If you have been tempted to take the plunge with the one of the world’s most powerful 2D physics engine and tools, right now is a good time to jump since the Planetoid Pioneers Contributor Edition is a solid 20% off this weekend!
With it, you get a killer game development environment seven years in the making, and now also a real juicy preview of what the game we are building with it will play like. As a Contributor, you have a real chance to take an active part in the development of this unique action adventure!
The newest version with much of the content and features we put together during our team’s summer sprint called “Project Slovakia” is in this Contributor Build 3 (already available to our Contributor Community for a few weeks now).
Some of the highlights:
So we’re a bit late with this one – it was supposed to be out a month ago, but we had several (good!) things distract us, like preparing for our two-month sprint with the core team together in a cabin in Slovakia, which is now ongoing:
ProjectSlovakia images on Twitter
Anyway, we did have some great feature news to share even back then, like:
So go forth and enjoy the above in the latest build in the main (non-beta) branch on Steam!
The first major build of Planetoid Pioneers Contributor Edition has been released, and it’s a juicy one! Major improvements include:
There’s plenty of other changes based on Contributor feedback, so head over to our repository twitter stream for the nitty-gritty details.
ALSO, we have opened up our beta branch for those of you who want the very latest features straight out of the oven! Just right click the Planetoid Pioneers entry in your library list and go Properties in the drop-down, and then opt-in to the beta under the Betas tab. (leave pw blank)
That’s all for now! Next major update will be gameplay and content-focused, so stay tuned ~
– the Data Realms team
Before I get to the goods, a newsflash on Cortex Command: We are indeed still working on a a nice update with Workshop integration that will allow you to publish your mods to everyone on Steam directly from within the game. There’s a lot of menu stuff that needs to come together still, but rest assured it’s well underway. Also.. some long awaited bug fixes are in the pipeline (seam gib bug, i’m looking at you!). Keep eyes peeled on our twitter feed for the latest on when that drops.
Anyway, I’m here to present yet another meaty update to our next project, the Cave Vehicle Engine; this time Miro takes us though our engine’s powerful particle systems and their new editors:
The particles will definitely be put to good use very soon as we get into the collision and particle penetration effects (e.g. bullets zinging off and through objects, with sparks flying and holes being made!). We strongly believe that realistic, detailed, and physics-driven effects add a massive amount of fun and feel to gameplay, so we care a lot about fully fleshing out these things which might otherwise seem like trivial graphical details. We are excited to show what we truly mean in time for GDC this year.
But wait, there’s more! Miro has been hard at work on a ton of other stuff like powerful in-game Lua debugging tools, Color Picker palette, Scenario Editing updates, and refined controls for getting all these editors OUT of the main game window and onto secondary monitors! It’s really a great way to work, with the main CVE screen filling your main monitor, and all the clutter of the editor panels completely off to the side, yet still controlling stuff in the game:
A new test build of the Cave Vehicle Engine appears! So much great stuff: external editor windows for separate monitors, huge improvements to the robot editor, a new FlipBot concept that is a potential solution to the ugly 2D sprite flipping animation problem. Miro demonstrates how it all goes down in these two new videos:
a complete walkthrough on how to build your own robot in the game:
Hey guys, here’s a really significant update on the Cave Vehicle Engine project we are working on, in addition to polishing up Cortex Command 1.0! There is now a fully functional, yet unpolished (sound familiar?) robot/actor editor in there. I will let the lead engineer and tech designer Miro Adamus demonstrate how it works in this video: