Our development team wants to thank those players who was watching and following the creation process of the game. We thank you for your patience and for believing in our dream. It is you who make Exoplanet to live and evolve in order to become better and bigger game with every single day passed!
In 2013 Exoplanet: First Contact has changed and become deeper, larger and more complex than even we – the developers – have expected. The project made many important steps to being an actual RPG with all than belongs to the genre and it also has gradually obtained several new features which will be crucial to deliver the desired gameplay quality and variety. Unfortunately not everything has gone as it was planned in 2013 and we did not managed to polish some new elements of the gameplay and game’s subsystems to the point, when they can be proudly presented to the community. That is why you can expect them to be announced and demonstrated and discussed thoroughly in early 2014, and that is why we want to discuss some things which will be first highlights of this year.
One of the most important goals for us in this year will be to release the alpha version of the game in Steam Early Access but there is still a lot of improvements to be done before it’s happening. As usual we want to achieve the certain high quality and implement the additional gameplay functionality before hitting Early Access. However for those of you who are to eager to try it out right now, the game’s alpha is accessible via preordering it on our site.
In the nearest future we are going to present the community our first completely functional quest and dialog system as well as the dynamic day\night cycle which also affects the behavior of NPC’s and monsters and completion of certain ingame tasks. The optimization of the engine and game’s resources also has not being forgotten during the past months and we have taken some bold measures to increase the performance in the upcoming builds at least by 30%, especially on medium-end and even weaker PCs, mostly thanks to the new rendering culling software we have integrated into the engine. Basically it makes the engine to decide, which “hidden” objects in the scene do not need to be rendered at the given moment of time (“hidden” means invisible to the player, e.g. hidden behind the landscape, buildings or level assets). It allows us to create much larger levels at this stage and potentially even connect them all in one big seamless world without a single loading between the areas in the future. We definitely are going to discuss this topic in details in one of the upcoming updates as well as cast some light at the mysterious “new large location” we are working at, which was not demonstrated in any form to the wide audience yet.
We are also glad to announce that the first preorderers with the high reward tiers are already saved in our Bounty Hunter Terminal database and soon they can found their “Wanted Poster” reward in any terminal across the K”Tharsis. Those of you, who has the according reward tier, can create your Wanted Poster by sending us your photos and short description of the character you want to be the world of Exoplanet. The details and terms are included into the E-mails we have sent to our generous preorderers.
In this new year we also decided to update Alersteam’s logo and to add a short slogan to it in order to outline our developer’s motto. In our logo graphics we are trying to show our desire to become stronger, to move forward, to activate our inner force and thus make better, bigger games, fascinating worlds to be discovered by us and other players. Lets discuss our new logo, friends: what do you think of it and what interesting associations you get looking at the picture and our new slogan?
In addition we also want to show you one of the most important improvements of the game’s content we have finished in 2013 – the new “face” of the Exoplanet which is represented by the new model of Jack Sharp, the Exoplanets protagonist. He was carefully sculpted and textured by our 3d artists and now is being animated to be included in the upcoming builds. Here are some pictures to show you the level of detais and amount of work made by our artists. We eager to know your opinion about the new Jack’s appearance: does it match the Space Western spirit as you imagine it? Let us know what do you think about it!
In or next posts we will continue to tell you about the different sides of the game’s development and also we give our best to make the intervals between the updated as short as possible.
Give the man some balls and a healthy piece of junk, my god! First I thought he was a chick with a beard ;)
Nice modeling, but some of the stuff like the gaiters make him look less "manly" to me. Some of the attachments also seem a bit too percectly shaped, for example, wouldn't these plates on the armor sides be more extruded into a kind of plating/convex shape? As it is - concave - they look too smooth to really give that sense of a protective layer; not sure where his shirt would fit below that. Perhaps it would be nice to have it sticking out under the armor.
The same kinda goes for the ammo belts. They would look better if they wouldn't be so perfectly smooth on his body and so thin. This isn't suede leather, but manly, coarse stuff.
Tt's a good looking model from a technical standpoint and I guess it serves its duty already. I just think it could be made to look better by making things a little less perfect, as strange as that may sound.
Thanks False3d! Great work.
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