Terraforming Earth
v1.4.12 fixes missing box issue with XMAS edition
Patch Notes - v1.4.10
His favourite is Curi, though. Curi's ability to evade Mowers is really appealing to him. Sometimes he activated hover at the wrong moment, so that Curi hovered just barely above the ground, which lead to some unscheduled Mower-induced disassemblies. He's very prudent and mourns each lost robot with a groan.
Seeing this, I implemented a change that makes sure that Curi always keeps a safe distance from the ground. With this change, you can also solve this obstacle without pressing a single button.
Very convenient, and also maybe a bit more logical, no?
My son likes to play Spiri, too! Teleportation is always fun. With Spiri, he's been bumping into doors while teleporting which made the experience a bit clumsy, so Spiri also got a new assist feature that helps with this.
I hope these changes will make your kids' life easier, too :)
Patch Notes, 1.4.9
I went for an other run, this time securing a victory via the plant-based strategy. I also got the Mr. Proper achievement for bringing back 100% of life. Only a single achievement to go until platinum, the dreaded Agoraphobe Run aka. Indoors Challange, in which you can only go outdoors if there are no indoors missions on the map, which makes it really hard to replenish TRUST. It took many weeks until I nailed it on stream, and there weren't even Drones and Turrets back then!
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Although there were no shields either, so I'm full of hope for this run. Anyway I'll try it with this brand new build, featuring:
- ledge assist: sometimes I fell off of floating bridges with Curi, so I implemented a little assist feature that helps you land on them.
- filtering out shared levels you've already played
- our heroes now have little name-tags in dialogues.
Have fun!
Andras
Tweaks, tweaks everywhere!
Anyway I tweaked some parameters to make the experience more enjoyable, I hope these little things will make your runs more fun in the future!
- faster terraforming progress
- robots start on max TRUST
- longer spawn protection
- Spiri is protected from bullets while phasing
- perks from EPA depot and S.C.F comms tower hacks are more effective
To the stars and beyond!
Christmas Special
Opi, Curi and Spiri doesn't really know what's going on with all this frivolous decoration, however the Earth's northernmost location is currently at its highest tilt away from the Sun, and so this must be a perfect opportunity to wish everyone a giant heap of utility for the next roundtrip around the Solar System.
Cosmic Love To Everyone <3
Leaving Early Access
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Levels All The Way Down
Puzzle games teach you many new skills but they are finite, and you finish them, and then you canât use those skills anymore. That's why we invented a puzzle designer AI which creates fresh levels for every run; you can use your problem-solving skills for as long as you like.
Guaranteeing that all levels are solvable was relatively easy (you can claim $100 cash prize for finding an unsolvable level!). The hard part was to make sure the levels are interesting and provide enough variety to keep you going for a long time. We spent more than two years honing the algorithm and gave players the ability to upvote cool levels so that other players can enjoy the generator's best hits.
A Transhuman Story
There are infinite levels but that doesn't mean you can't beat the game. You can achieve victory following two separate strategies: the easier route is to simply terraform Earth. The more challenging one is to find the cause of the mysterious disappearence of all life.
With this story, our goal was to paint a realistic picture of existential risk; stuff that can seriously cripple humanity's potential to realize our cosmic endowment of establishing an intergalactic human civilization. Trillions of trillions of potential future human lifes are in danger. The intro sequence might seem over-the-top but what happens there is actually well within the realm of possibilities in our current Universe. The threat of global warming, nuclear holocaust and asteroid impact is heavily publicized, but the risk from molecular nanotechnology and unfriendly AI wiping out humanity is less well-known. Our secret hope is that this story will nudge ambitious young people towards the field of AI-alignment research.
Graduating Early Access
Since the Early Access release this January, we released three DLCs to expand the experience. We also introduced many small features that improve the quality of the life you spend on this broken planet.
We'd like to thank our small community of friends and playtesters who never failed to point out issues and frustrations. This game was built on their shoulders. â¤ď¸
We hope you'll enjoy Terraforming Earth as much as we loved making it!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1029220/Terraforming_Earth/
Turret Trouble - OUT NOW!
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Bullet Hell... Puzzles?
The free Turret Trouble Update pits you against plasma-spewing enemies: you can't fight them directly, so you have to rely on your wit and planning abilities to make sure your quirky robots reach the objectives safely.
Turret Trouble adds 20 new obstacle configurations to the existing 90 puzzle types, raising the number of unique Terraforming Earth levels to about 10^81, more than the number of atoms in the Universe.
We played and playtested this update for a long time now and we hope you'll like the extra intensity as much as we do. Have fun!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1029220/Terraforming_Earth/
Get Ready for Some Turret Trouble
Turrets!
Be very afraid.
Bullet Hell Puzzles
Our latest expansion, Turret Trouble introduces a ton of new puzzles and hazards. In the spirit of the previous set of foes, Mobile Turrets and their stationary counterparts make the levels more challenging and require careful planning to make sure that our heroes safely get to objectives and reach the exit in one piece.
