Hey guys , there are about 40 days left until the game comes out in Early Access! I'll be posting weekly updates to keep you guys in the loop about what's going on. This week's announcement is about localization.
Localization
I've finished working on localization, but I still need to actually test the game again and make sure every single word and text is translated into the proper language. I've translated the game into French myself so right now, there's only French and English supported. However, the system I used for localization allows anyone to introduce their own language without changing anything in code.
That means that if anyone ever wanted to translate the game into, say German, all they have to do is edit a google spreadsheet and the language will appear in game if it's 100% completely translated! Also, if in future updates new text is introduced, languages who have not yet been updated to the new patch will just use English for missing words.
There are over 12'000 words to translate(!). Let me know if you want to translate the game into your own language and I'll send you a link to the document. For now, I want to see how this would play out before release. Once the game is out, I'll most likely make the document public so anyone can edit it whenever they want.
Alpha-1.0.0
Hey guys! So up until now, every patch was posted on the official Gaia forums only. From now on, they'll be posted on Steam as well!
The game will come out in early access with this version, Alpha-1.x.x, with x being some small patches that are going to be happening this month and the one after, including localization and fixing the inevitable bugs that this patch introduced. There will be a new trailer going up sometime at the beginning of May to show off this patch.
Patch notes:
* Implemented some serious UI to the game. No more bland rectangles with random colors on them. This is not just a reskin, but also changed some gui dynamics. All scrolling now supports the mouse wheel correctly, while retaining the old drag and release. Reworked the 'needs' circles to include labels and percentages instead. In the main menu, you don't need to turn your head from left to right and back again every time you want to access a new submenu (My neck muscles will miss this one). Turrets and fueled buildings now have their own UI panel to interact with. Every time you approach something, a little menu pops up that says what you can do with it, such as interact or pick up.
* No more default Arial font. We now have 2 main new fonts.
* Almost all inventories now have a help icon that lets the player know what kind of items it accepts. For example, the generator accepts only items with biomass, so that icon will tell you that when you hover over it.
* Removed the farm, which you can see in the trailer at 01:33, and consequently the 'Farm' tab in the PDA. Now you can actually plant seeds directly on the ground.
* Implemented seeds in accordance with the above point. There is a chance you can get a seed in your inventory whenever you eat a vegetable. No more planting crops out of thin air yay! This also gives an incentive to harvest wild crops in search for seeds.
* All buildings are now considered items. This means that whenever you craft a building, it will appear in your inventory instead of in a magical place. This also means that you can lose them on death and that you can trade them, though trading building items is turned off for Alpha-1.x.x!
* Implemented a small 'How-to-get-started' tutorial that can be turned on or off before you start a new game. This tutorial isn't meant to go in depth about everything and is actually very small and brief. It will only teach you the very basics and also give you an idea of what you should prioritize when you first land.
* Implemented Astral, your PDA assistant. That's right, your PDA will now talk to you. Very similar concept to Subnautica.
* You can no longer click on events when they appear on the right side of the screen to read about them. Instead, you'll have Astral announcing them.
* Implemented a new tab in the PDA, called 'Base', which has 2 submenus: 'Energy' and 'Defenses'.
- In the energy submenu, you have a nice list of buildings that produce or consume electricity. This tab will also tell you how much actual energy is produced by a certain building. For example, a wind mill's max production is 750W, but in reality, it will most likely produce less than that due to the wind factor and this tab will tell you exactly how much it is. In addition, you can press a shiny new button called 'Request Report'. When you do that, Astral will give you a breakdown of how your base is coping with its energy needs. In addition from what you'd expect from such a report, she'll also tell you if your base relies too heavily on a certain type of energy source. So if you have 10 solar panels but only 2 windmills and 2 generators for example, she'll tell you that you run the risk of running out of energy at night.
- In the turrets submenu, you have a list of all of your currently built turrets, along with their remaining HP, ammo, dps etc. In this submenu, the new shiny 'Request Report' button gives you the chances of surviving a ground attack and an air attack. Be warned though. If Astral says you have a 10% chance of surviving a ground attack, she's being overly dramatic. What she really means is that there is a high chance of losing something in the attack, like some building(s), not that you're actually going to have a 90% chance of dying in the next attack.
* Multiple monitors and resolutions are supported now. The resolutions button is now a dropdown menu, so no more cycling through all of your monitor's resolution until you get to the one you want.
* There are now 3 new sound sliders in the options menu: Music volume, SFX voume and Environment volume in addition to the old one 'Master volume'. The names are quite explicit. However, there is no music in the game right now. I hope to be having some OST for Gaia by the time it goes out in Early Access. So far the chances of that happening look quite promising!
