Dawn Apart News

And just like that we're back for another edition of Weekly Apart, the dev blog in which we neatly summarize the small and big milestones that we have reached each week developing Dawn Apart. So strap in for this edition as we share some cool gameplay details about what it actually takes to make your stay on Aurora worthwhile and leave your mark in the history books as one of the galaxy's fiercest Lucrum miners.

But first, in case you haven't already, make sure to join our Discord server (quick reminder: the good folks in our Discord will be the first mortals to playtest our demo scheduled for summer!) and leave a follow, like or comment on our various social media channels - we'd really appreciate it!



[h3]Stockpiling Influence[/h3]

The key to becoming an interstellar mining tycoon is to steadily expand your control zone on the planet Aurora. You achieve this by crafting and placing beacons, energy-consuming systems which enable you to claim land and build on it instantly. Within this "Sphere of Influence" (SOI), which initially consists of a 200-tile radius, you'll be able to place machines, walls, feeders, turrets, and other items - god-like that is (The SOI is visible in both the build and terraform view, but players cannot build or terraform if there are enemies within a 50-tile radius). However, here comes the catch: each placement costs Lucrum, the most sought-after resource in the galaxy that is buried deep beneath the surface of Aurora.

The Lucrum cost of placing an item depends on the distance to the nearest stockpile. Stockpiles are a key gameplay mechanic that allows players to manage their resources efficiently and strategically. Each SOI can have multiple stockpiles, which can be merged to increase storage capacity. The storage capacity of a stockpile is limited by the number of tiles and slots available. Each tile contains four slots that can hold up to 100 pieces of the same item, for a total of 400 items per tile. To expand the storage capacity of a stockpile, players can add more tiles vertically and horizontally, but this requires additional energy consumption costs.



[h3]Mo Lucrum Mo Problems[/h3]

The stockpile tile itself looks like an open shelf or rack that visibly holds items, making it easy to keep track of resources. Stockpiles can be fed by pioneers or feeders. While feeders add items as long as there is space, pioneers can be directed to move items to the warehouse or remove specific items from the warehouse using the Stockpile Detail View. Overall, stockpiles are an essential part of resource management in the game, requiring players to balance their storage needs with the cost of expanding their stockpile capacity.

Ultimately you'll be able to merge various SOIs allowing for larger and more expansive control zones, allowing for a fascinating interplay between fulfilling your own Lucrum needs, expanding your empire and provoking and reacting to increased attacks by the indigenous It'ak - all while fulfilling the growing Lucrum export quota of your corrupt contractor, the Kobayashi-Schwarz Corporation.



What do you think of the system? Let us know in the comments and feel free to drop more gameplay suggestions into the "idea chute" channel of our Discord server - we’re always happy to hear what kind of ideas the community would like to see implemented (of course we cannot grant every wish:) See you next week!

We're back for a brand new edition of Weekly Apart and couldn't be happier. There is nothing like a super-productive sprint in which all the planned additions to Dawn Apart are coming along nicely. We can't share anything yet but this week alone we've added some very cool gameplay functionalities and assets to our space colony sim.

Some of the in-game pioneers even claim they, for the first time, laid their eyes on the I'tak, Aurora's indigenous humanoid alien population, but so far the sightings haven't officially been confirmed (more on that in a future post). Today we follow a more dev-centric approach and want to further elaborate on Dawn Apart's awesome destruction physics by giving a peek at an important debug view we have in game.



But before we dive into what lays beyond Dawn Apart's shiny metal surface, please check out our new presence in the Epic Games Store. Take a quick break from reading this post by clicking on this link, throw Dawn Apart onto your Epic wishlist and then grab your weekly free game (but make sure to come back here to finish reading the post:)

[h3]Color-coded destruction physics[/h3]

As previously outlined we have a sophisticated system that predicts how an object will fracture when it receives damage. For instance, when a space marine fires bullets at an It'ak house, each bullet will generate rays with a specific force that will travel through the object and reduce its force depending on the type of material it encounters. Not all materials are destructible through physical damage, and in such cases, the force vector will rebound and travel in the opposite direction, leading to more fascinating destruction patterns.

