Hey everyone, after a lot of hardwork and many bugs, we’ve finally completed the alpha 0.55 multiplayer build. This is just a tech demo of sorts that lets us test out some of the key logic behind multiplayer. In this build, you’ll be able to see the new ragdoll system for animals when they die, turrets blowing apart when they die, and infinite terrain. We don’t recommend going beyond 8 players (you can try), as that might really kill the frame rate. When people change armor and weapons, the frame will drop (just like in single player, except here when everyone does it at once, it’ll cause a real long pause), we’re still looking at how to mitigate this problem.

Currently, only the PC version is available, we’ll add the links to the Mac and Linux versions after we test them out (probably tomorrow). For the people who downloaded a0.549m, download this version and you should be able to log into other people’s servers.

http://www.pathea.net/images/web/PlanetExplorersAv0.55m.torrent

Work on the games has been going very smoothly…well, as smooth as we can hope for. We have stopped work on our second project so we can completely focus on Planet Explorers, which means we now have ~25 full time developers working on the game, plus a few contracted ones. This has been made possible because of the support we received on Kickstarter and Greenlight. Which means you can expect lots of new additions in each future update.

Leading up to a0.55m, we seem to have fixed most of the position problems. We’re trying to get custom things into the build but the process is actually pretty hard. The UI for multiplayer got completely redone. We’re adding in enemies this week, took us a while to hash out the best way to do animals in mp. Still on schedule for the 10th coming up.

On the client side, durability is close to being done; houses are being worked on, settlement UI is in, with houses and power stations being worked on; the launcher is almost done and works for pc, mac, and linux; we’re working on a lot of terrain changes again, we added an editor to add terrain features that we made in an editor similar to the creations editor (this will look really really good…hopefully, if everything works out!); npc questing system got rewritten and we’re going through each quest to fix the problems, we have a ton of quests we want to add in this build but I’m not sure how much will get in since we just spent a month redoing it, but there should still be quite a few more; alien bases are being worked on; the wall is being worked on; we ran into a problem in painting the voxels in the world setting, we’re still looking at ways to get around it, basically, we can only have 256 terrain types, if one material, say iron, has 16 colors, that’s 16 types. So we have over 16 materials times 16 colors and it doesn’t work. One way to get it to work is to ignore the original type’s attributes and replace it with a color material. So wood and iron with color will have the same attributes, that’s the only way to add a lot of color in the world setting right now. The creations editor, on the other hand, will have 64 colors (so your houses will be multicolored). We have a few more thoughts on a workaround, but it’s looking like no spraying colors in the world for a0.6.

What a month it has been. We really didn’t know what to expect when we started this Kickstarter campaign. After all, we’re a no name studio pitching a equally no name game, all we had was our alpha build. But boy, the response has been very uplifting for us. In the end, we beat out our goal by almost 40% with $137,765 and we got greenlit by Steam. This is all thanks to your support! I cannot tell you how much gratitude we feel for you giving us the chance to make Planet Explorers into something we can be proud of.

We will be sending an email survey to every backer who has backed us as of the end of the Kickstarter campaign, including the ones on Paypal, over the next 2 days. If you do not get a survey in the next two days, please contact us at admin@pathea.net.

As I wrote in the last update, if you missed the chance to help fund the game during the KS campaign, we’re doing an extended campaign with Paypal. This will last for 35 days starting right now. We’ll get the counters working in the next day or so. All the Kickstarter options will be there. This will also count toward the “stretch goals” as well, just for fun and something to aim for.

Now it’s time to get back to work, after all you guys kept your end of the bargain by funding us. This time it’s our turn to keep our end by making Planet Explorers into an awesome game. Thank you all!

You can also follow us on Twitter andFacebook.

Planet Explorers has been approved for Steam. This is all thanks to your support. On Greenlight, out of all the people that voted, 76% voted yes, that’s much higher than the 58% average of the top 50. What that tells us is that Planet Explorers has hit the balance between hardcore and casual just right, at least in initial impressions and expectations. Now, we’re fully aware of the pressure to deliver, and we will work all the hard to live up to these expectations.

Regarding Steam’s Early Access, I know many of you want to play games in Steam so that they’re all located in the same place. But, we will not put the game on Steam until we feel the game’s ready for prime time, which means probably not until beta 0.1. The first batch of Early Access games have not been received well by some players, we don’t want that negativity. The launcher we’ll have for a0.6 will be able to give you the patch updating most of you want, so it should be more convenient anyway.

Again, thank you!

Thanks to everyone’s support, we’ve hit our Kickstarter goal of $100,000. There are still about 6 days left too. We feel so fortunate and thankful that we have so many supporters. It’ll make us work even harder on getting the game to be awesome!

We’ve also put up the Paypal options for the Kickstarter, you can find the link here: http://planetexplorers.pathea.net/news/preorder/