Dawn Apart News

Hey Prospectors,

Welcome to the first edition of our newsletter and dev blog for 2025! This time, we’re giving you a sneak peek into our upcoming playtest and sharing some updates to our schedule.

[h3]Upcoming Playtest: Launching January 27th[/h3]

Mark your calendars! Our playtest is just around the corner, and we’re thrilled that nearly 2,000 players have signed up (wow, no pressure!). To ensure a smooth start, we’ll begin with a small group on the first day. Once we’re confident everything is running properly, we’ll open the floodgates so everyone can dive in. If you’ve signed up, stay tuned—you’ll receive an email notification when it’s your turn to join (you’ll also see your status regarding the playtest on Dawn Apart’s steam page).


[h3]What’s the Playtest All About?[/h3]

The playtest has two main goals:

• Technical Validation: Ensuring our build works seamlessly when launched through the Steam app.
  
• Tutorial Feedback: Evaluating how effective our tutorial is in onboarding players and preparing you to build your mining colony on Aurora.
  

We’re fine-tuning the tutorial prompts and quests to strike a balance between guiding you through the basics and letting you discover things on your own. Here’s a quick rundown of what to expect:

• The tutorial kicks off immediately after planetfall.
  
• You’ll guide your initial three colonists to place drills, smelters, and stockpiles.
  
• Finally, you’ll construct a spaceport to accept and fulfill trade quests with escalating Lucrum quotas.
  
• The playtest offers 1-2 hours of guided content, but you’re welcome to stay longer to explore advanced production lines and craft higher-tier machines.
  

[h3]What Happens After the Playtest?[/h3]

We’ll analyze the data gathered from in-game bug reports, a questionnaire, and feedback shared on the playtest’s Steam hub. This information will help us refine the game and deliver a high-quality demo to the wider Steam audience. Again, if you have wishlisted the game, you’ll receive an email notification to check out the demo.

The demo will launch alongside our Kickstarter campaign, which begins on February 18th (pushed back two weeks for extra polish based on playtest feedback). The campaign will allow supporters to pre-order the game and snag some cool digital and physical rewards, all while enjoying a slice of what’s to come in Early Access this summer.


[h3]TL;DR[/h3]

• Playtest: Launches January 27th. If you haven’t signed up, there’s still a few days to do so and be among the first to set foot on Aurora.
  
• Demo & Kickstarter: Launches February 18th. Experience a polished slice of the game and support our journey.
  

Whether you join the playtest or wait for the demo, we’re excited for you to start building factories, assembly lines, and living quarters. See you soon on Aurora!

We are so excited to start letting more people test out the game and get your feedback. It's already been extremely helpful and we appreciate everything that's coming from our awesome community!

With this update came one of the biggest steps that we have every made towards being an actual game instead of a collection of systems. That would be a quest system and a super basic tutorial quest chain for new player onboarding. This will most likely evolve a lot along the way, but we want to put everything in place to teach the player all these various systems.

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• Added quests and quest steps to the game hud
  
• Added Quest Definition & Prototypes along with all parsers
  
• Added super basic hint list info event
  
• Added all basic tutorial quest chain
  
• Added ability to place blueprints while game time is paused
  
• Added autosave feature
  
• Added autosave interval to settings menu (default: 5 min)
  
• Added "Hide Autosaves" toggle to the load/save game window
  
• Added logic to hide the continue and load buttons if there are not saves on the main menu
  
• Added interaction points to workbench and chemical lab
  
• Add plant cutting using same system as trees but doesn't provide experience, is guaranteed to hit, one-shots and doesn't produce wood
  
• Updated various inconsistent texts
  
• Added a cursor hint that displays whenever a context command is available
  
• Added the selected prospector's name as the header for the context menu, "Anyone" when multiple or not prospectors are selected
  
• Added context menu indicator graphic to context menu
  
• Various updates to vox files (doors, windows, resources)
  
• Added additional signs and concrete floor options
  
• Added logic for displaying different texts for trade messages depending on the state of the trade
  
• Added trade state to title text in messages list item
  
• Increased the time it takes for a trader to arrive from 47s to 300s
  
• Updated trade message content controller to hide space port dropdown for active trades
  
• Added logic for displaying agent entities that will be spawned on trade completion
  
• Fixed space port validation grid casting shadows
  
• Fixed trade message not properly setting text when opening it from the trade port
  
• Fixed slight offset of messages panel
  
• Fixed incorrect sprite mask being used in the messages panel
  
• Added line breaks to trade messages
  
• Updated WorldDateTime display styling
  
• Updated logic to hide "Used to Make" section in tooltips if the item isn't used
  
• Added "Made In" section to converter tooltips
  
• Fixed issue with tooltip of items without recipe
  
• Fixed "Recipe to Craft" in Blueprint tooltips
  
• Updated Recipe Tooltip to better explain missing ingredients
  
• Fixed issue where the Saveable component was not serialized causing saveable entities to be lost after loading and saving again
  
• Fixed multiple SFX being played during mining and leveling
  
• Fixed chopping failures not also producing SFX
  
• Fixed a bug where the "Accept" button would show in a trade message when the trader can't fit the
  landing pad
  
• Fixed buttons being invisible in BugReporting modals ("error" and "thank you")
  

Looking forward we have a few more QoL features to put in and then are going to start tackling bugs, crashes, and new tasks that spawn from your feedback during the playtest.

The best place to get in touch with us and see what we are working on is by joining our Discord server. So if you haven't yet, stop by and let us know your thoughts!

