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[gimymblert]

[zede05]

Oh woah, that looks pretty interesting. I'm gonna read up on it, thanks for pointing it out.

In other news, we just released a0.7 last week after a long crunch. I stayed up for 40 hours at one point, heh.  

That last build took a long time (almost 5 month). We changed a lot of stuff, the change list is long, heh.

[zede05]

Fightin' 'em giant killer robots in multiplayer!

[zede05]

Some multiplayer action.

[zede05]

Finally got around to releasing a new demo based on the latest build:

http://planetexplorers.pathea.net/new-demos/

Anyone wanna try and give some feedback? 1.9G.

[eobet]

I tried it, but I did not get very far, because although WASD looked like it was mapped in the controls, they didn't do anything so I couldn't move... Q and E did rotate the camera, though...

However, what little I saw looked nice! Everything seems to stick to a theme, including the user interface elements, and it looked slick. Very approachable. I'm going to drop the cliché that it "has potential" because it obviously needs polish in some areas, but certain things are very nicely finished already.

One thing which stood out though, is the grass when viewed from above. The technique you are using makes it look weird, and not just from above, but having the grass following you around. Every though about making it static, but randomly scattering it at various angles?

[zede05]

One of the problems of Unity is that if you have some extra controller or virtual controller plugged in, it'll cause problems for the game.

Or you didn't click that dialogue box at the bottom above the quickbar...

The grass is still being worked on, it'll eventually allow for interaction as well as random winds.

[eobet]

Or you didn't click that dialogue box at the bottom above the quickbar...

Ah, that was it. Well, guess you have to usability polish to do then, because that was not placed in a way which made me think I needed to do anything with it.

[zede05]

Starting to get the decal system to work in the Creations Editor, and it's becoming a rather cool and powerful tool. Texture covers up a lot of the ugliness of the blockish structure of the items. Only problem so far is that it's still having a hard time projecting on to a really curvy surface, still working on that one.

[zede05]

So we've decided to put the next build on Steam Early Access (which will probably be next week), before Everquest Next beta comes out and people start thinking we copied everything from them. Due to that, we've been messing with all the Steam related API the last couple of weeks. Something we learned real quick was, don't try to support too many platforms at once, it's just too much work. But since we already promised the Mac and Linux builds, we'll have to try to get everything to work correctly real quick.  We also found out that Valve time really does exist, haha. Luckily, the Steam developer support community is great.

Below are some new screens from the current build (a0.75), we're finally spending some time doing graphical touch up and shader work. So no more Unity water. 

[zede05]

OMG, we're on Steam! http://store.steampowered.com/app/237870/

It was actually kinda anti-climatic when it got on Early Access, since Steam released it earlier than expected, and we were still doing bug fixing at the time. 

Still, my inbox went from 20-30 a day to 300 in less than 20 hours. No more free time. But it's ok. 

[gimymblert]

How did that "procedural texture" trick review was?

[zede05]

Been a long while since I last posted. We're still working pretty hard on the game, heh. It's been about 4 months since Planet Explorers went on Early Access, we're a bit past 100k now. I'm very surprised that we can get that number during EA. At some point during the past year, I knew we have a game that could do fairly decently once done, but still not 100k level while in EA.

What we have learnt from the Steam experience is that stuff sells a lot on Steam. By looking at our daily numbers, I could sort of extrapolate what the top sellers (even in EA) are doing, and it's quite a bit. Same for Summer Sales, holy cow, I didn't know gamers bought that many games during the sale.

With a decent userbase now, anything we put out will get immediate responses positive or negative. This is both good and bad. Good in that we know right away if something's not working, bad in that we don't know if it's not working for everybody or just a few really loud opinions. But overall, our EA experience has been really positive. It's a lot of hard work, but it's really gratifying to see other players experience those efforts. It also reinforces how much we still need to finish, oh the pressure. 

Here's a new poster art we've been working on for our Kickstarter backers.

