Since our previous patch extended into this week, we've just focused on adding some new tile sets and content, along with the some bug fixing, due to the shorter timeframe.
Take a look at some of the new thing in today's patch:
Now you can spruce up and customise your station just that little bit more! We also have another large patch coming next week, stay tuned! And keep sending in bug reports! they've been very helpful! :)
We've now jumped to version 0.6 as we've made some enormous internal changes. This patch you'll find the new feature where you can build and place walls along tile edges, as interior walls.
What does that mean exactly? Well, just take a look at the following:
In this screenshot you can see what you've all currently been use to managing. If you wanted to build 4 small bedrooms you'd be hard pressed to fit them in any tighter than this. However, now with the interior walls you can make much better use of space:
In the same amount of space you can get almost twice as many rooms crammed in.
We've also added a bunch of new tile sets, and with our new template are eagerly adding more this week.
For this Friday's patch we will be focusing on polishing and bug fixing, potentially adding in a few more tilesets. Please keep the bug reports coming in :)
This week we tackled significant core changes, and some highly requested features. We've had to go over a lot of the game's current core engine, from pathfinding, AI, oxygen flow, and more.
These large changes will bring us to v0.6, but has also introduced an entourage of new bugs which we are combating over the weekend. Unfortunately this Friday's patch will be delayed temporarily while we clean it up.
Thanks for your patience everyone! :)
(We have some teasers on our discord channel)
Monday Hotfix patch!
Over the weekend a few bugs showed up stopping the tutorial and traveling around the map. Thanks to those diligently pointing those out to us, they're now fixed and patched as of right now!
Amongst a few other minor bug reports and fixes thrown in, enjoy your week :)
Clowns and Mysterious ruins... :o
Hey all, here's a little teaser for some upcoming content!
So what's it all about? glad you asked!
Meeple Station is about being open world, sandbox, simulation, but we also love to have little eggs of story and depth, which can be a very difficult thing to achieve inside of a simulation game. Campaigns aside, we wanted to add a little bit of mystery to the game, such as factions, conflicts and more in-depth exploration features. Including minerals and resources that can only be obtained through exploration.
Here are some little snapshot teasers of the micro-dungeon structures we're implementing.
But what's new this week?
Amongst a very very long list of bug fixes, we've also introduced the first tourist feature (HONK). For our kindred spirits (SS13 fans) we've introduced clowns!
This is a small intro to the very large overhaul this week to the animation system for mobs and entities which will also make modding new creatures and mobs into the game about fifty times easier. (Watchout for your Coulrophobic Meeple!)
You can expect many more entities, mobs, creatures being introduced over the next few weeks.
Lastly, a quick update on where we're at with multiplayer.
Unfortunately, Early Access launch proved that we still have much further to go with creating our desired Single player experience, and to avoid hampering development, we've decided to put our current multiplayer work on hold until we've completely fleshed out all of our major single player features. It's crucial to us as a team, first and foremost to make a great game, and then introduce the features thereafter to be able to properly share that with friends. If we try to do this the other way around it will lengthen development unnecessarily. :\
Until then! have fun Meeple! and don't forget to stop by our discord channel! we'd love to hear your suggestions :)
Rendering Rework !
This week you'll notice some drastic changes to layer rendering. We're very excited about these changes as it sharpens up a lot of your experience building a space station.
This week's patch comes a little bit late. The previous week I was moving house and I'm still struggling to setup a new internet service. However, we've decided to bring both last week and this week's efforts into one single patch, and we're quite proud of it!
Here is a screenshot of how the old rendering looked:
And here is a screenshot of how it looks now:
You can immediately notice the difference, but wait! There's more!
We've also made some significant changes in the way you can move between layers (and we have even more quality of life additions coming later on). As you swap betweens layers the camera will now follow the movement of the layer, and the lighting will transition with the layers, making it very easy on the eyes and more intuitive in general.
We've also added occlusion to tiles that block your view, so you never have another tile or item sitting in front of your current layer. The lighting on it's own adds a lot of depth, see for yourself:
How asteroids use to look:
And this is how they look now!
These are just some of the changes we've been working on this week. There are quite a few other adjustments in game, but they're a little bit difficult to explain, such how camera movement has changed as well.
