Untold Universe - January update news

Hello everybody,

It have been a month now since our last post, as the end of the year was full of events and surprises. Still, we did not stop to work actively on Untold Universe, and I’m proud to say we progressed a lot!

Many things were done, as we are trying to accelerate our development to bring you a minimal and stable version of the game as soon as possible, for a private Alpha.

Spaceships physics

Handling correctly spaceships collisions and physics was one of our biggest challenge, as players can design them, and thus give them any shape. We spent the last month integrating the powerful Bullet Physics engine in our game and it finally works, making us able to detect collision per-cube.

A mid-size fighter class ship

That’s actually a huge step forward for our engine, and for the game. We, indeed, finished to build the essential bricks that will allow us to add many features in the future!

Trees are back!

Back when we started showing off some screens of the game in our news, the Terran biome was showcasing very cubic trees. We then removed them from the generation algorithm to improve their look. And now, they are back!

A small forest

New blocks

Being able to create spaceships, shipyards and buildings, we started to feel we lacked some more cube types. Thus, we added a batch of them, and reworked some to give designs a better look. Currently, the differences between blocks is mainly graphical. Actual properties will be added progressively.

Terran biome and buildings

We firstly re-worked the Terra biome rock texture, and added some new building cubes.

Digging underground

Spaceship blocks

Then, we modified deeply our spaceships textures, and added some. Here are the most important ones:

• Control panel: This is the most essential block in a spaceship. Without one, you can not pilot it.
• Engine: This block will be needed to make your spaceship fly, and will influence it's maximum speed.
• Energy cell: Another essential block. It provides energy to your other ship's modules.
• Armor plates: This is the most basic block when building a ship, coming in different flavours.

Hope you like them!

Private Alpha?

Three months ago, we opened a thread in our website's forum so you could tell us if you would like to help us build the game, by testing and criticizing. Since then, not many accesses were given. Indeed, we took more time than we thought to get the spaceships working. Now that this has been done, we are again considering to give away some keys next month.

For now, we are concentrating on stabilizing the game, and adding some small gameplay elements so testers could get a taste of what we are trying to achieve. We will come back to you soon with more information about that.

But anyway, I’d like to thanks the people who are showing interest in our game. Your opinion is valuable to us, and pushes us to move forward as fast as possible.

Thank you again, and see you soon!