Techtonica News

As we announced last week, the Techtonica demo has officially returned!

What’s changed? Super, super minor stuff, quite honestly. We did prepare these patch notes for your reference, though, and we’re renaming the Techtonica demo in order to solidify that this will not be updated.

The Techtonica demo is now live as the Techtonica Prologue!

[h3]Here come the patch notes![/h3]

You, the community, wanted a way to play the game after the Demo’s untimely demise, so here it is! The Prologue is very similar to the Demo, with a handful of small changes.

Please note that the Techtonica Prologue is an UNCHANGING MONOLITH, a snapshot in stasis, a stationary testament to how time makes fools of us all. Which is to say… we’re not gonna update this.

We’re pouring our effort into making Techtonica proper the best game we can, which means leaving the Prologue as-is.

🏭 Minor Updates 🏭
⛏️ = Changed in response to community feedback

• Updated in-game text to remove reference to Next Fest. Next Fest is so two months ago; the Prologue is what’s hot right now.
  
• Disabled the in-game feedback form because we were tired of hearing from you (no wait, that’s a joke, please don’t go, just give us feedback in Discord!).
  
• ⛏️ Improved performance while navigating menus with large inventories (this does not affect some menu hangs on open/close)
  
• Updated resource icons. They’re so shiny! They don’t match the models for their resources… YET!
  

A Note on Save Files

For the diehard Groundbreakers who just can’t let go of their Demo save files, good news! Your save files should be mostly compatible with the Prologue.

However, Demo/Prologue save files will not work in the Early Access release of Techtonica.

—

Welcome back to Calyx, Groundbreakers. Now, let’s get to work.

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

It’s true! There are real human people making Techtonica, and we took a week to hang out, eat, play games, and bond as a team for the first time since the pandemic began.

Fire Hose Games was founded and is largely based in Boston, MA, but we now have team members distributed across the U.S. and in a few other countries around the world! We went remote because of the pandemic, and that means a lot of folks have never met in person beyond the confines of a virtual meeting place.

So! Before Thanksgiving here in the States, we held our annual summit in Boston and gathered as many of our team as possible to grow as a company and as friends.

We thought you’d like a little look at what we did over the course of the week!

Oh, by the way, the demo relaunches this week.

[h3]On Monday, we traveled. [/h3]

When we officially got together, we chowed down on ramen and, of course, hot chocolate. A few of the team even made it out to a great dive bar for a few beers.





[h3]Tuesday? Aquarium.[/h3]

On Tuesday, we ventured to the aquarium before a bunch of very (boring) important team meetings. Excuse me, Penguins.



[h3]Wednesday meant Boda Borg.[/h3]

Boda Borg is this really interesting take on real-life video games, sort of. It’s equal parts escape rooms, puzzles, and obstacle courses, and the team had a blast breaking into groups and fighting through failure to stretch brain muscles and conquer rooms.



[h3]Thursday was museum day.[/h3]

On Thursday, the Fire Hose team hit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a beautiful place and perhaps one of the most interesting museums I’ve ever visited.





[h3]On Friday, we called it quits.[/h3]

We all made our way back to our respective homes on Friday, but not before we spent Thursday evening saying goodbye to Ruma.



---

Thanks for reading about our adventures. Now? Other than swapping some language in the demo to relaunch it, we're hard at work on the Early Access release of Techtonica. You can expect lots more about the game soon.

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

Hello Groundbreakers.

We’ve heard you. We’re bringing the Techtonica demo back.

Here are the key details before we get into the meat of what we’re doing. First, the demo will go live in the next week-ish; we’ll be sure to update you here and on Discord. Second, the demo will not be updated as we focus on the main game.

[h3]Okay, here’s how we got here.[/h3]

We launched the Techtonica demo immediately after the invite-only Alpha finished in September. The purpose of the demo was two-fold:

• Open the Alpha experience up to everyone
  
• Stand as our demo during Steam Next Fest
  

We left the demo up for an entire month after Next Fest, but the plan was always to remove the demo once the Steam festival ended.

