we’d like to apologise for the lateness of this month’s development roundup. We’ve been working hard on putting your feedback from the first iteration of the Fleet Combat and Planetary Colonisation betas into the game, and now have most of the suggestions implemented. The combat and planet betas have now been successfully merged together into a combined client that will become the first iteration of the galaxy beta. Work has now begun on the Galaxy screen and main UI menus, and we’re working hard on getting that ready to show to all beta backers as soon as possible.

The big news this month is that we’ve been working on a new 3D ship designer for Predestination that’s been made possible thanks to a grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. We’ve got some great ideas for expanding the ship designer with extra features, and will launching a Kickstarter campaign exclusively for the 3D ship designer hopefully within the next week. We’re very excited to have locked in a basic version of the 3D ship designer as a feature, and will use the Kickstarter to see how far people would like to expand the feature. Check out the sections below for more detailed breakdowns of everything we got up to in November: Read More

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The Predestination Planetary Colonisation beta has now begun

  October 31, 2013 , ,

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We’ve just launched the second round of the Predestination beta, introducing the planetary exploration and colonisation gameplay. If you’re one of our beta backers or are otherwise signed up to test the game, check your Kickstarter mail or email for a message from us with a download link. If you were supposed to be in the beta but didn’t get an email, please send us an email to planetbeta@brainandnerd.com and we’ll sort it out for you.

As with the previous beta stage, there’s no NDA and you can talk about it or make videos if you like, but we would appreciate it if wouldn’t share the beta or download link publicly. It’s not quite ready for public consumption yet and is still using mostly placeholder 3D models and sounds that may change before release. If you’re not in the beta but still want to see the progress we’ve made this month, check out the video below of us playing through it and let us know what you think! Read More

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April Dev Update: New aquatic race, ship combat update, battlefield generation, and more

  May 8, 2013 , ,

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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. Read More

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New colony system, what do you think?

  February 10, 2013 ,

In last week’s development update, I showed recent work on the planetary colonisation that made the exploration grid visible from orbit. This week I updated it so that you can even direct your exploration efforts from orbit and developed a new resource distribution algorithm, but I ran into a small problem: If you add in enough resources to keep exploration interesting, you’d end up with a ton of colonies to build on each world. To solve this problem, I decided to try out a new system inspired partly by Civilization. Read More

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New screenshots: Galaxy map, planets, system window and planet exploration

  November 18, 2012 , ,

There are some big announcements coming in the next week or so for Predestination, but until then we have some new screenshots of the game in action. These screenshots show the three main parts of the game: Galaxy Management, Planetary Exploration, and Tactical Fleet Combat. All three areas are still work in progress, but they’re really starting to come together. Read More

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Planet exploration update and terraforming idea

  August 27, 2012 , ,

The Predestination team gained three new members this week: a new concept artist, a 3d modeller and a composer have officially joined the crew. The artists have been working on  new animated buildings for the colony screen this week, and our composer has been producing some awesome sci-fi music for the game. I’ll properly introduce the new and current members of the team in my next update and can hopefully show you some of their handiwork soon.

This week we’ve been working on fleshing out the designs for the races we plan to have at launch, and I’ve been implementing a hex-based planet exploration system to go with the hexagonal colony system described in the previous update. Players now have to explore outward from the starting colony as you can only explore hexes on the border with unexplored areas. Exploring a tile reveals what’s on that tile (if anything) and pushes your borders back, letting you see what all the surrounding squares look like. Below is a screenshot of the new system in action: Read More

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A brand new planet colonisation system!

  August 12, 2012

This week we did a major design iteration on the planet colonisation system. In the previous design, the planet was split into a huge square grid and you could send scouts anywhere to find resources. Extractors were built on the resources and they were piped to the planet’s main colony for use, so if you found a mineral deposit you’d build a mining station on it and the colony would then have +1 minerals/turn for use in factories.

After some testing, I found that it felt like I wasn’t really colonising the planet; I was just exploring it because I had to get it out of the way, and that’s not fun. Since I could see the terrain and knew where resources would spawn, I tended to go straight for those areas and there wasn’t much left to find in the entire planet. There were also unanticipated problems with designing a reusable colony blueprint: How do you know how many fossil fuel power plants or factories to build if each planet has a different number of resources? And what happens if the blueprint finishes building all your factories but you haven’t found the minerals to supply them yet? This week’s design iteration solved all of the above problems. Read More

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Dev update: New planet exploration features

  May 8, 2012 , ,

I got to work on the planet exploration a bit more this week, and added in a lot of the planet exploration features I described last week. You can now queue up as many scout missions as you want and they will be executed in sequence. When a mission starts, it takes an energy cost from the planet’s reserves, and if that energy isn’t available the mission will wait until you have enough energy before starting. You can now delete scout missions, and they are now sent from the nearest settlement you own for reduced travel time. Below is a video showing some of the new mechanics: Read More

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Second iteration on planet exploration system

  April 25, 2012 , ,

There are lots of software development strategies, but the one that comes naturally to me is rough iterative development. The process starts with an idea for a feature, which is then used to produce a gameplay prototype. I try the prototype out to see how it feels, and show it to people to collect feedback. That feedback is used to refine the prototype into a second iteration, which is then tested and shown to people again to collect feedback. This cycle continues until eventually I’m happy with the feature. Usually I do all the testing myself and only show the prototypes to a few real life friends, but over the past few weeks I’ve been showing the prototypes to people via the blog. Even with just a few people commenting, it’s been really useful.

Last week I showed a gameplay prototype of the planet exploration system and got some great feedback. This week I’m back with the second iteration on that system: Read More