But how does our engine differentiate between different materials? Well, since the planet Aurora and everything on it consists of three-dimensional analogues of a pixel, also known as voxels, we can take advantage of the incredibly powerful medium: We take raw .vox files (from the free GPU-based voxel art editor and interactive path tracing renderer called MagicaVoxel) and parse out color/material/physical property data into data structures that we then can use on our end.



Think for example of lasers breaking and burning through wood voxels, causing other flammable voxels to catch fire, or hitting a very heavy metal and just visually heating up that voxel instead. For this system we took great inspiration from Dennis Gustafson and the team at Tuxedo Labs who developed the game that dragged voxel games kicking and screaming into the modern age, Teardown.

[h3]Tron Apart[/h3]

So basically each voxel physical type has a set interaction with a damage type and a large number of lists of modifiers for how much force it takes to interact with it. In the case of fracturing we dynamically calculate the Total Mass, Center of Mass, Volume, and Inertia Tensor based on the physical type of each voxel that makes up the debris and send it on its way.

In our work-in-progress build we actually have a key shortcut to display the differently colored materials, which creates this very cool looking, Tron-like look of your mining operation on Aurora.



At least in this debug view building and tearing down factories has never been so colorful. Should we leave this rainbow-colored behind-the-scenes view in the game when it comes out? Let us know in the comments and see you next week!

Allright Pioneers, please join us in the center square of our little space colony for another round of (more or less) important announcements! In this week's Weekly Apart update we want to further flesh out the colony sim aspect of Dawn Apart as we are currently working on a character viewer that tracks the wants and needs of the first humans to set foot on the planet Aurora!

But first we want to give a special shout out to YouTube and Twitch partner TotalXclipse for including Dawn Apart in his amazing "TOP Factory Games You NEED To Checkout In 2023" video - it's really an honor to be in the company of those other great automation games. Check out the compilation below, make sure to follow TotalXclipse and while you're at it leave a comment, like or follow on our social media channels as well!

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[h3]The Human Connection[/h3]
Since Dawn Apart will not merely be a factory but also a space colony sim, it is crucial that players establish real connections with individual pioneers. Early on we decided that the people colonizing Aurora would not be generic, faceless avatars but individuals with unique looks and personas that you will care for (or, depending on their actions, perhaps despise). Because the in-game characters are rather small - especially when contrasted with the huge machinery and factory building - and hard to relate to on that scale, we came up with a solution.

As hinted at in our previous post about designing the UI for Dawn Apart, we have dedicated the lower right corner of the screen to a character viewer that, with a click on each respective colonist on the map, gives you a more detailed profile of his or her look and personal stats. In part inspired by the first X-COM game this preview includes a voxel model of the character (that will ultimately be animated and reflect the activity the colonists is currently pursuing), their weapon/item loadout as well as an status update detailing sleeping, eating, health and bathroom habits over the last 12 in-game hours.



[h3]Up close and personal[/h3]
Keep in mind that this is still far from being the final version and a voxel/pixel artist will revamp it completely once all the systems have been set in place. The character in this case was, as a test, designed by the great @DanielWienerson who is known as the creator of Voxel Doom. Future iterations of characters will consist of modular parts such as hair, clothes, and other facial parts that are then randomized and rearranged.

Adding this 'Pioneer Detail View Controller' makes a huge impact in terms of further humanizing the colonists. Along with giving them means to express what is on their mind by displaying dialogue and thoughts and an intricate system of interconnected needs and wants (Rimworld is the obvious source of inspiration here), we hope to (literally) give our colony a human face.



Let us know what you think in the comments and see you next week! And don't forget to join our Discord server if you want to be among the first players to check out our demo!

Welcome back Pioneers to a new installment of Weekly Apart. The last post was actually two weeks apart from today but now we're back from the Easter hiatus and have some exciting news to share. Ever since the announcement we have established the backbone of the game but now we're now laser focusing on building a demo - and want you to be a part (or rather Apart, hehe) of the process!