These are fresh changes, and despite how excited we are to show them off we do expect people to find a niggle here or there, so please don't hesitate to let us know! we're still working around the clock :)
Come join our discord! (I'll be around more often when my internet is setup, promise!) https://discord.gg/ADRrmbv
EDIT:
Just in case the above screenshots weren't clear, these visual changes were actually a lot to do with ergonomics, not just an aesthetic touch-up. We noticed a lot of players getting confused and unsure what or where they were looking. Example, the following screenshots will show you how the new omission system works:
Weekly patch #7 (Fresh Tutorial)
Hey everyone, dev here!
This week's patch we focused on getting a much more comprehensive tutorial finished. We know for a lot of our veteran payers this isn't a noteworthy feature, but we've noticed an unnecessarily high learning curve for most new players and we're trying our best to break things down quicker for our new meeps.
We are listening daily to requests and bug reports on discord and we've also been hammering quite a few out this week. Please feel free to jump on our server and say hi!
A lot of large things (personal things) are keeping the dev (me) wrapped up this week and next week, which means next week's patch will mostly be aimed at maintenance and minor additions to content. Thanks to everyone whose stuck by us so far! We're still working hard and Meeple Station has a lot of development planned for 2019!
Weekly Patch #6 (New Content and QOL)
Hey everyone, Dev here!
Thanks for sticking around to watch development! Once again it's our weekly Friday patch, and this week, amongst the new content, we've been analysing and trying to find ways to improve the user experience early on.
One feature this week is the click and drag to place tiles and create salvage orders. This means building corridors and large rooms can be done in one quick motion.
We're also hard at work setting up for other large content, namely getting the galactic side of things setup for more explorative fun. Here's a little WIP teaser of the new and simpler engine model we're creating. We want to introduce an earlier research for engines to help get players moving around and exploring much sooner.
We're also working on a much needed tutorial to help break in the new players. We sorely regret not having this in sooner, unfortunately our long and comprehensive tutorial that we included with our demo last year was no longer relevant to the current game with all of the changes. Next week we hope to have this introduced once again.
Don't forget we're on our discord daily and happily respond to requests and queries! And remember you can read more detailed changes on the title screen changeLog :)
Weekly patch #5 (UI and Research changes)
Hey everyone! dev here!
Yet again, our promised weekly patch. This one is coming much later in the day as I got a little held up on some elusive bugs.
This week was a bit less productive than I'd have hoped due to a nasty flu, regardless we still have some large changes to the game.
You'll notice we've changed the game's UI completely. We've removed the bubbly and colourful arrangement that many people complained about looking too much like a 'mobile game', and created a more subtle grey scheme. We're still interested in people's feedback, since this seems to be a fairly ambiguous topic, when asked, typically half of people want the bubbly UI and the other half are either indifferent or completely hate it. We're trying to find something everyone can be ok with.
the other large change we've made this week is to the research menu. Internally we've adjusted things to allow for easier implementation of new technologies for research and modding. We hope to introduce quite a few more next week!
Weekly Patch #4 (Tiles and Networks)
Hey meeps! Dev here!
Once again it's our Friday patch! And this week we've been cooking up quite a lot of internal changes. The following changes are based mostly on some significant tweaks to the main engine.
First up, most of you will notice two new tile sets, Glass and Reinforced hulls. The glass hulls are decorative, whereas the reinforced hull provides a greater resistance to meteors and bombers.
The reason we added these new tiles is because we've changed how the game can read and use sprite sheets for indoor tiles, with walls. This means you'll also notice walls are collapsable and will disappear when you hover on a room.
Many people have asked for internal walls as a main feature, and this is the first step towards that. (The current walls hog an entire cell, but we'd like them to line the outside of the cells instead)
One tile use to have around 280 sprites just to cover all of the possible angles, including the roof sprites, but now it's been reduced down to about 15, which also makes it much easier for anyone wanting to make new tile mods for the game.
The other major addition is something you wont see much of just yet, but again opens up a lot of possibilities for modding. we've added an example mod to show exactly what that is.
You can now setup your own type of logic networks, such as the already familiar circuits and fuel lines. This means you can create a new and custom network (or several) such as steam power, radiation or conveyor belts, and pivot the gameplay around these networks. You can get a glimpse of what is possible with the new example mod, where we introduce a new network (liquid form brothium) and introduce a new furniture item that compresses it to create the Globomite resource, which is normally a long refinery process.
With these few alterations to the game's engine we hope to speed up the process of bringing more content.
We still have many more plans coming, and love hearing all of the feedback and suggestions from the community. Don't forget we're very active on our discord channel, if you have questions and queries, feel free to stop by, we're all friendly! ;)
