We have an exciting announcement, we are going to release the game in Early Access, and very soon!
In this devlog we will detail why we will release in Early Access, when it will happen and what our development plans are during this period.
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Why Early Access?
We have reached a point in development where all the major components of the game are in place, and we’re now shifting focus towards adding exciting content. This will be a gradual process and will still take some months. But the core game is already playable and we feel there is no reason to keep the game away while we are adding more to it.
In addition, the feedback we received on the demo and then on the prologue has been invaluable in improving the game, balancing it and polishing it. We have some ideas for a few more features and content but we think it would be cool to involve you all in the process.
Science congress artwork by Ludovic Rossier for the scientific golden age event.
Initial Early Access version
Compared to the prologue, there will be multiple new additions when we release in Early Access, most notably:
New projects, lifeforms and leaders.
Space projects that you can do outside of Mars.
New impactful events.
A new trade interface.
Scenarios providing unique challenges, and difficulty levels.
A meta progression system that unlocks more content as you play.
Quality of life improvements.
Removal of the turn limit, longer play time!
And a lot more!
We are doing our best to have the most polished and bug free experience possible for early access, but it is important to remember that early access is not the full game and there will be some missing elements. We will aim to keep saves and compatibility between updates as much as possible, but we can’t promise that new features will never break ongoing saves. We also intend to keep the progression between early access and the full game, so all content unlocked would remain unlocked.
More projects and visual variation.
Early Access updates and more
During early access we will release regular updates to the game to add content, improve the balance and polish the experience of the game. And of course we will continue to take your feedback and ideas into consideration. Our goal is to release a total of 4 large updates spread out over 6 months, so an update about every 6 weeks. All updates will contain new projects, new scenarios and balance patches. This is our current plan for the updates, though it might still change as we progress in development:
Update 1 will introduce technologies, which provide global benefits in various areas and cost science to research.
Update 2 will be the leader update, where we will add more leaders with unique skills and specializations to the game.
Update 3 will be the space update. You will be able to found a city on the two Martian moons: Phobos and Deimos. Also we will add more space projects in this update.
Update 4 (Full release) would be the final update. As this will be the last update before full release, we will focus more on polishing and quality of life improvements.
We will also add more music and sound effects to the game, however it is not planned yet in which update this will be.
After full release, we will of course continue to maintain the game and have some ideas for DLCs.
Success is within reach!
Release dates and pricing
We will release the game in Early Access on the 21st of April this year. The game will release for 19.99 euros / dollars on early access and there will be a small discount in the first week.
We estimate that we will stay about 6 months in Early Access which currently puts the full release of the game at the end of October 2022. We estimate 6 month is enough for us to integrate the content we still have prepared as well as implement the feedback and ideas that will come up from you. If these are a lot, it might require a few more months. Seeing how involved some of you have been, we can’t completely rule this scenario out ;)
And of course, the most important thing for us is to release the game in a complete, nicely polished state and if that requires a few more months of work, so be it.
The price of the game might go up a little bit on release. And we are also hoping to release it on Nintendo Switch at the same date (as the full release of the game).
Get ready for Early Access launch!
And this is it! We’re super excited to finally be so close to release after working on this game for years. We can’t wait to see the creative strategies you will come up with to win even the hardest difficulties.
Get ready! Terraformers Dev Team
January Devlog: Space projects, trade UI changes and city migration
Hello everybody. In January we developed and fine tuned the game further, and designed new content. In this devlog I’ll show a new feature that will be in the game: Space Projects! Also I will discuss how this new feature might change the trade interface, and explain how the migration of cities and projects due to sea level rises will work.
Space projects
Mars will not just be terraformed using the resources that are present on Mars itself. To turn the Red planet into a Blue and Green one, you will have to look towards the stars.
Space projects are similar to normal projects in the way they are proposed, but once chosen they will not be simply playable by spending its required resources. Instead, they will be stored next to your trade panel and you will have to transport the resources towards them using your transport routes.
