Welcome to Spess weekly UPDATE. This weekly UPDATE, we are going to be covering map editor features. Along with a team member update... yes ok we will cover.. Nicholas, the lead dev. (even though I am the one writing this, wew).
Anyways, back to the topic, as announced few times and showed off in videos, we will have a level editor in-game that will allow both developers AND players to create their own custom maps that can already be played over network properly. We can easily also add awesome stuff like multi-station maps and Steam workshop map sharing. Which opens the road to a lot of unique content.
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Meet the Team - Nicholas (developer)
Ah yes, I am Nicholas nice to meet you.
Nicholas and Fractal (the Artist) started this journey as a baseball VR prototype. Then yeah. Clowns came. We made a bunch of botanist memes on Reddit, people liked it, we still exist thanks to community support. Yay.
So yeah, Spess started as series of tiny prototypes being worked on and being "tested" as a concept.
As for any other relevant background, before working on Spess, Nicholas was involved with the ancient predecessor of the current SS14 and current Unitystation. I've also even added Georgian national dishes to TG13, and it ended up on almost all other forks due to that, nice.
Final thoughts[tm]
We sort of can't believe Spess is more than 2 years old by now. Interesting journey. You know... hopefully next week, we'll have a huge announcement in many ways. Also, we are expanding our team a lot lately, so watch out for new team member introductions from time to time.
Honk. https://discord.gg/9s6QdEy
Botany feature overview & MEET THE TEAM
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Nicholas, you finally do some weekly updates, and now you give us 2-year-old videos to fill up the content?! WHAT. THE. HELL. Sorry, just a fun throwback.
As you can somewhat tell from the title and the video, today, in this weekly update we will be reviewing the first feature to come to Spess (SpessVR if you will) which was botany. But that's not all, we will also be starting a new topic in these kinds of posts, which is contributor team introductions and overview! It will be basically quick summaries of people who helped develop Spess over the years.
Botany - Feature Summary
Yeah, I think Botany in Spess is unique and FUN. Basically, the point is to mutate plants and acquire rarer plant "DNA" and new types of plants with specific uses. Here's a very good summary written years ago but it still holds 100% true and is what we followed across the years.
Mutation will be dynamic, as opposed to standard TGstations specific mutations. This means mutation can be done from every plant, but there's a considerably high chance for specific plant mutations. For example, a standard tomato may mutate into nearly anything, but it has a very low chance of doing so, however, it does have a considerable chance of mutating to something similar such as bluespace tomato or blood tomato (new breeds of tomato basically)
And here's a flowchart or whatever. For the basics.
Anyways. We will be covering more features next week!
Meet the Team - Liam (developer)
In this section, we will be overviewing Spess contributors one by one every week. First one up, Liam!
Currently works in a VR development company in his home country.
One of the first Spess developers, he helped pioneer non-VR (desktop) mode, created level editor, which led to making all in-game stations player-made and more streamlined. You can find him and everyone else in general at our Discord of course.
Final thoughts
Anyways, I don't think anyone will read an article/update larger than this, so I'll STOP.
Make sure to check out our official website to get a gateway to all our other social media: https://spess.space
For any suggestions feel free to start discussion in our Discord as well. ayy.
The update is now WEEKLY - Map Editing and SLIMES!!!
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Mapping & New station in progress
Welcome to the now weekly update! We will now review game progress & news every week rather than every month! woo!
So, since the current station that we used for development is very tiny, we had a need to design a larger station. This is something that players will be able to do themselves as well in Spess Desktop Mode.
Currently, you can save your map to load it into multiplayer for everyone to play on, we're hoping to bring the map save feature to the Steam workshop as well!
I will post part two next week. But for now, make sure to join our Discord for further discussion!
https://discord.gg/9s6QdEy
Introducing... XENOBIOLOGY to Spess
Xenobiology at its state is basically botany, but you grow "cute" little alien slime life forms instead of plants. They wander around station, grow different organs and components, and mutate into larger sizes.
They also can rise in population, or overcrowd, causing that CHAOS.
Future plans are even more sinister. Once they grow too big or mutate enough, they will be aggressive towards players or other entities, attempting to eat them, muhaha.
So yeah like that, we will try to announce and properly detail Spess features every week or so.
Make sure to check out all our platforms! Get on our Discord, and also, help fund development at Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/spess
RELEASE DATE - Early access open release date is announced... now!
We now finally have an open early access release date for the first open beta release: 0.7!
We have decided to release at the end of November (30th) to make sure we have enough time for polishing and making sure both VR and non-VR platforms work nicely in multiplayer and such.
Soon we will see the "beautiful" (more like chaotic and bloody) launch of the Spess station. Oh right, screenshots for our first official station coming soon.
And we will also try to include a polished and user-ready station/map editor for creating custom stations for use in multiplayer.
Ok ok, some more info coming soon(TM), but for now, stay tuned!
MONTHLY SPESS UPDATE - Now on Steam too!
View all previous monthly updates on our primary channel, Discord!!! :p https://discord.gg/9s6QdEy
And it is time for some monthly updates BANG BANG
Greetings spessmen! So if any of you follow our somewhat outdated in visuals of a Steam Page, you'd know we are listed as "Coming Soon" at "2020 Q4", this means, we're trying our best to have full early access PUBLIC RELEASEEEEEEEEE.. by end of the year. I promise that the next monthly update, I will put out actual open release date.
Until then, our beta testers are helping me with internal feature and design discussions as we get closer to release after 3 dayumn years. I am opening up 2-3 more spots to somewhat active/old/interested community members who would like to give lots of opinions on game direction AND play early broken builds. lol. Ask for it in #development or #general
Just like a bit more than a year ago, I'd like to host a COMMUNITY SURVEY - yay. ALL ANSWERS ARE OPTIONAL, so if you get bored or tired, feel free to submit an incomplete survey or only fill ones that you find relevant/fun to fill. BUT. since high effort entries will help us greatly, I'd like to start a small competition/giveaway: 5 first people to nearly fully or fully fill the survey and include their discord name in the one question that asks for it, gets the rare Discord title "certified spessman"
That title may be a mystery for some of you, it's basically 100 first people that joined this Discord, but it's gotten a bit rare as some people left the server or lost their accounts, etc but other than flexing rights it gets you free game copy on-request at release, and hopefully few more ideas I can come up with for that. So LETS GET IT.
I may increase the frequency of update releases as we get closer and closer to having FUN AND ENGAGING visuals, game mechanics, and STUFF.
Development team expansions
As promised, we are ramping up the development. As some transparency, we currently consist of these ACTIVE members (not to discourage inactive but honorary contributors from past, but still)
2 developers including me working near-fulltime, same with 2 artists, and a marketing manager. These are our current core team members. :)
See their exact names or chat with us on our Discord!https://discord.gg/9s6QdEy
