Rise of the Machines
Welcome to Friday, hands down the best day of the week - not only because the weekend is upon us, but also because it coincides with our weekly community update! This time we want to put a spotlight on the over 50 unique machines that you can put to good use in the game to refine, cut, punch, crimp, smelt, press, crush, and liquify a variety of resources - including the precious element Lucrum 115 that everybody in the galaxy is after.
But before we dive into the engineering expertise of the greedy Kobayashi-Schwarz Corporation, we want to congratulate you on putting Dawn Apart into the top 750 of most wishlisted games on Steam! Great job - we really appreciate you wishlisting, recommending and championing the game on social media. But just as the Kobayashi-Schwarz Corporation can't get enough of Lucrum, we want to continue moving up that list so please keep on plugging Dawn Apart to your friends and fellow base building and colony sim enthusiasts - and join our Discord server if you haven't already!
[h3]Machine Learning[/h3]
As in other automation games, machines (along with awesome dynamic conveyor belts of course) are the heart and soul of Dawn Apart. To process and refine your raw resources during various stages of the production chain you need to set up assembly lines consisting of various gadgets and devices.
For example in order to craft a copper cable you must extract ores from the ground, transport them into a furnace, smelt them into ingots, then turn those ingots into poles with the punch press, further process them into rods with a lathe and finally turn rods into copper cables with a crimper, and so on - you know the drill (pun not intended). For the increasingly complex interconnections between resources and machines see an early iteration of our recipe tree below, which by now more and more resembles the entangled synapses of our developer brains.
[h3]Voxel ex machina[/h3]
By the way, every machine was designed by the great voxel artist @knosvoxel who has previously created assets for games like Teardown, Bonfire Peaks and Cloudpunk (seriously, we're lucky to have him on board and you should check out his portfolio - it’s really amazing what he can create with those tiny cubic cells). In fact, because machines are such a central part of Dawn Apart we created a video series called #MachineMondays which each week profiles one of the units as taken straight from a digital mining trade showcase.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
But, as with every element in our game world, it is the inner values that really count. Since the whole planet of Aurora is fully destructible down to the last voxel, the machines aren't just hollow assets that look good but they have the same depth as their real-life counterparts. So when they get blown to smithereens by the angry alien population (well, for them you are the alien, really), as for example the industrial drill in the Gif below, they reveal their intricate layers and parts that scatter across the factory floors.
We're still working hard every day on our machines (coding devices that is) to further refine the systems so you can craft away by yourself in a demo soon! Next week we plan on showing you how those machines also might catch fire, because we're adding Fire VFX to Dawn Apart. Stay tuned and see you next week!
But before we dive into the engineering expertise of the greedy Kobayashi-Schwarz Corporation, we want to congratulate you on putting Dawn Apart into the top 750 of most wishlisted games on Steam! Great job - we really appreciate you wishlisting, recommending and championing the game on social media. But just as the Kobayashi-Schwarz Corporation can't get enough of Lucrum, we want to continue moving up that list so please keep on plugging Dawn Apart to your friends and fellow base building and colony sim enthusiasts - and join our Discord server if you haven't already!
[h3]Machine Learning[/h3]
As in other automation games, machines (along with awesome dynamic conveyor belts of course) are the heart and soul of Dawn Apart. To process and refine your raw resources during various stages of the production chain you need to set up assembly lines consisting of various gadgets and devices.
For example in order to craft a copper cable you must extract ores from the ground, transport them into a furnace, smelt them into ingots, then turn those ingots into poles with the punch press, further process them into rods with a lathe and finally turn rods into copper cables with a crimper, and so on - you know the drill (pun not intended). For the increasingly complex interconnections between resources and machines see an early iteration of our recipe tree below, which by now more and more resembles the entangled synapses of our developer brains.
[h3]Voxel ex machina[/h3]
By the way, every machine was designed by the great voxel artist @knosvoxel who has previously created assets for games like Teardown, Bonfire Peaks and Cloudpunk (seriously, we're lucky to have him on board and you should check out his portfolio - it’s really amazing what he can create with those tiny cubic cells). In fact, because machines are such a central part of Dawn Apart we created a video series called #MachineMondays which each week profiles one of the units as taken straight from a digital mining trade showcase.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
But, as with every element in our game world, it is the inner values that really count. Since the whole planet of Aurora is fully destructible down to the last voxel, the machines aren't just hollow assets that look good but they have the same depth as their real-life counterparts. So when they get blown to smithereens by the angry alien population (well, for them you are the alien, really), as for example the industrial drill in the Gif below, they reveal their intricate layers and parts that scatter across the factory floors.
We're still working hard every day on our machines (coding devices that is) to further refine the systems so you can craft away by yourself in a demo soon! Next week we plan on showing you how those machines also might catch fire, because we're adding Fire VFX to Dawn Apart. Stay tuned and see you next week!