THE SIGNAL: Stranded on Sirenis News

Hello explorers,

It’s been a while since our last proper update—a long while, in fact! We’ve been laser focused on our work behind the scenes, and today we’d like to share what we’ve been up to!

[h3]🧭 The Road So Far[/h3]

We kicked off the year by reviewing all the feedback from our Winter Holiday playtest. Your insights helped shape our design direction, and we’ve been iterating on both your feedback and our internal vision for the game.

The first few months were about laying a new foundation. We expanded the team with new members and interns, which allowed us to form focused strike teams: Combat, Build/Craft, UI, and Level Design. This new structure is helping us move faster and more intentionally.
But scaling up wasn’t just about adding people—it was about cleaning up. We removed all placeholders, transitioning away from using any store-bought prototyping assets, and doubled down on reinforcing our art direction. Every asset now reflects our style and should run efficiently on a wide range of machines.

[h3]⚙️ Under the Hood: Unreal Engine 5.5 & System Refactors[/h3]

We also dove into code refactors and upgraded to Unreal Engine 5.5 the very day it dropped. Among the biggest technical changes was integrating the Gameplay Ability System, which will make our combat and action systems far easier to iterate on. To do this, we had to go in and modify ALL of our existing features, so it was a lot of work! It will be worth it, though.

[h3]🚗 Vehicles Are Back—and Better Than Ever[/h3]


After the engine upgrade, we moved our focus to vehicles. If you remember our May 2024 playtest, you might recall the early version of our Custom Vehicle system. We ended up pulling it from the last two tests—not because we abandoned it, but because we wanted to integrate your feedback into the customization feature. Our customization flow had too many steps, and needed to be streamlined.

We were looking into different technological approaches for our design, and with UE5.5’s release, the moment finally arrived.

[h3]Here’s what’s new:[/h3]

Chaos Modular Vehicle Plugin: We moved from Chaos Vehicles to Chaos Modular Vehicles—an experimental but promising solution that has the added benefit of drastically improving physics stability. No more flipping out (literally).


Garage Overhaul: We’ve shifted vehicle customization from the Workshop to a dedicated Garage, complete with a streamlined building flow. Parts now snap together more cleanly, creating more intuitive and rewarding vehicle crafting.


Improved Terrain Handling: Our new suspension system hugs terrain more precisely than ever, making driving across rugged alien landscapes feel smooth and responsive.


[h3]🚀 Why Vehicles Matter in The Signal[/h3]


Vehicles aren’t just a side feature—they’re central to your journey. You build them as part of your crafting loop, then use them during extraction runs to haul back valuable resources. They need to feel powerful, reliable, and worth the effort—and we’re committed to making sure they do.


[h3]🛠️ What’s Next?[/h3]
We’re excited to let players try out the new vehicle system soon. But before that, we’re polishing up a few final pieces. Expect more concrete news in the weeks ahead.

In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you:

🗨️ What kind of vehicle customization would you like to see in The Signal? Let us know in the comments!

Thanks for being part of the journey. Don’t forget to wishlist us on Steam if you haven’t already—every wishlist helps us more than you know. And also, don't forget to follow us on our socials!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1830110/THE_SIGNAL/

Stay tuned,
The Signal Dev Team

X | Discord | BlueSky | Tiktok

Instead of closing our playtest last week, we are taking things one step further and opening it to a wider audience. Starting Thursday 19 December 2024 we'll be admitting 1,000 new players who have requested playtest access -- these people will receive emails that the playtest is open.

But maybe you tried the playtest previously at some point? If you did then YOU TOO will have access to the playtest, you just won't receive an email. Steam is weird that way. The playtest will also be available to Discord community members who have access and/or who claim a key.

We are going to leave this playtest open until Monday 6 January 2025. Hopefully follks will have some time to test out the new build over the holidays.

This is our gift to you! And all we ask in return is for you to complete our FEEDBACK FORM! Whether you played for 5 hours or rage quit afer 10 minutes -- we absolutely want to hear about your experience. It is extremely valuable feedback and truly will help us decide what to work on next.

This is an early Pre-Alpha build, and you may experience bugs, crashes, or performance issues. It's a work in progress but we feel like there's a good experience in there and we hope you will get something out of it.

Please note that this build has a Save System, so you don't need to complete the playthrough in one sitting. Since we will most likely be changing many more things between now and the next playtest/demo, your save will NOT carry over beyond this playtest.

Ways to play:

• Join our Discord and claim a key in the playtest-chat channel
  
• If you playtested before look for the green Join The Signal Playtesting "PLAY NOW" button on our Steam page.
  
