Same here, just heard about this, can't believe I haven't before. Looking very forward to the release, 2017?
Sorry for being quiet during the summer. I'm frantically coding Battlevoid: Sector Siege while our 2 other guys are hammering away on Space Haven, leaves little time to shoot updates! I'm hoping that will change soon as we get Sector Siege released. No release date yet for Space Haven, it's going to be sometime in 2018 I do believe. We only had 2 weeks off during the whole summer so rest assured we've been working almost the whole summer on it. I'm going to make an update soon, but to tell you what we've been up to: We have created a background generator system, which creates planets, suns, stars, asteroids, nebulas and more space elements. Now here's the astonishing part. This is all done with code! There aren't any sprites or textures, yet they look magnificent! Obviously we threw in directional lighting in there. What does this mean? Well, it means we can create parts of galaxies simply by tweaking a lot of numbers. This will keep the game package small, and texture sheets available to be used for other stuff. I'm really looking forward to showing the new background elements for you guys! Stay tuned. P.S. Regarding iPhones. It is our goal to make it work yeah, but there could be issues with screen space, we will see. If we can make it we will do it.
Sound Design Do you have sound design or music in the game yet? It's looking extremely polished! Can't wait to see the final result.
Sorry for not posting in a long time, I coded my own game and devoted myself so much to it that I didn't have time to update on our main game at all. Super happy now to be able to show how the game looks now! While Santa has been preparing for Christmas we have been churning away on Space Haven. Things are coming together, we are able to put more pieces together and start to experience the package as a game. There are still ways to go though, a lot of challenges have come up along the way but we are confident that we can overcome. I'm excited to show you the newest material of the game, I think the game is looking more gorgeous than ever but will leave it up to you to decide for yourself! Above is a ship designed for mining, a mining ship. 4 mining pods are able to launch from the pod hangars and go mine for resources. Two crew members put on their space suits and use jet packs to go claim a couple of mining pods left out in space. These should be useful for times to come! Team leader having a last debrief for the boarding party. We have encountered an unknown space ship and they are not responding to our hailing. Perhaps the ship is abandoned, could also be a trap! Life aboard a ship. There are plenty of tasks to take care of, keeping the crew members busy. Life is not bad right now, but we never know what tomorrow might bring. We need to be prepared. No life forms on this ship. However, we found some very valuable resources in the central storage, we will grab them and leave. Debriefing in the dining hall. Quite interesting to look at my first post and see how the game looks now when compared. I think we have managed to take it in the right direction! As for when it is coming out: I can't give a definitive answer to that yet, but we're hoping 2018 will be the year and that's what we're aiming for. Video clips in the link below! http://bugbyte.fi/forums/showthread.php?tid=417
We've been working on furthering our building mechanisms this first month of 2018. As we have started to get a better feel for the different systems in our game we have also started to think more about the real core of the game. One thing we knew we wanted to have was the expansion of a ship, being able to expand your base and get more room for new buildings is essential for any good building game! We thought about different approaches to this, but in the end we wanted to try to have it as free as possible and let the player design his own ship from the hull up. We ran into a pretty tricky problem since being in space means the hull walls should be kept intact when expanding, otherwise very important gases like oxygen and temperature will leak out and kill the crew! Also, in its current state our game differs from Spacebase DF-9 by not having the inner walls be the same as the outer hull walls. Because of this we had some issues but fortunately we managed to solve them. The screenshot above has a small "possible size of ship" - limit, so don't worry about that. Take a look at videos posted here to see how it all plays out: http://bugbyte.fi/forums/showthread.php?tid=451
Greetings! We have spent the past couple of months progressing quite well with Space Haven. We started focusing on game play and right now we're improving the UI to look much better! We have made a lot of progression regarding the AI of characters, they are now acting self-preserving and trying to stay out of trouble as much as possible. This really improved game play a fair bit already! Sorry it is taking so long, but we absolutely have to nail the game play or otherwise all work will be for nothing. There just isn't any room to give out a mediocre game. I know a lot of you must be yearning to know when the game comes out, but I do not have a definite answer yet. I can say that the game is starting to be playable now, we have played it for up to 1 hour already ourselves. It needs more content and more overall improvement though, but we're getting there! I will soon post new screenshots once we get the UI update ready, that will make the game look even better than before. Phyllis, the pilot of a mining pod, arrives to the air lock with resources to unload. Phyllis is going to grab a bite to eat before heading out again. August, the engineer, loads the core module of a newly captured ship and powers up the ship. Lights flicker as power is distributed to different parts of the ship. Ronna goes spacewalking to fetch a mining pod, she then docks it at the spaceship hangar area. Godfrey, the captain, looks busy at the bridge. He's not really busy though, he just wants to avoid heavy lifting at the docking area. Meanwhile, we spent time to set up a dedicated home page for the game, and also social media channels. So definitely check them out and give your favorite channel a follow below! https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceHaven/ https://twitter.com/SpaceHavenGame https://www.facebook.com/BugbyteGames And last but not least, check out the cool home page we set up for Space Haven. It has a lot of info about the elements in the game: http://bugbyte.fi/spacehaven/
