The time has finally come -- Synergy is now available in early access! We even have a nice Supporter Pack for you all that will be updated for the full release.
We would like to thank each and every one of you for sharing our game, wishlisting it, giving us feedback, and of course, to those who will buy the game for its early access launch or later.
Synergy is such a project close to our hearts that this early access launch is a huge milestone for us. We hope you will enjoy it as much as we have had fun working on it!
During early access, we plan to add new content and improve existing features (more news to come about this). More than ever, we will need your feedback to make the best game possible. So if you haven't joined our Discord server yet, feel free to do so! We will be glad to count on you there.
And last, if you like the game, please consider leaving a positive review. Besides warming our hearts, it will help us a lot to increase Synergy's visibility! 🙇‍♀️
Once again, thank you so much, and most of all, have fun in this strange and hostile world!
After years of hard work, we are thrilled to officially announce that Synergy will be released in early access on May 21st!
Watch the release date trailer on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/sF9s3N9qUmw
We can't wait for you to experience this early access version and collect your feedback.
To tide you over, here's our latest devlog about how the developers took inspiration from the Moebius style to create Synergy.
The community has spoken! Your questions were numerous, and we've decided to dedicate this devlog to the one that kept coming back: how did you manage to capture the style of Moebius in a video game? And what were the challenges associated with that? Okay, okay, that's two questions, I see you coming! Vito Salamone - Lead Artist is here to answer you today.
The main motivation was to faithfully recreate the unique characteristics of traditional comic books. Therefore, it was only natural to employ a technique that closely resembled it to capture its essence as much as possible.
Thus, all the game assets were created in 2D using a graphics tablet. Extensive research was conducted beforehand to achieve a result that best encapsulates the textured, organic aspects, as well as the roughness of a medium's grain.
This choice was also motivated by the available production resources, which were mainly oriented towards 2D.
Regarding the style itself, it was important to preserve the dreamlike and light-hearted imprint characteristic of Moebius' style.
From a technical standpoint, this life is symbolized by a rough, trembling, and textured line that draws itself in soft and nonlinear curves. All of this is complemented by debris of lines reminiscent of organic movement and physical support.
In the context of a city builder where many elements are displayed on the screen, the challenge is to make everything readable and coherent for the player. It's important to strike a good balance between a visually consistent and immersive environment to maintain visual enjoyment while also ensuring maximum accessibility and ease of understanding.
To clearly distinguish between different types of objects, color-coding was implemented. Given the visual style's flexibility, which allows for a wide range of colors, it was relatively straightforward to opt for color codes that allow players to quickly identify the family of objects to which a building belongs: yellow for industrial, green for cultural buildings, purple for healthcare and prevention structures, etc.
Building upon this idea, it was important for players to also find enjoyment in constructing a beautiful city. Beyond survival objectives, players have the opportunity to arrange their city as they see fit. This includes creating cities and villages with multiple intertwining colors or more orderly arrangements, breathing life into the overall environment.
Once the elements were integrated, the challenge shifted to their animation. Bringing all these elements to life can quickly become time and resource-intensive. Therefore, puppet animation was quickly favored—a technique that involves cutting out each character and building element to animate them piece by piece. This allowed for a wide range of movements while remaining consistent with the initial vision and maintaining credibility in terms of production reality.
In conclusion, translating this visual style into a video game required a lot of observation and preparation. The guiding principle was to achieve a result that is as visually appealing on the screen as it is enjoyable to explore.
-Vito Salamone Lead artist
We hope you enjoyed this 7th Devlog! Thank you so much for your support and see you soon for the next one!
Synergy is a city-building game in which humanity must survive in a strange and hostile world. Build a city while respecting the ecosystem. Explore and analyze your environment. Provide for the needs of your citizens.
Watch our pre-recorded stream featuring some gameplay of Synergy, and make sure to try out our first public demo!
For any feedback or suggestions, feel free to join our Discord server. ♥
✨ Synergy - Steam Next Fest
Synergy is a city-building game in which humanity must survive in a strange and hostile world. Build a city while respecting the ecosystem. Explore and analyze your environment. Provide for the needs of your citizens.
Watch our pre-recorded stream featuring some gameplay of Synergy, and make sure to try out our first public demo!
For any feedback or suggestions, feel free to join our Discord server. ♥
SYNERGY DEMO IS OUT NOW!
You've been waiting for it as much as we have. We are SO thrilled to finally unveil the first public demo of Synergy, right before the Steam Next Fest!