The demo does have its bugs and performance issues. Moreover, every day, the demo gets less and less like the game that will launch into Early Access in 2023. Eventually, the demo won’t represent what players will get when they buy the game.

[h3]The demo returns next week.[/h3]

With all of that said, we’ve heard folks would rather have the snapshot, unsupported demo than nothing at all. So, we’re making minor changes (like removing the references to Next Fest) and relaunching the demo for free on Steam next week.

Remember, we won’t be updating the demo at all. We’re focused on building the Early Access version of Techtonica, and we don’t want to spare the developer time to update the demo.

Because the demo is getting less and less like the actual game every day, we plan to remove it once we get close to launch (probably within the month of launch). We don’t want players to download the demo and think that’s the version of Techtonica they can expect at release. The Early Access version of the game features more polish and more content.

Thank you for being such a great community. We wouldn’t have reached this decision without your feedback.

See you on Calyx!

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

We’ve talked about this before in our Discord AMAs and across a few interviews, but we’re going for something special with Techtonica. Internally, we refer to it as flow or flow state.

It’s not something we made up! Flow is a real thing, it even has its own Wikipedia page, which is the standard for when a thing becomes real.

Essentially, entering a flow state means you’re in the zone, totally immersed in and energized by the thing you’re doing. As you can probably imagine, this is a super common thing in video games, especially in genres like factory automation, city sim, base building, and colony building.

We’re striving to build an experience that helps players achieve that flow state of energized and relaxed focus, and we feel that a huge part of getting there lies in the music players hear.

Techtonica’s soundtrack (and audio design) is being done by Cityfires. If you played the demo or were part of the Alpha, you’ve experienced the music firsthand. It’s super critical to the game, and we’re working hard on making it feel great.

Today, we’re sharing two new songs from Techtonica. These are both still in progress, so you’ll likely hear something different once the launch rolls around, but we like them enough to share them with you today!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The first song, above, is meant to drive home that flow feeling, and it packs a methodical pace alongside a dark and mysterious tone.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The second is much more up-tempo than the first, and we think it works well against a factory building backdrop.

We hope you enjoyed this preview of the tunes to come. If you did, we'll probably share more between now and launch.

Techtonica’s due for release in 2023. The soundtrack will be available for purchase here on Steam, too! Drop us a Wishlist to stay informed.

Thanks for reading, Groundbreaker. See you soon.

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

If you follow Techtonica here on Steam, this likely won’t come as a surprise. Factory automation games like Techtonica have a narrow, dedicated following, especially when compared to other marquee genres like the typical action, adventure, or FPS fare.

That’s why we were pleasantly surprised to see such a positive reaction from a wealth of players completely new to the genre at Day of the Devs.

Double Fine (of Psychonauts fame) partnered with iam8bit (purveyor of great video game merchandise, including vinyl that we adore) in order to host Day of the Devs, a one-day-event aimed at providing select indie studios a place to showcase their upcoming games. This year marked the 10th anniversary of the show and the first in-person event since before the pandemic.

We were picked to join the event, along with more than 70 other devs, and we took the trip to San Francisco with the demo in hand to show some new folks the wild world of factory automation and black hole gun-wielding.

It was a ton of fun!

Over the span of five hours, the show floor was open to players of all kinds as they listened to live music, wandered from station to station, and played some great indie games. Joey (that’s me!) ran the demo for the event, and Techtonica never sat unplayed as folks were treated to the very beginning of the demo and jumped to a later save with the M.O.L.E. built and ready to eat through some of Calyx’s walls.

What did we learn? Factory automation is an up-and-coming genre, people love wielding a black hole gun, and the voice performance for Sparks is really good.

We did catch a few factory automation fans, of course, with each of them super eager to share how many hours they’ve spent building factories across games. They took to Techtonica right away, laying belts, building machines, and upgrading tech.

This was a super cool event, and we were thrilled to showcase Techtonica to folks who would have never otherwise had a chance to play it.

If you were there and found us on Steam, say hello! Also, join our Discord!

Don’t forget to Wishlist Techtonica!