Time to give you an update on what we've been working on the past month. We put emphasis on improving the user interface, since many of the game play elements really started needing it. We're working hard towards a "first early version" of the game. Everything we do is with that goal in mind. We have been tackling one problem at a time, and one by one we are able to solve them. Above is a screenshot of our new user interface, it's looking pretty slick we think! Hope you like it too and it makes you wanna click on things and watch things move. Like a real game! We've had one bigger problem for a long time. Linking resource usage to hull expansion. Our resource system was initially based on building blocks, meaning all facilities, walls etc. usually needed 1 or more blocks to be built. When playing the game we realized we had made a mistake. It started to take a very long time for the characters to haul building blocks everywhere, too much time. We had to redo the system a bit, to allow us to set custom material costs for elements to be built. The hull expansion was still a problem since we needed some way for 1 block to be transformed into many tiles of hull, otherwise the hauling would take much much longer than actually building something. Fortunately the mining pods was our answer, and it makes more sense for them to take care of expanding the ship hull. Mining pods can now be loaded with a building block and enables it to build some 10 tiles at a time before having to return to load up with more building materials. Since we were already working on the mining pods we decided to finish their build and mining animations. Really happy with the result! Look at them go, mining that asteroid for all that it has. Hey, we're really going to need all those resources so don't leave anything behind! We have also been working on a notification and objective system. These notes will pop up to help you get started in the game and will notify you when something is going wrong. Will be really important to guide the player to understand the game better! Another screenshot of the user interface. Oh right, characters have their own inventory system. You can equip them with weapons or other items you find aboard ships! Above is a screenshot of the tile based gas system. You can see the different view modes down to the right, currently oxygen is selected. Apparently this ship has low oxygen in a small room, where the core is. It's recommended to build walls around the core and other refinery facilities. They heat up a lot and some produce hazardous gases. Seal them off and equip the room with a spacesuit door to allow crew members to work safely near it. The crew job management system. You can assign your crew members to take care of various things. This menu needs a little polish still but it's working well! Arnie has some lunch and his stomach starts to grumble. Straight off to the toilet he goes! Ever seen anybody do his business so fast? Didn't even pull down his pants! When will the game be released? The game is really coming together now! I hope you can see the progress and want to thank you for your patience. Some of you have been following development of Space Haven since the beginning, I believe that's some 2 years now since we started. I can't say any exact dates yet, because we simply don't know when the game will be good enough. We want to do things right, and not rush out an incomplete package and have years of work go down the drain. The future of our company hangs on this game, if it fails we are in dire shape. Once again, heh! Also, any type of release of a game is also much more complicated than simply releasing it once it is done. Things we need to consider: [*] Is the time of the year right for an indie game release? For example, releasing on Christmas and fighting for visibility against all AAA games is pretty much suicide. Releasing when some big gaming event like E3 is going on is not good. What other games are being released, do we have a chance with Youtubers for visibility at that point? [*] If we do a Kickstarter, is the time of the year right? Same type of things apply as in above statement. [*] Has the game been tested enough and bugs ironed out? [*] Is there a Steam sale going on on that date, or has there just been one recently? As you can see, the best opportunities to release a game for indies are limited to certain times of a year. Best being around February - May and August - October. To give you some kind of time frame my best guess would be towards the end of this year or early next year. How can I help? [*]Stay tuned! And if you want to help simply give the link to this forum post to a friend, or refer them to: http://bugbyte.fi/spacehaven [*]You can share this album on a relevant Reddit subreddit or another forum you frequent! https://imgur.com/gallery/revSa [*]Remember to follow the game on twitter, facebook and now also instagram.