To be among the first mortals to get their hands on a playable build, please join our Discord server if you haven't already (and also check out our other social media channels). Since we value feedback from our first adopters, everyone on that server will get the chance to play the demo before it officially hits Steam. We're aiming for a demo release in mid-summer, because there are a few online festivals in Summer (including the Steam Strategy Fest) that would be the ideal framework to let fans of the genre build their first factories on Aurora.



[h3]Features in our assembly line[/h3]

To be fully transparent and in line with our Glass Factory approach: There are still a ton of features that we have to work on, specifically the implementation and creation of music, sound effects and the Graphical User Interface. The latter is the most time consuming, since we are currently designing a bunch of sub elements such as various view modes of machines and characters to properly display crafting recipes and personal needs of the pioneers. Then there is the colony aspect of the game which involves selecting multiple characters, automated fulfillment of tasks and creating randomized movement pathways.

Also there are some major (and minor) improvements to the gameplay that we want to tackle in the upcoming months, namely creating basic but satisfying combat and tower defense mechanics as well as giving Aurora a much-needed visual update (if we find the time that is, as of right now all gameplay-related matters take precedence).



[h3]What you can expect from the demo[/h3]

Finally there will be a round of polishing that involves enhancing the framerate, adding animations to machines, pioneers and vehicles as well as localizing the demo into English, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Polish (the EA version will feature far more languages, but the most wishlists so far have been from those five language regions). Given that the first public build will feature a relatively modest amount of text we're going to translate it ourselves but may reach out to the community to have a look, so if you’re a native speaker and interested in minor translation work give us a holler.

Oh and by the way, while not a full prologue the demo will be structured as one, telling the story of the first pioneers to set foot on Aurora to build a landing pad which then acts as the base for the Kobayashi-Schwarz Corporation to send more colonists and materials to the planet.

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As you can see we have our plates full and the demo is still a few months away. But we wanted to let you know early so you can have something to look forward to - and we have a way of saying thank you for being down from day one and championing Dawn Apart! See you next week here or any time on Discord!

Welcome, dear Pioneers, to the latest edition of Weekly Apart! One half of our team has returned from their journey to an obscure gathering in San Francisco - all revitalized and highly motivated to resume working on our little colony sim. With development fully back in swing we also decided to try out an exciting new approach to keep you posted about the state of our game!

But before we share more details (trusted regular readers know what is coming) we want to once more plug our social media channels. Feel free to select the one(s) of your choice and leave a like, follow, or comment! And if you want to get access to even more cool stuff and insights into the creation of Dawn Apart we highly recommend joining our Discord!



[h3]Welcome to the Glass Factory[/h3]

Since we really appreciate the feedback from our incredible Discord community, we want to go one step further in terms of transparency and participation and have decided to give up on our separate developer-centric Discord server and move all our day-to-day development stuff to the public Dawn Apart server, especially to the newly created 'Glass Factory'-category.

We are aware that the 500+ followers on our server are among the most dedicated and passionate supporters and by sharing the maximum amount of information about the state of the game, we want to show that we value their investment and are committed to delivering the best game possible.



From sharing first drafts of voxel assets and concept documents to previewing tracks of our OST to discussing new gameplay ideas (that we may or may not implement) in our “idea chute” channel - stepping into the Glass Factory will give you a great overview of what we are currently working on.

[h3]See and be seen[/h3]

While for obvious reasons we cannot share everything (for example, you won't be able to listen in on our daily morning meetings, for now; we will host an AMA in the near future), you can get into the nitty gritty of, say, the design of ladders or enjoy the sight of applying destruction physics to an unsuspecting space marine.



Speaking of glass, we are also currently testing various factory window shapes and tiles, along with a new walkway and gangway system to be placed along walls as a way for colonists to navigate through multi-floor factories (see above) - for all those instances your suggestions and feedback are very much appreciated!

Because next Friday is a federal holiday in Germany and the IT&W team will be busy searching for easter eggs (rather than bugs), the next instalment of our blog series will return in two weeks. See you then or say Hi on Discord!

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