We’ve been working really hard over the last month to finish up all the components of a0.9. We’re getting there, but there are still lots to do. Many players have asked for an exact date for a0.9, based on our current standing, we’re looking at sometimes in March. As to why we went from the original December date to now, it’s because we’ve decided to rewrite the items code as well so that the game can become easily moddable on all fronts. We like to joke around the studio about it, but a0.9 really is turning out to be PE 2.0 as far as programming’s concerned: every system except for voxel generation has been tweaked or rewritten. The bad part is that it’s taking up a ton of time and the results won’t be seen regularly like in games such as Kerbal or Space Engineers (they had more flexible and better programming structure from the start to allow for faster updates). We do sincerely apologize for that as it is a demonstration of our lack of experience when it comes to setting up the structure for this type of game (though in our defense, there weren’t a lot of smooth voxel games around as a blueprint). But we’ve learned a lot and we’ll make sure there won’t be a repeat of that for any of our future games.
Due to the late release of a0.9, we will be releasing an a0.87 version in February. A0.87 will again be mostly an asset update, with new cloth types, biomes, locations, procedural updates, and such. Now, as I said before, we have done a ton of work for a0.9, and we’ll be showing off the new stuff bit by bit as they come online. Today we’ll show you some of our progress on the Story Editor:
For people familiar with editors, this will feel right at home. You can pretty much do anything within the bounds of the game with the story editor, if someone wants to mod the editor itself for more, well, be our guest. We will have a decent documentation when this fully rolls out. Next are a few screens of the procedural Adventure mode:
We did some optimization and we’re able to allow 512m height on the terrain now. All of a sudden, the mountains look much better. We also tweaked the cave systems and added more procedural code. We’ll be working on this up to the release of the game.
On a final note, we’ll be crossing the 200,000 copies sold on Steam mark any day now. We’d like to thank you all for your support and we’ll make sure this game ends up deserving of such support.