Oh, hello! Long time no see. Sorry for being quiet for a bit longer stretch there. Sometimes when you develop a game a lot of the back-end stuff gets done, which means there isn't much visible to show. We have been working on many things, I have probably forgot some of them. I want to start by showing a really cool screenshot of an asteroid base. We want the universe to be filled with other groups and their ships, but also space stations built to support space exploration. We thought it would be cool if humans decided to build these stations at/on asteroids! Making for cool asteroid bases that you can visit. We've been working on finalizing the user interface, testing that it looks OK on different screen sizes and resolutions. There is still some unpolished work, like polishing the button graphics and what not. However, the bulk of it is done! Above is a screenshot of the ship storage facility. You can build these wherever you like and optimize how you want them to store resources. Above is a screenshot of a grow bed, allowing you to plant fruits, vegetables and more to help sustain your crew aboard the ship. Growing plants will require water and the right environment conditions. It will also require someone who knows what they're doing, otherwise there is a risk that the crop will die! After finishing with the user interface (for now), we jumped into adding some character to our characters! No longer are they mere robots carrying out orders. We have made them much more human, which of course makes things a lot more interesting. We created a fully fledged mood system, which I have to admit is very similar to RimWorld. We like to try to be unique whenever we can, but we really didn't see a better way to do this. It is, however, tailored to Space Haven and has some features that separate it from RimWorld. Much of it is based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This mood system is what steers a lot of the game play and gives the player incentive to evolve and expand, to make the base better. Above is a screenshot of the skills and backstory of a character. We came up with the idea to develop some interesting backstory by linking occupation and traits to before and after everything went to hell. So the backstory will show what occupation the character had before the apocalypse, and which traits were revealed when the world collapsed. This combination can create interesting backstories like a character being a police officer but then revealing traits like being a wimp or psychopath after facing the apocalypse. The characters true nature shining through in dire times! Of course the police officer shown above is a very stereotypical police officer, lazy and likes to eat donuts! And finally for some fun stuff! We have also created a speech system to the characters in the game. This will be the way characters interact and actually develop some relationships between each other! We decided to use icons and emoticons, because they will allow for a lot of imagination, while still giving enough of context to know what is going on between characters. Above is the new guy asking if he can join a couple of fellows at the dining table. A heated discussion takes place when Neal walks up to the guys expressing his concern, Coby hates Neals guts so he immediately puts him in his place. Neal gets sad and Guy finds the whole ordeal very amusing. How can I help? Stay tuned! And if you want to help simply give the link to this forum post to a friend, or refer them to: http://bugbyte.fi/spacehaven You can share this forum post on a relevant Reddit subreddit or another forum you frequent! http://bugbyte.fi/forums/showthread.php?tid=483 Remember to follow the game on twitter, facebook and now also instagram.
Thanks guys! Anyone interested can read more here: http://bugbyte.fi/spacehaven/ There's also a sign up to our newsletter at the bottom to be notified of when the game is released!