Build a city while respecting the ecosystem. Explore and analyze your environment. Provide for the needs of your citizens.
In this demo, you can expect approximately a 1-hour experience, including the following content:
Research system
8 exploration events
7 elements of flora to analyze (1 of the 3 types of analysis for now)
20+ buildings
20 resources
We can't wait to get your first impressions, and we hope this very first demo will meet your expectations! However, please keep in mind this preview is just a small portion of what awaits you in the full game. ♥
👇 If you like the demo, don't forget to wishlist the full game to get notified for launch!
In our previous Devlog focusing on shadows and depth, we took a slightly more technical approach than usual. Today we're back with a more standard devlog, but more importantly, we're excited to introduce a new feature – Neighborhoods!
To begin with, all residents in Synergy require shelter due to the harsh climate. They will regularly come to drink, eat, and sleep in their homes, so it's crucial to carefully consider the placement of your houses.
These buildings should be located close to a Cellar, a structure that provides houses with food and water in the surrounding area.
Once you've ensured the survival of your citizens, it's time to enhance their quality of life!
You'll have the opportunity to build a Neighborhood for your residents. Start by constructing one of these three squares: a cultural square, a trade square, or a botanical square.
The square will bring together all the buildings and homes in its area to form a Neighborhood. Next, choose the type of Neighborhood this area will become – historical, creative, or convivial.
Each neighborhood requires the presence of specific buildings to be considered valid – a special building as well as regular ones. Other buildings in its area will contribute to its final score. For example, for the convivial neighborhood, you'll need a canteen as a special building, along with three houses.
Additionally, objects like wells, sun shelters and kitchens can significantly boost your neighborhood score with a large number of points each. Smaller bonuses, such as benches, housing, or tables, contribute a few points each. This allows you to focus on a specific bonus type, creating diverse neighborhoods with unique atmospheres.
These neighborhoods will provide bonuses to the quality of homes.
There are multiple types of bonuses that you can obtain through the creation of these neighborhoods. For example, by making a creative neighborhood, each house can now score up to 30 cultural points instead of 20. This creates homes that are much more enjoyable for the residents and also contributes to your city’s prosperity score.
We hope you enjoyed this devlog and can't wait for your feedback about this upcoming feature. Thank you so much for your support, and stay tuned for the next one!
Welcome to this new Devlog, which will be a little more technical than the others as we will tell you about the process of creating shadows and depth in Synergy!
While creating the game, we faced a common challenge in top-down 2D games - sorting rendering elements. The go-to strategy is drawing elements from top to bottom based on the texture's baseline, but it doesn’t work in some cases!
Buildings and environmental elements vary in size and don't always have a square base. As a result, larger elements may need to be rendered behind smaller decorations, even when they are lower on the screen. Simple fixes, like dividing long decorations into sections, can resolve these issues.
But this approach isn't quite suitable for us because in Synergy, the buildings are animated. Cutting them into sections would complicate production.
We opted for a solution similar to what is done in 3D games: sorting the entire game environment with a Z-buffer.
This not only allows us to sort buildings and the environment without issues but also gives us the ability to position characters realistically within the buildings!
To have a functional Z-buffer, we needed a basic 3D model of each building or environmental element and to store depth information in a texture.
We use Blender for our 3D models, and an in-house tool makes a standardized file for each of them, ensuring consistent depth textures for all buildings. After that, we process the texture to smoothly integrate it into the engine, using a filter in Substance Designer.
With a depth representation of the building, we can explore various visual effects by accurately determining the world position of each pixel in the environment!
This allowed us to implement our atmosphere and fog system, enhancing the world's relief and visual appeal.
Access to 3D information in the game allows for dynamic shadow casting on the screen. The process is a bit intricate.
In typical 3D games, shadows are rendered by comparing the Z-buffer from the game camera to the light source's perspective. However, our depth textures are limited to the game's view, not the light source's. So, we use rays from surfaces to the light until they hit a building for shadows.
It may not be the most efficient, but it provides interesting results in our 2D world. To maintain smooth gameplay, we generate intermediate images to estimate distance for optimal performance.
Simply having depth information doesn't cover the thickness of a decorative element. For the most accurate shadow, we have to estimate thickness; otherwise, the shadow appears too large and incorrect.
The building's thickness is estimated based on the rendered element's width. This way, a pole or column looks less solid than the body of a house.
There is still some work left to enhance shadow quality and performance, but it's a visual bonus well worth the effort.
We hope you enjoyed this 5th Devlog and thank you for your support during this project. See you soon for the next one!
