September 2020

Mars Close Approach, Spreading Life and more

Hello there,

On October 6th, Mars was at its closest to us with only about 60 million km of space to cross from Earth. This close pass only happens about every 2 years. It is currently very bright in the sky, next to the moon, and you should totally check it out. It will remain very visible for a few weeks. One day, those close approaches will pace the life of the early mars colonization, as it will be synonymous with faster communication and rockets on their way.

Spreading life

We have made some more progress on the terraforming gameplay. As we quickly mentioned in the July devlog, we had implemented the atmospheric aspect of the environment (temperature, rain and oxygen). This month we added the “gardener of life” aspect where you can spread life forms. There are multiple life forms at your disposal and you will be sent new ones when completing quests from Earth. Each life form has different tolerance levels to different terraforming parameters, such as temperature, rain, food… and thus will grow or shrink depending on the situation. Life forms will also spread to neighboring regions if the environment is comfortable for them. And of course, you are not just spreading life for the fun of it (though it is fun in itself!), life forms will bring new resources and bonuses to your cities on Mars.

We have also continued to work on optimizing the planetary view. We aim to be able to display a lot of elements on the planet: exploration icons, location names, travelling characters, region borders, resource flows, city details… Our previous solution had some difficulties when hundreds of elements had been discovered, thus we are reworking it from the ground up for it to be efficient.

Events and more

We have some pretty exciting news that we cannot reveal yet, but expect another email to give more details soon!

We were also part of the Space Game Sale on Steam which just finished. It’s exciting for us to be part of these events, even just in the “Coming Soon” category, as it brings more eyes on the project.

Design and artworks

On the design side, some improvements were made to the city management mechanics as well as the transport mechanics in order to harmonize them better with the region and exploration system.

More artworks for exploration are in the works, such as this discovery of sandstone structures carved by the winds during millions of years.

Until next month!

Terraformers’ team