* The big battle at the end of the game doesn't occur on the planet anymore, it happens in space now. The main reason for that is performance issues. The battle used to drop your FPS to about 10-20 if you went into XRay mode while on the planet because it had to render every single building you ever placed down transparently, as well as the terrain itself and other props on the planet. Transparency is a very expensive thing to do in games, especially for something of the scale I wanted. In space, this won't be a problem anymore since the only transparent things will be enemy ships and your own ship. So at least now you get to go into space!
* Implemented the decorations you see in the house in the trailer such as art pieces, plants, sofas and desks, as well as walls with windows.
* Added a model for the control drone.
Optimization/bugs:
* Improved the AI quite a bit. The AI used to chase you for a while and then go 'poof' if it went too far from its starting position. Also, if you were trying to kite an AI and then shoot it when it decides to WALK back to its starting position, the AI would bug out and couldn't figure out if it should pursue you even more or just calmly walk back. Now, it will actually RUN back. Some AI also had trouble fighting each other due to height differences. Apparently, an Amarok was too tall for a goat and it couldn't target it so it would just walk up to it and hug it. Sometimes, the AI had some pathfinding issues near rock formations and that's been fixed as well. So all in all, the AI code is more stable now.
* Massive improvement to fire spreading. Previously, the way fire was spreading was in a grid like fashion. So you could have a 10 by 10 (100 squares) grid spawn from a tornado, each square with 1 fire in it and this was a massive performance bottleneck. Now, there are only 4 squares, but the fires themselves are much bigger. The area they cover is even bigger than before and the performance is impeccable, as if the fire wasn't even there. This means that adding a flamethrower in the future will be a breeze.
* Water won't be rendered when you're far away from it anymore, which saves quite a bit of performance on your GPU. This used to be true in Alpha-0.x.x too, but it wasn't very well done and still costed some performance.
* There were quite a few bugs with the end battle, such having environmental sounds play when you're inside the ship. All of those have been fixed.
* When you used to take a drug that said it should last 5 hours... Well it used to last 5 hours in real life. Now it correctly lasts 5 in game hours.
* The default button to access the PDA is now 'TAB' instead of 'P'. Current owners of the game will still have 'P' by default though, so you'll have to manually change it to 'TAB' yourself if you want to.
* Fixed the bug with the farm because there is no more farm :D
* Put some restrictions on where and when you can save the game. You can no longer save when flying, levitating, swimming, diving or when enemies are nearby. The restriction on swimming and diving will be removed when the water package goes live.
* No more lag during autosave.
* Equalized some sounds and introduced some new ones
What are packages? Well, you could look at them as if they were DLC's, but free! They contain lots of content but the best thing is that you can vote on the order in which they are implemented. That thread also contains some info about the current state of the game.
I wasn't joking around when I said that the community will have a big say in the development of the game! The first package was voted in a few months ago and as promised, it will go live with the Early Access release.
Launch date announced!
Gaia has been in development for almost a year now. Today, I can finally say that the game is coming out on the 30th of May 2019! I will be posting new trailers, screenshots and gifs on the page closer to the release date. The game has changed a ton since last year. The current screenshots and trailers on the store page are quite outdated, especially when talking about the user interface.
Anyway, during the time between now and the release date, I'll be focusing on fixing as many bugs as we can find, making some quality of life changes and balancing the late game.
As for the Kickstarter, well, we can safely say it has failed. What does this mean for Gaia exactly? Well, it just means the game will come out in May instead of towards the end of the year. Without any more funds, there's not much left to do at this point. But at the same time, I'm currently in the talks with some audio artists to see if we can put some nice music in the game.
I hope you guys are excited, because I sure am!
Gaia's Kickstarter now live!
Hello everyone! The time has finally come. The Kickstarter campaign is now live and you can make a pledge here to support me!
The main reward for backing the project is access to the game as soon as the campaign ends, which will be on the first of April. There are other rewards as well, such as the ability to put your name in the game so other people can see you as a pirate or merc attacking their base. You can even get to name a faction!
For more info, please check out the link :)
Happy gaming!
New Testing period open!(APPLY WINDOW CLOSED)
EDIT: Thanks everyone for your applications! The window for sending requests is now over, congrats to those who got a key! I’ll be sending out the emails in the next few hours. I also wanted to add that I uploaded a raw gameplay clip next to the trailer to showcase the lategame a bit so you can get an idea of how the game plays, even with the current bad (or missing) sound effects. The Kickstarter campaign will address these issues and more. After we do some more testing on different types of video cards and processors (that's where you 5 peeps come in!), I hope to be having the campaign live by the end of the month or early next month!!!
Hello everyone!