Once again, we gather here after two months to present our latest Devlog. We are excited to inform you that our game is constantly progressing, and we can't wait to reveal more details soon!
In the meantime, we'd like to introduce you to the diversity of flora that awaits you in the game. We now have 17 plants for you to discover on the surface. These plants will play a crucial role in your journey as you strive to develop and build your city in the face of extreme and challenging weather conditions.
By interacting with these plants, you'll have the opportunity to harvest valuable resources, assisting you in the construction and growth of your city. While we won't disclose the specific properties of these plants just yet, we can give you a glimpse of their appearance and growth stages.
By analyzing them, you'll be able to identify different properties of the plants that will be beneficial for your colony. To do this, you'll need a Field Laboratory.
This building will allow you to analyze plants on the surface in order to understand them and avoid overexploitation, ensuring their preservation on your land.
Assign people to the laboratory, you will be able to stack up to 5 research tasks which they will conduct in the order of entry.
These research tasks will provide valuable information about the needs of the researched plant, such as its water requirements or whether it should be avoided, the type of resources it produces (e.g., water or food), and other benefits it can bring to your soil if you plant it in your colony!
Choose a plant on the surface and learn to understand it, so you can properly grow your seeds and thrive with their help in your colony. Add your knowledge to the Book of Knowledge.
You'll also receive information about the risks of harvesting, as your characters could get injured which research can reduce this risk of. (Additionally, you'll learn more about their appearances: smooth, porous, spiky, and so on.)
Each plant is unique and serves a useful purpose for your colony. We hope you'll enjoy enriching your Book of Knowledge with your research!
Thank you for supporting us in our project. Every day, our game progresses, and we couldn't do it without your support. See you soon for the next Devlog!
It's been a while since our latest devlog, but we've certainly made some good progress in Synergy, as you may have seen on social media! Obviously, we can't wait to show you more.
In the meantime, we'd like to introduce you to the different roles your citizens will play in-game in this small devlog. However, keep in mind citizens will not have predefined roles. It will be up to you to assign them tasks in the various buildings, and their outfits will change accordingly.
As you may already know, in Synergy, you'll need to explore, build, and develop your city amidst extreme weather conditions. However, be careful not to leave your citizens unhappy if you want to thrive. Without further ado, let the introductions begin!
Expeditions require around 5 citizens, but this number can be increased by having multiple exploration buildings. Explorers venture to destinations they have glimpsed from afar, not knowing exactly what they will find. Once there, they regularly face choices that lead them to gather resources, knowledge, or even new plants to reintroduce to the map. Additionally, citizens can explore new areas, opening up the possibility of discovering new destinations.
The explorers wear large hats that provide a continuous nutritional supply during expeditions and protect them from heavy sun rays.
The agronomists are the citizens who work in most of the buildings related to plants and water. They can be found in the gatherers' hut, the arborists' workshop, the self-sustaining garden, the nursery (for reintroducing plants), as well as the pier and the water treatment basin.
They need this diving suit-like bubble to protect themselves from the toxic emissions that can occur when handling certain crops.
Sages have a deep understanding of life in general. They contribute to the community through their wisdom, but they are not self-righteous or socially superior beings. They primarily work in cultural and social buildings, as well as in schools and a few other care-oriented buildings.
They embody the idea of serenity and an open mind towards the environment, and therefore they do not wear hats.
Scientists dedicate their lives to understanding the world and the technologies that surround them. They mainly work in the field laboratory (analyzing plants and terrain), the research center (technological research), or the weather station (weather forecasting).
Their outfit is made of waterproof material and has a shape-changing feature that allows them to interact with dangerous substances.
Craftsmen engage in precision craftsmanship, such as woodworking or the arts. You can find them in places like the weavers' workshop, the carpentry shop, and other art-related buildings.
They use a monocle equipped with a precision lens to perform tasks that require fine accuracy.
Hammerworkers are also craftsmen, but they specialize in construction and heavy-duty work that requires extensive protection. They are the citizens who construct buildings, work in the blacksmith's workshop, the foundry, and the excavated cave.
For their work, they are equipped with gloves, fireproof suits, and welding masks.
And here we have the chefs! These citizens work in a few rare but essential buildings related to food, such as the Kitchen for food preparation and the Canteen where citizens come to dine.
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And that's it for today! We hope you enjoyed this small devlog, which provides more insight into the tasks you'll be able to assign to citizens in the game.
See you in a few weeks for another devlog, and until then, thank you all so much for the really nice feedback here on Steam, but also on social media!
