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[Impmaster]

Wow, you've gotten far m8. Still working all alone?

[K1lo]

Thanks! Yes, working primarily on my own but with the help of someone for art and someone else for sound/music.

It's been a long time in development but it is starting to feel like it is coming together... keeping my fingers crossed for Steam Greenlight, currently Isomer stands at position #71!

[laxwolf]

wow, can't believe this is the first I'm seeing this project. Great stuff, and a greenlight vote from me!

[K1lo]

Thanks Laxwolf!

I have two pieces of awesome news to share with you all today.

Firstly and most importantly, last night I came home to an email with the subject line "Congratulations, Isomer has been Greenlit!" ! Hurrah!!

Thank you so much to everyone who has voted and left such amazing feedback on the Greenlight campaign page. I have been bowled over and humbled by your kind words and enthusiasm.

I have started the process to get Isomer onto Steam and will update when it is available. Anyone who has already participated in the alphafunding drive either via Humble or Desura can request a free Steam key as I promised before. I'm not exactly certain how this system will work, bear with me I will figure this out while I go through the process with Valve.

Secondly, a new Isomer build is available today. I uploaded update 18 (0.8.7.1) this morning!

The biggest new feature is the addition of alarms to enemy facilities. At strategic points now throughout enemy structures, there are sensor strips positioned to detect alien intruders. If any of your units walk over these, it will immediately trigger an alarm in the building (lots of red flashing lights and general disruption to tea and biscuit time) leading to immediate reinforcements beaming in at all the spawn points in the building (that's bad ).

There is a new craftable structure too - the Time Orb. It's built on a mini powercore as with other structures and changes based on the time of the day. Fully white during the day, becoming darker as night approaches and completely dark at night. There was a player request to be able to tell the world time more easily and this Orb allows you to do just that. Decorate your bases with high tech alien clocks!

Isomer now keeps track of statistics from each play through which are shown on the Game Over screen. Anything from the number of enemies you kill, the length of time you survive on the world to the number of supply ships trades you have made is now shown.

Aside from these additions, the focus of this build is pretty much the same as the last build - polish and snazz. There is a reworked Game Over sequence, if enemy units manage to break through your base and take out the power core, the world will disappear in the face of a series of large explosions.

The camera switches from position to position it moves from one point to another rather than just snapping to the new position auto-magically. A small change, but it really helps to orientate you in the world when you know in what rough direction everything is.

Here's the full change log:

• New: Added five new enemy buildings and updated every existing structure to use new human blocks.
• New: Added animated scrolling to title, loading and saving screen backgrounds.
• New: Added smooth camera motion.
• New: Added alarms to enemy bases. Bases now have sensors which if triggered will sound alarms causing reinforcements to spawn immediately.
• New: Added new structure - Alien Time Orb. Shows the current part of the day/night cycle.
• New: Added tracking of game stats through new PlayerStats module.

• Improvement: Reduced the number of resources dropped by portable power cores.
• Improvement: Pressing ESC will now return a paused game in the title screen to the in-game screen.
• Improvement: Pressing ESC will back out of modal screens in game (functioning like right click).
• Improvement: Improved transition from game over screen to menu (game now prompts and waits for player input).
• Improvement: Greatly enhanced game over sequence and screen.
• Improvement: Added better handling of critical errors resulting from partition mismatches. Game will now save and shutdown rather than terminate.

• Bugfix: Fixed bug preventing deregistration of enemy (and friendly) spawn points when the position is destroyed.
• Bugfix: Fixed bug where disabled enemy spawn point sprites would still cause a superfluous lookup in the gamelogic on destruction.
• Bugfix: Fixed bugs in pathfinding code relating to transporter use.

As with before, the new build can be updated from inside the Isomer launcher supplied with the Isomer Alpha.

[K1lo]

So.. pretty amazing news guys. Isomer has launched on Steam today!

A new build (0.8.8.1) is available today in both Steam and non-Steam flavors.

The versions are identical, however the non-Steam version will not have the additional Steam features like Achievements (and others in the future).

The focus of this build (aside from integrating Steam) has been improving combat and the AI of friendly units when under fire or in a group. Now, when a group of units is assigned a combat order, any units that don't have a line of fire will try to step into firing positions rather than just standing there as they did in previous builds.

Additionally, when a friendly unit comes under fire it will now raise an alert which will cause friendly units nearby to come to their aid automatically (if they don't have any existing orders).

Also new in this build is the information overlay (triggered by holding the shift key) which gives information about things in the world (i.e. entities, blocks or objects).

Aside from this there have been the usual collection of tweaks, bugfixes and general incremental improvements. The full changelog is below...