Work in progress space projects art
Work in progress space projects UI
This means that it will take multiple turns to complete it (depending on how fast you can transport the resources there), and that you will have to choose between using your transport route to trade resources with Earth, or to send resources to a space project. Some examples of space projects are:
Importing Water from Europa, a moon orbiting Jupiter.
Constructing giant space mirrors, heating up the planet.
Mining asteroids, to acquire more resources.
Trade User Interface changes
The trade panel that is present in the prologue, is difficult to scale when there are lots of transport routes. Also it doesn’t work very cleanly in combination with the new space projects. Therefore we are trying out different designs for it. The design in the images above is what we are testing at the moment, and still improving visually. The idea is that your amount of unused transport routes are shown at the bottom, and you can click on the buttons next to the resources to import/export them. At the end of your turn, they always need to be in balance. Using this system, you can also export resources towards space projects.
Work in progress UI for trading
City migration
Rising sea levels is an integral part of terraforming Mars. This will result in some locations that can be submerged into oceans. Which locations will be submerged, and on which ocean rise level this will happen, is indicated by the amount of blue waves next to the location.
Work in progress of city migration
Here you can see that “New Havana” will be submerged if the ocean level rises by 2 steps in the future. To prevent this, we can now migrate the entire city to another city location. This will take time though, time during which the city will not produce anything. The duration is based on the distance towards the new location. The further away, the longer the migration process will take. As you can see we could migrate New Havana to the south, where there is a “flat plains” city location. The duration will be 6 turns (2 + distance).
When migrating to a new location, you will be able to relocate your buildings inside it as well, just as your Headquarters. This will also be an option for individual buildings, for example if you want to place them in a different spot in the same city, or in another city entirely (though that takes longer).
Work in progress of city migration
That was it for this month, stay tuned for more exciting news soon and thank you for reading!
Terraformers Team
December Devlog: 2021 retrospective, december progress and a peek into 2022
Dear community,
we would like to wish you all a very happy new year 2022 and thank you for your support! We hope your year is starting as successfully as the launch of the James Webb telescope! This year will be an exciting one for us with the upcoming launch of Terraformers!
James Webb telescope takes off from Kourou in French Guyana on december 25th 2020. Photo from NasaHqPhoto.
2021 retrospective
2021 has been a busy year and the game has progressed a lot since last december. Looking back it’s always fascinating to see all the things we have done and what we thought at the time! Exactly one year ago, we were gearing up for the Steam Festival of February but eventually decided the game was not in a good enough state yet, so we decided to cancel and aim for the June Steam Festival instead. It was definitely the right choice as the feedback on the demo in June was positive and helped us improve and confirm the design for the prologue which we released in October. Your feedback on the prologue has been invaluable to improve the game and it’s been very motivating to see your high scores and ideas.
It’s always fun to see how much we have progressed in the past year.
December progress
To conclude 2021, this December we have implemented a slew of new features. We have improved the map generation logic with new unique landmarks. We added the possibility to have varying city layouts which now also include slots that provide unique bonuses. We also added the possibility of relocating cities and buildings as well as destroying buildings as it was requested a lot. We also added “space projects” which are major projects that can be done outside of Mars, for example redirecting an asteroid.. On the art side we made new leaders, buildings, and visual & UI polishing. And finally we patched the prologue to be as smooth as possible.
An in progress art piece from Tiago showing the livelihood of people in a Martian city.
A peek into 2022
All the stuff we did in December brings us very close to being feature complete. We are currently working on the overall game progression and implementing multiple starting scenarios as well as content unlocking as the game progresses. And after that, we will focus on implementing the ever growing list of content: buildings, space projects, leaders, leader skills, events and other things which our designer has been creating tirelessly. There is still a lot to do but it’s exciting to reach this stage where almost everything is in place. Now it’s about polishing, balancing and implementing all the already designed elements.
The concept for the new scenario selection screen.
With 2021 behind us, onward to 2022! Stay tuned for more, Terraformers’ Team
