June 2020

Swissgames Showcase and a bit more of everything

Dear Mars people,

Another good month of progress on this part of the solar system. A lot of it is happening in the background and we don’t have so much game visuals to show this time. Though we do have some cool artworks of events which can occur in the game. Ever wondered how terrifying an incoming dust storm might be? Or have you pondered on if nuking the pole is a good idea? Here you go:

Artworks, user interface & sounds

Now that we are happy with the overall design of the UI, we worked with Miguel, our UI designer, on a collection of basic UI elements like buttons, windows and controls that we call the "UI toolkit". It will allow us to quickly put together decent looking interfaces when prototyping and implementing new design elements.

Frederik, our sound designer, has been busy with refining and producing more sound effects and it does really give depth to the game. For example, he designed multiple soundscapes for the cities, which are selected by the game depending on the amount of people in the city and the type of location.

Tiago on his side has been working on some more event artworks which we are excited to show you soon.

At the moment, the visual identity of the game is not very well defined. We had a few different artist working on the project and no clear guidelines or art direction. Thus we started working on a "brand book" to clearly define the art-style of the game as well as harmonize the different elements. Ludovic will lead this art direction endeavor.

Development

On the development side we have also progressed on multiple fronts at once.

First front has been improvements to our sound design tools for Frederik. He had some great ideas on how to fade in sound moods depending on which distance we are looking at the planet as well as on which size a city has reached.

We have implemented the UI toolkit from Miguel into the project and have made great progress to convert all the UI in place with it. As an example, the old settings window vs the new. It’s not an important part, but it still gives a great feeling to have it polished a bit.

Finally we have continued progress on the refactoring of the city mechanic as well as the implementation of the region mechanics. This ties into a lot of aspects of the game and it would be too much to describe all here. But we are very happy with where it is going and we can’t wait to show you.

SwissGames Showcase

We are also excited to announce that we have been selected to be part of the SwissGames Showcase. It’s a program put together by the Swiss Art Council to promote 10 Swiss games that they estimate have potential. Through this program Jamil Moledina, an industry veteran, selected us for coaching sessions. We will also be able to join upcoming events with SwissGames this year such as Gamescom, Reboot and Nordic Game. Perhaps we’ll have the chance to meet you, online or physically depending on how the situation evolves.

Thanks for following us in our development, we wish you all a nice summer!

Terraformers’ dev team