As promised before, a new testing period is now open. I'm looking for 5 new people to help test out the game in preparation for the Kickstarter campaign. In exchange, you'll get a free Steam key that won't ever be revoked*, meaning that you'll always have access to the game. However, unlike last time, there are few guidelines that apply if you want to become part of the testing team, but before we get to that, I just want to say that this is no longer a first come first serve deal, so no need to rush in sending a request. The offer will be available for 7 days from the time of this announcement, at which point I'll select 5 people and give out the keys.
So if you want to become a tester for Gaia, please follow the steps shown below:
1. Use the contact form on the official Gaia website (you can find a link on the right side of the Steam game page) to send a request
2. In the comment section, please include as much of the following information as possible:
- Hardware info (ram, screen res, cpu, gpu, os)
- The country you live in
- Any previous experience with playtesting unreleased games and providing feedback, with proof if possible!
- A little bit of info about yourself
- Your steam name
3. Sign up on the forums on the official Gaia website, as that's where you'll be able to provide feedback regarding bugs and issues.
That's it! After 7 days, I'll contact the 5 lucky ones and then hand out the keys so you can start playtesting. Last time we did this on the first come first serve basis, few people actually provided any kind of feedback so this time I'm trying to pump up that number to better help with development!
*Disclaimer: Your key may be revoked if you don't provide any, or very little, feedback after a few weeks on the forums.
A little peek into the future
Hello everyone!
We've just released the last major content update a few days ago. It's what you guys voted for: the ending of the game. This is just one of the endings we have planned though, there will be at least one more in the future. For more details, you can read about it on the game's website or watch Garie's newest video on youtube as this announcement is about the future, not the past! (The video doesn't show the ending, just talks a bit about it among other things).
Now that the last content update is out, we can finally move on to balancing the game and optimizing it as well. Right now, a huge, massive ship costs just as much as a bullet and the game runs at ~70-90 fps on a gtx 1070 at highest settings, which is not very good. So as we move forward, we'll be balancing every parameter possible like, resource requirements, dimensions, prices, every type of stat on the AI, texture sizes and other optimization techniques etc. As we work on this, we will also be improving a few visuals but no new models will be introduced. For example, we'll be adjusting lighting, colors and some special effects while also fixing bugs. A LOT of indie games out there are released in Early Access with very, very bad models, very low content and almost always filled with bugs and promises. We don't want that with Gaia, we want to improve Early Access reputation by showing that when there is will, there is quality even in the early stages of a game.
Because of that, we'll be hosting a Kickstarter campaign sometime in Spring next year, depending on when we'll be done with what we said above. It might be February, March or even April, we don't want to make any promises we can't keep. The purpose of the campaign will be to raise funds for various things that I personally, the sole dev so far, can't do, such as high quality sound effects, animations, models and art. One of the rewards will be getting a steam key for Gaia as soon as the campaign ends so hopefully we can get some support going with that :).
One last thing. About a month before the campaign starts, we'll be hosting another testing period where we'll be testing actual gameplay instead of concepts and mechanics. The purpose of that is to ensure that the game is satisfactory for people who will be backing the Kickstarter campaign. We'll be handing out 10 more keys to people who are interested in helping out with testing, so just watch out for announcements on this page! There'll be even more testing periods after the campaign but before the game is officially out in Early Access so don't worry if you don't get a key this time.
Here's the link to the video for those interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRgyN6ejeFs
A little preview
Hey guys, thought I'd show you what I've been working on these past 2 or so weeks and also take the opportunity to let you know that we have someone who keeps track of updates and doing sort of a dev blog on Youtube. If you're into this kind of stuff and want to watch the game progress through development, check Garies UNI series here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCyZqEpDpuU
That video is about solar flares, fire tornadoes and toxic atmosphere.
Livestream gameplay/Q&A
Edit: Live stream is over. It lasted a little over two hours. Thanks everyone for coming!
Hey guys, we're going to start the stream in about an hour and 20 minutes. Here's the link, hope to see you there!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CURh2YPXKUM
For those who missed the last announcement:
Garies is going to be playing the game while answering questions and I'll be there to answer questions in chat as well. It's the first time we do something like this so we don't know how long it will last, but we think it will be at least an hour or 2.
Upcoming live stream Q&A
Hey everyone,
One of the Gaia testers, Garies, came up with an idea of hosting a sort of live stream Q&A so we'll be doing just that this coming Saturday! We'll be doing this on Youtube at 14:00 EST time. When the time comes, I'll be posting another announcement with the link to the stream.
Garies is going to be playing the game while answering questions and I'll be there to answer questions in chat as well. It's the first time we do something like this so we don't know how long it will last, but we think it will be at least an hour or 2.
