Dawn Apart News

Welcome to a special Friday game dev community update, Pioneers. This week, as a wise man named Nelly once said, it's getting hot in here. Yes, we finally can show you a sneak peak of our fire propagation system which can turn your colony/factory compound into a blazing inferno within minutes!

But before we rain fire and brimstone on you with bad fire idioms and puns, we are all fired up (see - we just can't help ourselves) that we have cracked the top 700 of most wishlisted games on Steam! Good job - you can keep spreading the word by clicking on our, well, brand new linktree and follow the social media channel of your choice!


[h3]The Roof is on Fire[/h3]

As you are probably aware by now realistic voxel destruction is a main feature of Dawn Apart. The great thing about voxels is their usefulness knows no bounds, and in this case we use the same physical material data to control how objects burn (on the CPU side) and how the flames are rendered (on the GPU side). Whenever an object takes some type of fire damage we set flammable voxels within the hit area ablaze. Once on fire the voxels will burn out over time and attempt to propagate to surrounding voxels taking into account their material. That also includes objects in the near vicinity, so try your best not to stand too close to a roaring inferno. But see for yourself:

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Once on fire we do two different things to show off that hot stuff. The first is to update a dynamic voxel material attribute which gives off a red glow based on its heat value. The second is to send a buffer of data (world position and heat) for the burning voxels to the GPU to spawn off flame particles.

The color, speed and height of the flame particles will change depending on the heat which is a product of the flammability (what material comes into contact with fire) and the actual degree of heat (how many voxels are also on fire nearby; the flame grows 10% higher with every ignited voxel in close proximity). Instead of going up in a straight line our goal was to create erratic, turbulent flames with lots of embers and sparks - the higher they get the faster their upward momentum.



[h3]Where there is fire there is smoke[/h3]

Over the course of their life the flames become smoke which loses velocity, but can be influenced much more by the turbulent forces along with our upcoming dynamic wind system.

The coolest, or rather hottest feature, however, is our charcoal system. To emulate how buildings and structures actually burn down, walls, roofs and machines in Dawn Apart do not simply vanish from the map after they caught fire and burned down. Instead, once a voxel has finished burning it needs to figure out what it should do next. Some materials, like flora, just flat out die and are removed from the world. Others, like heavy metal, cool off and look a bit scuffed up. The last category will either die or they have a chance of becoming severely weakened and blackened charcoal, leaving behind a very unique burnt structure.



Of course there will be ways to minimize the chances of fire breaking out in the first place (for example by smart placements of machines and effective maintenance) and ways to extinguish them once they start (by assigning colonists to be firefighters). We'll talk more about this in our next post which is going to be all about our water mechanics. In the meantime we’ll keep the fire burning development-wise. See you next time!

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.

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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!

Hey there Pioneers, this week we want to give you an update on what is arguably the lifeblood of any automation sim: conveyor belts. Since they are going to play a key part in turning the rugged terrain of the planet Aurora into a profitable mining operation, we're constantly tweaking and refining their mechanics for maximum convenience.

But before we show you how we make delicious conveyor spaghetti that is cooked to al dente perfection, we want to shamelessly plug our social media presence, which is admittedly still in its infancy but slowly but steadily growing thanks to now regular content drops. We're on YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and of course Discord so feel free to hop on any of those channels and leave a follow, like or comment - we really appreciate it. Oh, and if you are actually came from one of those accounts to read this blog post, make sure to head over to our Steam page and wishlist Dawn Apart!



[h3]Fastening our conveyor belts[/h3]

Since conveyor belts are going to be such an integral part of Dawn Apart's gameplay, placing or dragging them across the map must be quick, intuitive and, most importantly, feel right. This poses extra challenges when it comes to verticality. As we pointed out in our last post, our building system was designed with sky-high factory compounds in mind with conveyors going in and out buildings as well above and below other conveyors.

So to get your resources from point A to point B in the most logical and satisfying way, we want to offer players conveyor dragging mechanics that are 'intelligent' and dynamic while still highly versatile and sandbox-y. As you can see in the video below, when dragged, conveyors automatically adjust to the terrain below or objects in their way, including going over or under other conveyor belts.

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[h3]Conveying the problem[/h3]

As you may have seen in the trailer, as with any object in our game world, the conveyors are fully destructible (for example, when your factory is attacked by the It'ak, the indigenous humanoids who actively dislike foreigners digging up their home planet). We're not gonna lie, destructible conveyor belts initially caused a huge headache development-wise.

For example when an explosion blows up a moving conveyor transporting stuff, those items were removed, but in cases where the front/back conveyor of a given item group were destroyed it wasn't updating the list. In development we need to always know where the front and back items are to determine where in the Conveyor Group the Item Group is so eventually we would try to get some data from another null entity and it would crash.

Fortunately our coders did a terrific job of fixing those issues and now we can't wait to let you folks finally try to set up your own assembly lines and M.C. Escher-like conveyor mazes! Until then check out the second entry in our #MachineMonday-series. This time we proudly present the Ore Crusher 2.3 - an excellent device to both turn ores into fine mineral powder and cause horrible workplace accidents. See you next week!

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Welcome to the latest Dawn Apart dev update, pioneers. For this post sky's the limit really, because we want to show you how vertical building works and how we are designing our build mode specifically for erecting multi-floor factory halls!

