Techtonica News

Greetings, Groundbreakers! We’re thrilled to finally share Techtonica’s Early Access release date with you.

Techtonica will enter Early Access on July 18th, 2023. We revealed the date during today’s Future of Play showcase, and you can check out the brand-new release date reveal trailer below.

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Thank you so much for your support, feedback, and hype as we’ve moved from Techtonica’s initial announcement to the closed alpha, public demo, and beyond.

We’re calling Techtonica’s Early Access launch 0.1, and we have so, so much to share as we move forward to 1.0 and beyond. Join our Discord to stay up-to-date and chat with devs.

Welcome aboard, Groundbreakers. We’ll see you on Calyx soon.

Let’s get to work.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1457320/Techtonica/

As we approach Early Access launch, we’re mostly focused on bug fixes and performance gains. Our art team, however, has been focused on upgrading the UI and menus in Techtonica.

UI is extremely important. We’ve all played games where menus were clunky and frustrating. Tweaking these elements and making them user-friendly while still looking rad is a difficult task, and our art team tackled it well. We previously covered the HUD UI update here; give it a read if you’re interested!

Today, we’ll share some more UI upgrades and dive into the thought process behind our UI design.

Let’s get to it.

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[h3]The Inventory Menu Overhaul[/h3]

The original menus were developed for our pitch demo. They supported different mechanics, many of which we tested and scrapped over the course of early prototyping. The art team was also developing the art style for the rest of the game which was going through fast and furious iterations. As both the art style and set of mechanics solidified, it became obvious that we had to update our UI to suit not only the new designs, but also the new story and narrative content.



Some features in this screenshot have been nixed... Like the health and energy bars from when we had survival mechanics!

The inventory and schematics menus are actually still pretty similar to the early designs (and will be undergoing a visual overhaul sometime in the future), but when you compare them to the new layout, it’s still pretty different.



There's a ton of info relating to both the resources and recipes in Techtonica, and there were a bunch of decisions to be made in terms of what exactly to show the player and what to keep in the background. It's pretty common to hear, "Oh, we should be showing that number, too," during development. While squeezing in another line of info can work from time to time, it's much easier to design a robust UI system that supports these types of changes.

The new inventory menu has organized the information needed in a much more efficient manner, cleaned up the fonts and color scheme, and added a lot more detail.

In the future, Techtonica’s inventory menu will look something like this.


While some of the features won’t be available for Early Access launch, eventually players will see machine statistics like throughput, fuel consumption, and more in their inventory menu.

[h3]Settings, Settings, and More Settings [/h3]

Below is the old settings menu from our first demo.. featuring a placeholder name for Techtonica while we started design!



While this looks clean, it was no longer representative of our current layouts and design, and we needed more options. Our current Settings Menu (with lots of new options) is below!



For the settings menu, we tried to be conscious of different gaming setups as well as accessibility for all of our players.

Eventually, our settings menu will look more like this:



[h3]Unlocking Satisfaction[/h3]

Finally, a fun UI effect we recently added is the unlock animation for terminals. Every time you repair a terminal, you get a really cool effect that we will improve over time.



We wanted to make the player feel excited about repairing the production terminal, and what better way to do that than a full screen animation?

Finally, we've got some big news.

[h3]The demo is being removed from Steam on June 9th. [/h3]

With Early Access launch on the horizon, it's time to say goodbye to the demo. It's no longer representative of the game we're launching into Early Access this summer.

If you’d like to chat more about the UI or what’s coming to Techtonica, join our Discord.

Until next week.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1457320/Techtonica/

Techtonica’s Early Access release approaches! We’ve been working on this thing for years now, and we wanted to pause and reflect on it a bit with you before the release gets here.

We sat down with a few developers to dig a little deeper into what’s going on with Techtonica.

Our Game Director, Richard, discusses what lead to Techtonica and some of what we have planned for tomorrow. Bristol, our Technical Artist, dives into how VFX helps with world-building and player direction. Finally, Eitan, our Founder, discusses our vision for Techtonica.

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If you’d like to hang out and chat directly with Techtonica’s developers and community, come join our Discord!

Wishlist Techtonica. We’ll launch into Early Access this summer.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1457320/Techtonica/

That’s right! The M.O.L.E. can do more than just tunnel in a single dig size.