• New: Added Steam achievements (to Steam build).
• New: Added new game icon.
• New: Added Steam mode to launcher (in Steam build).
• New: Added polished enemy and friendly spawn point sprites.
• New: Added polished menu images.
• New: Added mouse context info screen triggered by shift button.
• New: Added quit without saving button to in game menu.
• New: Destroyed cacti can now be collected for biomass resources.
• New: Added colours to entity notifications to make it easier to distinguish positive and negative events.
• New: Added side step and target position finding for player controlled entities. Entities will attempt to step into a position from which they can attack a specified target and move back to their original positions afterwards.
• New: Player controlled units will now raise an alarm when under attack causing nearby units to try to identify and also return fire.

• Improved: Made some core stats (health, accuracy and defense) increase by set amount rather than percentage amount per level.
• Improved: Updated title screen icons to use new colour scheme.
• Improved: Updated game banner in launcher.
• Improved: Tweaked heading colours in about screen to match new title image.
• Improved: Removed greenlight banner in launcher.
• Improved: Removed debugging code which should not have been left in relating to explosion diagnostics.
• Improved: Improved code for game menu positioning and logic.
• Improved: Improved unit selection (selecting unit from group now requires one click not two).
• Improved: Half height human crates and cacti no longer block vision.
• Improved: Improved weapon reloading.
• Improved: Improved / sped up decision making cycles for entities.
• Improved: Added new prefabs and improved existing ones.
• Improved: If the player mines a block with an alarm sensor pad it will triger the base alarm.

• Bugfix: Fixed bug where enemy Heavies and Engineers would not start with full health if they were not level 1.
• Bugfix: Fixed bug with PowerCore integrity function returning 100% after power core was destroyed.
• Bugfix: Fixed bug where particle engine would tick even when the game was paused.

To get the latest build update (for non Steam builds) use the Isomer launcher as usual, Steam will automatically update to the latest version. 

[K1lo]

TIGarians...

Do you fancy making some sprites which could be officially included in a future build of Isomer? If so you've come to the right place, I'm opening submissions for three different items. Submit one sprite or as many as you like! If they're good enough there's a very good chance they'll be included in an upcoming build.

Here's what I'm currently looking for:

• A new storage crate image for human bases
• A new image for loot crates
• New decorative objects for human bases (can be anything you like as long as it fits with the visual feel of enemy bases).. some suggestions to get you started : armour weapons racks, objects for human entertainment, human sleeping quarters

Here are the requirements for sprites:

• Each sprite must be an image of size 64x72 pixels
• Each sprite may have a single image (nonanimated) or many images (animated) so be creative!
• Each object must fit into the isometric space provided by the template below (feel free to save and use this as a guide)

Guide for all sprites:



How to use guide (all sprites must fit within the faces shown in the guide):



Example of sprite within guide:



Depending on the level of interest I may even rustle up some prizes later. For now the reward is getting something you make included in a game published on Steam!

This is a slightly cheeky copy and paste from the official forum thread which can be found here, but I wanted to post on TIG in case because I know there are a lot of great artists here who may or may not be familiar with Isomer.

[K1lo]

After a few days of downtime following the crunch involved in getting Isomer ready for Steam, I have just released a new Isomer build. Build 0.8.9.1 focuses on enhancing enemy bases in a number of ways and fixes bugs reported on the forums from the last build.

So, what's new with enemy facilities? Firstly there's a new block called an alarm control core - this block can be found in some enemy bases and controls all the alarm sensors throughout this facility. Destroying a base alarm control will disable all the sensors and alarms in the building making it easier to assault the powercore without interruption.

Secondly, enemy bases can now extend underground! Previously no enemy base could have any part of it below the ground, as of this build several buildings have extensive underground rooms and corridors adding to exploration and discovery.

Aside from this, two entirely new enemy buildings have been added and more than ten others have been tweaked and updated. Below is the complete changelog for this build:

• New: Enemy units are now damaged by touching biomass plants.
• New: Added new enemy buildings.
• New: Enhanced enemy facility generation by allowing buildings to have an underground facilities.
• New: Game version is shown on title screen.
• New: Added new transition screen with stars rather than tiling scrolling background.
• New: Enemy bases can now have their alarms disabled by destroying the alarm control block.

• Improvement: Updated player dropship.
• Improvement: Player spawn points can now be built and now require minipowercores.
• Improvement: When a new game is generated the local world around the starting dropship area is automatically revealed.
• Improvement: Steam achievement 'Cut the red wire' (related to disabling alarms) now can be achieved.
• Improvement: Enhanced a large number of existing prefabs.

• Bugfix: Fixed bug where enemy units would loot resources for the player!
• Bugfix: Fixed bug in launcher which would enable the non-Steam update option if it failed to read the locally installed version number.
• Bugfix: Fixed crashing bug with generating 2D selection block that goes off the edge of the screen.

As with previous new builds, you can update Isomer either via the Launcher (if using the non-Steam version) or by letting Steam handle the process for you automagically!

[oodavid]

Congrats on the greenlight! Following :-)

[K1lo]

Thanks oodavid!

[dhondon]

I see negative comments on steam regarding the graphics. Why don't you team-up with an game artist? If you cant pay you give a decent percentage of the sales. The game has potential (I might be interested)