The game's development is ongoing, with a lot of new game mechanics and content being worked on. Here's a small update about all of this !
Soon on Greenlight !
We are working on the game's Greenlight trailer, to open up the votes in early January. Helium Rain should be available in Q2 2016 for Linux and Windows. Take a look at our brand new cover art, with a shot of the Invader class destroyer.
Gameplay
As a space sim, trading and economy are very important concepts. We're working very hard to ensure they are interesting. We now have factories and resources, and here are some new features we just finished :
- Cargo bays for ships and stations ;
- Resource trading UI, to buy and sell stuff to or from other spacecrafts ;
- Station and ship building !
Large parts of the economic model are still in the making, but the player-facing elements are all but done. We're working on a free market system, where every price depends on the station's situation, on the game's economy, on aspects that you will be able to impact as a player. It's very hard to balance, but will also be an interesting feature for the game.
Ship customization, one of the first features ever, also has a sleek and clean UI.
It's a tough challenge, but we're nearing completion of Helium Rain !
Art
Production of the game's soundtrack has started, with the first track already in the game. The first spaceships are now pretty much final, here is an exclusive look at our heavy freighter class.
We've also created a few brand-new stations. The first two are dedicated to energy production - they produce rocket fuel through electrolysis of water. The first station, the nuclear fusion plant, does it by fusing Helium-3, and the solar power plant uses solar arrays. Other stations will be shown later on !
Most of the game's art can be found on ArtStation.
Localization
We spent some time investigating a frequent request : the localization of the game. For now, the game is only in english, but we want to make it available in other languages as well.
- We spent hours to review all texts in the game, so that they all use Unreal Engine's localization infrastructure.
- The game was set up to work with localization. We don't have a language choice yet, but we can start Helium Rain in a different language through command line parameters.
- We only have around 1,500 words to translate, but most texts are very short and lacking context. It's actually a bit challenging. For example, we have a lot of texts like "SHIP : {0}" or "{0} credits".
- We can only translate fixed, complete content, or risk translating data that will be changed later.
If we do localize the game, we will work on it after the game is done with the Alpha version, which should come out at the end of the year for a select few.
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