You might already know about Flatten Mode, an upgrade that makes the M.O.L.E. level the Calyxian terrain around you for flat factory floors. Today, we’re introducing the unique bit sizes that take the M.O.L.E. from useful to absurdly powerful.

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Let’s dig in!

[h3]Wait, what’s the M.O.L.E.?[/h3]

For the new Groundbreakers among us, there might be some lingering questions about what, exactly, the M.O.L.E. is. We’ll touch on that quickly.

Techtonica is a factory game with destructible terrain. You’ll need to dig out ore veins, hidden chests, buried facilities, and paths to massive, open caverns. You’ll also want to clear space in the terrain for your factories, of course!

You can use your pick to do some digging, but that doesn’t work on all materials and is rather slow. The M.O.L.E., then, is one of our terrain manipulation solutions (to be expanded through Early Access!).



The M.O.L.E. is a black hole gun that digs in a 5x5x5 cube with its default mode.

[h3]Massive M.O.L.E.’ing with upgradable bit sizes[/h3]

As you upgrade PTs and build and place Research Cores, you’ll slowly unlock additional M.O.L.E. bit sizes, and these are super useful for bigger or more precise digging.

Aside from the default 5x5 bit size, you’ll be able to unlock 5x9, 3x3, 9x9, and, eventually, the massive 12x12.

I took a quick GIF to give you a sense of the 12x12 bit’s scale.



[h3]Invest in Coolant![/h3]

The eagle-eyed Groundbreakers among us likely noticed that the M.O.L.E. overheated in a single shot with the 12x12 bit size in operation. My advice? Invest in Coolant. To get that, you’ll need Iron, Shiverthorn, Miners, Power, Planters, Threshers, and Assemblers.



You’ll need a factory. Are you ready to get to work?

With every update, we’re getting closer to the Early Access launch of Techtonica this summer.

Wanna chat with the devs, watch live streams, and learn more about the game before anyone else? Join our Discord!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1457320/Techtonica/

In Techtonica, our intention is to give players the tools they need to automate virtually every process. From mining to terraforming, farming, and production, we want you to automate it all.

The tools to enable the automation of these systems will grow over the course of our Early Access journey, but we’re ready to reveal one final machine for our 0.1 launch this summer.

This is the Core Composer, and it automates Research Core placement.

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To understand why the Core Composer is essential, you’ll need to understand how Research Cores work.

[h3]How do Research Cores work?[/h3]

Techtonica features a Tech Tree that’s upgraded with three key methods: Production Terminal Upgrades, Scanning Artifacts, and Research Core placement.



Think of Research Cores, seen above, like points. These Cores come in different colors, and tech unlocks require increasing amounts of Cores. Some things may require 10 Cores to unlock, while others require hundreds. The power of the tech involved correlates to the placed Core cost.

You can manually place hundreds of Cores if that’s your jam, but we wanted to give you a tool to automate Core placement. That’s where the Core Composer comes in.



[h3]Automating Core production and placement with the Core Composer[/h3]

The Core Composer features eight ports on each of its four sides, sits on Power Floors, and automatically builds Cores fed via Belt and Inserters. Depending on how fast you feed it Cores, this massive machine can create a tower of research potential rapidly.

Here’s a timelapse to give you a sense of how it builds.



Once the Core Composer reaches a certain height, the five-by-five build pattern expands on all sides, and the Core Tower turns into a sort of Core Tree. The Cores themselves rotate, hum, and pulse, giving the Core Composer’s work a hypnotic, breathing vibe.

[h3]Designing Techtonica’s largest machine[/h3]

Designing and building the Core Composer meant establishing a massive machine for the world of Techtonica that offered an open top for Core placement. How, then, did the art team avoid a machine that essentially looked like a pizza box?



They started by looking at the design already established by items in the game’s universe like the Production Terminals. The rounded profiles and piped and lit exteriors make for a clean, almost mid-century vibe. The machine would be modular, too, allowing for more rapid production and implementation, much like our PTs.



The Core Composer is immediately readable from the sides and at a distance, and its open design allows for the Cores themselves to be the star of the show once they begin forming on its surface.

Thanks for reading this week’s update, Groundbreaker! We’ll be back next week with another batch of info as we march towards our Early Access release this summer.

Wanna talk Techtonica? Join our Discord!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1457320/Techtonica/