• Keep an eye on your inbox for an invitation -- maybe you're one of the lucky 1,000 players!
  

And if you don't get access or can't find the time to play, we absolutely promise there will be another playtest in early 2025. We hope everyone has fun and gets through the holiday season -- we'll see eveyone next year. And as always, please do join the conversation either here on Steam or through Discord -- we love hearing from players!

P.S. We just joined BlueSky - https://bsky.app/profile/goosebyte.bsky.social

We're launching a new Prealpha Playtest TOMORROW (Friday December 13, 2024) morning, at 10am EST. The plyatest will run until Tuesday morning, 10am EST.

There's so much new stuff in here, I won't ruin the surprise by listing it in bullet point format.
We've gone into uncharted territory on some of our design choices and have a few features that definitely require some more iteration on the tech side, so there may be some bugs, but we believe the experience should be smooth enough to gather some good feedback.

There is also some content that's still in early stages, so some things are not fully realized, but we felt that including these would help flesh out our vision more, and give you a better sense of the direction we're heading in.

The build DOES have a save feature, since the playtest is too long to fit into one session for some people. The save/load system should also help in case you encounter bugs, but save/load sometimes also introduces some additional minor bugs. We don't have a dedicated QA team, but we think we've covered most of the really bad ones. If you encounter bugs, please feel free to let us know about them in the 'submit-bug-report' section of the Playtesting Discord channel.

This playtest is CLOSED and EXCLUSIVE to the Discord Community. If you like what you see, invite your friends to the Discord so they can take part in this journey, too!

We do hope to eventually re-open the playtest to more players (ones that sign up via Steam), but that depends on the early feedback we get from people in here.

We're super excited to see what you think of the build, and ask that everyone please hit the "feedback" button in the main menu and share their thoughts on this build.

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend and enjoy our latest creation.

- Theo

How to join this playtest:
- Click Here to join our Discord for The Signal
- Navigate to the 'playtest-chat' discussion and Grab a Key!
- Redeem your key when the playtest is open (Friday 13 Dec 10AM EST until Tuesday 17 Dec 10AM EST)
NOTE: If you've acessed our playtest before, you won't need a key -- the app will be open to returning playtesters without a key during the times listed above.

We're honoured to be taking part in Midgard's Zero Carbon Quest Steam event, happening December 9 through 16 2024. We have been working with the fine folks at Midgard to have the development of THE SIGNAL asessed for it's carbon impact. We've been tracking the data and once the game is released will receive a rating based on our usage.

Normally this sort of ESG stuff is reserved for the ultra-corporate suits and AAAs, but we feel it's relevant to our work. In THE SIGNAL you interact with a planet that has a mind of it's own -- it's governed by a self-sustaining ecosystem that extends beyond ecology and into its own consciousness. We don't want to give away too much, so we'll just leave you with the idea that systems are important. Everything is connected -- so why not bring that theme back out into the real world?

We're lucky to be based in a province (Quebec) where the majority of our power consumption comes from hydroelectric energy, and we mostly work from home so nobody's burning fuel driving around all day for their job. But that doesn't eliminate other activities: there's travel for events and showcasing, there's travel for team meet-ups. There are always things to consider!

That's where Midgard comes in! They have the power to... track our power usage!

Is this sort of thing important to you? Please complete this survey and let the folks at Midgard know what you think. If you'd like to learn more about the methodology behind the rating process, we invite you to visit the Midgard website for more details.

P.S. If you made it this far into our post, you get the reward of secret knowledge: we'll be running another playtest very soon. Like if everything goes as planned, before the end of the year soon... Make sure you're signed up and are following us on the Community Hub to be notified when it opens!

Big news! We've prelaunched our Kickstarter!
You can follow this page to be notified when the campaign launches!

Why are we doing a Kickstarter? We're excited to deliver on our vision for The Signal, but the reality of making games in this economy has challenges. A lot of challenges. Due to things being weird, we think self-funding is the right path to get this game in your hands!



We've already come a long way in the process, and are nearing the final stretches of feature development. With your help, we'll be able to do more to ensure The Signal reaches its full potential. Your support will help us add more accessibility options, more languages, more voice acting, more music, and more art. The extra support will allow us to conduct more playtests and iterate more, so that we can launch a game that has been crafted together with your input.

So tell your friends and family members, cats and dogs to follow the project on Kickstarter to be notified when we launch. And of course, while we get things ready, wishlist and follow and sign up for the next playtest. We're grateful that you are here and reading this -- have a great day, Explorer!