Annoying as these enemy robots might be, you also really need them to solve certain obstacles. You need Mowers to get higher and you need the Drones to fly over things. Likewise, you'll need the Turrets to... well, you'll figure it out :)
Quality of Life
Turrets are the major attraction of this update, but we've also improved the experience in many different ways and polished the game in places we didn't even know could use some extra polish. This includes tweaking with controls to make Opi and Spiri more fun to drive around, better gamepad experience and a whole new intro sequence that teaches new players how to use the Factory and the Mission Control screens.
The first three missions are now selected by hand to make sure players have time to get used to the controls before diving into the deep end of the procedurally generated pool.
Players who are flying solo will hugely appreciate that our heroes are now protected with cloaking devices when standing still. You don't need to park your robots carefully before switching to another one, freeing up a ton of mental resources so that you can concentrate on the puzzles.
Coming Early Next Week
Turrets will make their debut next week. If you are eager to meet them before the official release, hop onto our Discord server to learn the secret cheat code that unlocks them right now!
Cheers,
Andras and the Lost Robots team
Environment Update
To create more immersive and genuine environments, Timi and Csabi (our environment designer and art director, respectively) have been busy with enriching the environments with countless props and objects, to really bring home the point that you are on the deserted Earth. Humans lived here not long ago.
Dead trees and plants are scattered across outdoor levels since the Virus only killed organisms that were alive at the time. Various objects are left behind by the humans as well, such as boots and camping gear. Indoor levels are juiced up by countless colorful signs, graffiti and posters.
The level designer AI also got a visual upgrade: it now decorates walls and ledges with little details, resulting in a more organic look. Fresh playtesters trying out the game for the first time could never tell that the levels are not handcrafted, so this wasn't strictly necessary. However, we felt that a little variety won't hurt in this area either.
All in all, we hope that the Environment Update will lead to an even more immersive experience for old and new players alike.
What else is cooking?
We came out with the first mini-DLC slash major update in March: Drone Danger introduced several new ways to die! In the same spirit, we are working on a bunch of new obstacles and yet more ways to blow up in the form of different kinds of Turrets. The fun thing about these is that the level designer AI is throwing these new things next to the old stuff in crazy ways, which results in a lot of surprising situations. Expect the Turret Update to come out during May or early June.
Harsh conditions! (Warning, Turret visuals placeholders. They'll be pretty, I am certain).
And wait until you see the Turret Bots. As usual, foes are also friends; they help you solve certain obstacles. Turrets can be exploited to overcome a bunch of new situations. New puzzles! If you want to give Turrets a try before it's released officially to all players, hop on to our Discord server and we'll let you in on a little secret.
After the Turrets, who knows? Teleporters? Force fields? Moar dakka? Just wait and see. We have enough cash to work on this game until August, so until then you can expect a bunch of crazy things even if we don't sell a single copy. If you'd like to see us keep going for more, go and support us by picking up a copy of Terraforming Earth on Steam and telling all your friends about it too ;)!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1029220/Terraforming_Earth/
PS.: Oh yeah, and also play it with your friends over Steam Remote Play. That's what we do during the lockdown, it's awesome (and safe:). We all need to nurture our social connections extra hard during these isolating times, and playing games together is a great way to enjoy and share one of our greatest passions! Stay home, stay safe and stay connected!
50% Off During Early Access
In recent months we realized that since Terraforming Earth is the first roguelike puzzle platformer ever, it doesnât have an established audience yet. As we were pondering in a recent update, careful thinking and planning while being chased is a very challenging and unique experience. This is made possible by our innovative level designer AI. We believe these kinds of dynamic experiences will be the future of gaming and we are ahead of the curve. We might also very well be mistaken: thinking in fight-or-flight mode might be a bad idea and only interesting to a very niche audience. At any rate, we would love to find out which one is the case and for that, we need to involve more players.
Because of this, we are halving the base price of Terraforming Earth for the duration of Early Access.
We still believe that we have assessed the value of the game correctly, early player feedback seems to back this up. As we are adding more content during Early Access, this value only increases over time. When we transition out of Early Access, we are planning to revert back to the original pricing.
For those of you who have supported the project at the full price: we are sorry. By supporting us earlier, you got a worse deal. Your enthusiastic feedback so far suggests that you have got your moneyâs worth in fun puzzling experiences, so hopefully you donât mind that much. We still would like to honour your contribution by including your name in the Credits in the âEarly Backersâ section. Please send a mail to andras@terraforming.earth to let us know how exactly youâd like to be credited. Thank you so much for your early support!
For those of you who are considering picking up the game: thanks so much for sticking around and expressing interest in Terraforming Earth. We hope this offer will convince you to give the game a shot. Let us know either way.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1029220/Terraforming_Earth/
Cheers,
Lost Robots