As the first month of new year comes to a close (already?), we appreciate you for wishlisting and following Dawn Apart as well as joining our Discord server! (Also there is The Base Builder Fest on Steam right now, in which we of course participate, but are kind of buried among other great games in the most wishlisted upcoming section. So please feel free to urge your co-worker, roomate or whoever may have a steam account to hit our wishlist button). But wait, what is this?



[h3]Look up in the sky! It's a…[/h3]

Giant factory! That's right - early on in development we decided to go vertical. Unlike in other automation games we want to give the player the choice to build factory compounds over multiple floors with conveyor belts going up and down as well as in and out factory halls. We also wanted to keep things realistic to a certain extent and avoid the shortcut of being able to place floating platforms that are not supported in some way by the surface.

Since Dawn Apart is not merely an automation game but also a space colony sim, you're in charge of sheltering both colonists and various machines, including industrial cutters, crimpers, steamers and washing plants. While the latter are pre-designed objects we opted for a sandbox-y approach when it comes to housing.

In essence we created a grid-based placement system that is both horizontal and vertical along with an intricate arsenal of modular floors, tiles, walls and staircases that will allow you to place machines over multiple floors - along with a staircase system for the colonists in charge of operating, maintaining and repairing those machines to reach them.



[h3]Raising the roof[/h3]

So, for example, according to specific room determinants, you can build a giant hall with quarters housing 50 colonists including bunk beds, kitchens and bathrooms on the first floor. The second floor then houses a distillery while various assembly machines operate from the third floor and so on. Conveyor belts and adjacent platforms placed on stilts connect various floors by bringing in raw resources from below and transporting refined metals out of your facility.

Because colonists (for overall well-being) and machines (for maintenance purposes) need a roof of their heads you have to enclose the top floor with roof tiles (roofs are excellent spots to place solar panels or gun turrets, by the way) To still be able to look into your factories to check if production processes go smoothly or to see if an engineer accidentally has fallen into the ore crusher again (yes, that's a thing) we adapted a system popularized by The Sims: You can hover with the mouse key over a roof and it disappears or use the shift key to switch between floors and access complete, level or foundation views.

The overall goal is to create seamless transitions between gameplay that takes place outside in the various biomes of the planet Aurora (e.g.terraforming the surface, getting attacked by humanoid aliens) and the automated production chains and the colony life inside of large factory compounds. Oh yeah and since all environments and objects are fully destructible, an attack on your settlement can make these transitions between in- and outside even faster.

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Speaking of factories and machines: Make sure to join our Discord server or subscribe to our YouTube channel to check out our new video series #MachineMondays! Each Monday we preview one of the beautiful machines that will be ultimately part of your assembly line. Until then, see you next week!

Hey pioneers - and welcome to another community post, as we branch out from our regular dev-centric stuff to give you a glimpse into our creative process. With Dawn Apart’s sprawling world, fascinating interactions between colonists and aliens and intricate (and fully destructible) factories, we want to offer automation and colony sim fans an experience that goes beyond your average builder. While we’re not shy to admit that we have been inspired by the greats (especially Factorio and Rimworld), putting our unique spin on the genre requires regular, hours-long brainstorming sessions on top of already tight coding schedules.

But before we dive into the process of how our four-man-team comes up with new ideas - here is a friendly reminder that you can become a part of that creative undertaking too by joining Dawn Apart’s Discord server. There we share a lot of first ideas and concept art, discuss which Sci-Fi movies have influenced us lately and ask you about small, but important details and directions of the game. Heck, we even launched a “Tales from Aurora” sub-channel, in which we share short stories that further flesh out the universe of Dawn Apart. You should come check it out, it’s a fun place!



[h3]Take a look in the Miro[/h3]

The heart and soul of our day-to-day operations is our Miro board. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Miro is an “collaborative platform that enables distributed teams to work effectively together.” Think of a fridge door on which you can put sticky notes - but online and with infinite space. You can access it in your browser but we have also installed it on a giant touch screen at our office which gives us some serious Minority Report vibes when moving notes with pictures and ideas around.



When developing a factory and destruction sim like Dawn Apart the Miro board is the perfect place to geek out over chimney designs, share photographs of decayed factories, and draw diagrams that show in which directions debris is flying after an explosion. For example, above you can see a tiny snapshot of our giant whiteboard where we collected and categorized pictures of factory walls, floors and roofs that serve as models for our voxel artists. And below, next to our bi-weekly sprint schedule, you can see a section where we looked at burning houses to refine our fire destruction physics (as detailed in our last announcement post).



[h3]From concept to completion[/h3]

Since we are not only developers but have remained fans ourselves, the Miro board is also plastered with references from other games. Doom Eternal’s collectible viewer, Noita’s particle system or The Sims’ ‘look through the roof of a house view’-feature all served as inspirations and were posted there in the form of screenshots or videos before adapting and building on those ideas for Dawn Apart.

Of course, all of our original concept art, created by a network of trusted collaborators, is placed onto our virtual whiteboard as well in order to get dissected, critiqued and updated. See for example this very early concept art of the It’ak, the indigenous species that roams the planet of Aurora and is going to play a major role in the final game.



In short, by connecting all our creative synapses, Miro has become the collective brain of Dawn Apart. At the same time it is also great for streamlining the development process through assigning tasks and evaluating past sprints. We can’t wait to move the last sticky note to the ‘finished’ section of our scrum board and let you finally play the game. Until then, we’ll keep you posted. See you next week or on Discord!