[gimymblert]

Great to have news, I'm just waiting a stronger computer to join >.>

Character looks a bit derpy here eyes don't focus naturally

[kkiablo]

Just found out we haven't posted the log for over A YEAR The good news is, our game is still alive and we are closing to the final. How exciting it is!!!

The current situation is that our team has changed the game engine into Unity 5 (we have been using Unity 4 for the whole time). Now we found Unity 5 has more new features and it can greatly improve the structure and the fluency of the game. However, as you may know, the physical engine in Unity 5 is quite different from what we used before. So it really took us a great of time to get used to it. Except the idea of the storyline, we nearly re-structured the game. And without a doubt it comes along with a lot of new bugs. Even some good parts went crazy… Well please ignore my mumbling… It's just the process is too painful and we absolutely don’t wanna get through it again... So far the game is more stable with less bugs and it's more convenient for us updating the file!
From now on, we will keep posting the updates. So you will see more info/new features (spoiler alert on the next post: story editor) of this game.

[gimymblert]

come back!

[kkiablo]

From version A0.94, we had a new function in World Editor that everyone can create and share customized stories. How many of you guys already tried it?

We think the story editor would make the game more fun. Cause we know our players always have brilliant ideas. So the customized stories could be more fun, scary, absurd or adventurous. And then other players can also experience your stories by downloading and saving the published file into a particular folder (we will explain this part in our how-to article). Besides, in our next version, but not particularly the next coming version, you can expect multiplayers in the customized stories. That should be even more interesting.

Now the only problem is that it may be a little bit complicated to customize the story. In fact, I ran a test on my friend to see how long she's gonna take to understand the whole creating process, and she took several days by herself... So we will sure update a how-to guide and video soon and I'm pretty sure these will help a lot. Meanwhile, we have another thought, to encourage our players who already know how to create customized stories to share their experience of story editing or even their brilliant stories. Maybe we will reward the best story in the future?

Anyway, these are just some snapshots of story editor, so maybe you can have a rough understanding of it?

[gimymblert]

great stuff!

[kkiablo]

Hey guys, it's been a while since our last post here.

In between these months we did make a lot of improvements in Planet Explorers. Other than bug fixing, and that's for sure what we'll keep doing to the very end, one of the major improvements is the new guidance system we added in game. Here are some screenshots.









The purpose of this system is to guide players especially who's new to this game, show them the tips or even tell them the in-game controls. Well, we have to admit some of our in-game controls in the previous versions were not very user-friendly, in other words, players know what they should do but just don't know how. Now the AI Robot Andy is gonna help them get through all. And of course, if the players are already very familiar with our game, and think Andy annoying, they can just turn it off.

What made us choose this kind of AI robot to do the guidance? Actually we thought about just adding a tutorial into the game at first, you can still find this tutorial section right in the interface of selecting gameplay mode, but we find players barely use this tutorial and even don't know the existence of it… Well, this system still needs some tweaks.





Besides, we added the ending CG into the game. Now the story line in story mode is fully completed, guess what Ava found at last?







Now Planet Explorers is in beta 0.6, and soon in this/next week we are gonna have another version out on steam.Here check out Planet Explorers beta trailer

.

[kkiablo]

Hope we still have audience here. 

Well, anyway, now we can finally annouce the final release of Planet Explorers. Since Planet Explorers is asset completed, our focus in this game has changed to fixing and tweaking stuff. So fixing and tweaking now have become a lot easier.

We are going through the game over and over, hoping to find bugs as many as possible, at least players will not expect critical crash problems in the end. Besides, the crash reporting system we added in game also helped us a lot. You know it's pretty slow for us to find bugs just by ourselves since the whole storyline takes 15 hours at the fastest for a run through.

Now we have scheduled the release date on Oct. 25th, and we are working very hard to accomplish this goal. 

Just in case if anyone wants to check our latest progress on this game, here is the link of the changelist. Click here .