Welcome Prospectors, to the last edition of our dev blog/newsletter in 2024. It’s been an incredible year for us here at Industrial Technology and Witchcraft. From growing our development team to launching our first playtest and transitioning from procedural generation to a handcrafted voxel world map, we’ve made great progress in bringing Dawn Apart to life.

To wrap up the year in style we’re sharing our roadmap for the first half of 2025, packed with exciting milestones leading up to our Early Access launch this summer. So let’s dive in!



[h3]Demo Launch, Kickstarter, and Festivals[/h3]
We’ll kick off the new year with our first Steam-wide playtest scheduled for January 13 January 27. If you missed our initial Discord-exclusive playtest—or want to see how far we’ve come—you can sign up on our Steam page today. We’ll notify you when the gates open!

During the playtest, you’ll:

• Build assembly lines and factories guided by a series of initial trade requests
  
• Explore a sizable preview of our handcrafted map
  
• Terraform the planet Aurora alongside your colonists
  

We’ll also include a bug reporting tool as well as an extensive questionnaire to ensure your feedback shapes the game’s further development. In fact, we actually cleared our schedule after the playtest to incorporate your criticism and observations into our first official demo which launches on February 3rd February 18.

The demo will coincide with the start of our Kickstarter campaign, so that you’ll be able to get a good impression of the state of Dawn Apart should you decide to back it and pre-order it. Seriously, we have some cool perks, rewards, and stretch goals that we can’t wait to share with you; please follow the pre-launch campaign so you’ll get notified about limited and time-restricted rewards and discounts.



Additionally, we’re thrilled to showcase Dawn Apart at two major Steam festivals:

• Steam City Builder and Colony Sim Fest: March 24–31.
  
• Steam Next Fest: June Edition: June 19–26.
  

The June festival will feature combat and enemy wave mechanics for the first time—a major addition as we polish the automation and colony sim aspects of the game.

[h3]Looking Ahead to Early Access[/h3]
Our Early Access launch is set for summer 2025 (exact date coming soon!). While the base game will be ready at launch, we’re committed to evolving Dawn Apart with the community’s help over the next 20–30 months before releasing the 1.0 version. Check out the road map below to see what we have planned for this period:


We can’t wait for you to dive in, build, automate, and manage your own factories. Getting Dawn Apart finally in the hands of those who have championed the game is incredibly exciting for us. Thank you for your ongoing support - it means the world to us. See you soon on Aurora!

Hey there,

we're super excited to be part of this year's Ada Lovelace Day Sale here on Steam! Aside from Dawn Apart the festival (formerly known as Programmer's Day Sale features lots of other great games about coding, engineering and automation!



For context: Ada Lovelace Day is celebrated every second Tuesday of October to honor the renowned 19th-century English mathematician, widely recognized as the first programmer in history. To celebrate, the good folks from Luden.io put together a collection of games that are not only entertaining but also help you develop the mindset of an engineer! Make sure to head over to the festival page to check out great demos, discounts and upcoming automation gems!

Welcome Prospectors, to a brand new edition of our dev blog newsletter in which we’ll take you on a journey to the massively overhauled surface of the planet Aurora. Yes, our devs in tandem with some of the best voxel artists out there spent the last month or so giving Dawn Apart a much-needed facelift and we couldn’t be more proud of how our game world looks now.

But before we show off our new biomes and document how far along we’ve come with some (pretty drastic) before and after comparisons, another reminder that you can join our ongoing, Discord-exclusive playtest (which will soon include the refurbished landscapes as well). All you have to do is join our Discord channel and sign the pinned form in the #playtest channel and you’ll receive a playtest steam key in the mail!


[h3]From procedurally generated to handcrafted[/h3]

We have always envisioned Dawn Apart to take place on a lush and beautiful planet with different biomes full of intriguing flora and fauna. But when, after initially focusing on game mechanics, we experimented with procedurally generated maps the end result never quite did the trick.

Yes, we had tons of amazing looking voxel assets but randomly sprinkling them over the map didn’t work for us. So, in a rather drastic change, we opted for putting the world design wholly in the hands of collaborating voxel wizards including @abductedbypixel @knosvoxel and @luminousviolett who have in the past worked on real gems such as Teardown or Cloudpunk.


[h3]Redesigning Aurora Chunk by Chunk[/h3]

The workflow went as follows: For each of our four biomes (desert, savannah, rainforest, highlands), the voxel artists designed one or more connected 256x256x256 voxel dioramas including trees, bushes, rock formations, rivers, and monuments like hamlets, crash landing sites, or odeons. We then gave those tiles to our in-house art department who fleshed out and expanded them according to a hand drawn map/matrix consisting of a total of 420 ‘world chunks’.

This method came with a set of unique challenges: Our art team had to be extra careful to connect various tiles seamlessly - especially those that connect different biomes. The artists also had to, along with assigning physical properties to materials such as metal, rock, or glass by color coding them, group and name every object in the landscape (e.g. foliage, trees, decorations) so that everything in a .vox file was parsed into the game scene accordingly.


[h3]More than a fresh coat of paint
[/h3]
This was time-consuming but in the end totally worth it, as it led not only to a visual update but improved and expanded the gameplay as well. As opposed to the mostly flat and uninteresting procedurally generated map, you can now discover and explore a living, breathing planet with the right mix of horizontal stretches (deserts, bodies of water) and verticality (steep mountains, cliffs, and jungles).

To conquer this version of Aurora, exploration and terraforming are key: Send a search party through the fog of war and you may discover a crash landing site, an ancient It’ak temple, or a coveted Lucrum deposit . Or remove a mountain top to expand your assembly lines and make room for your growing factory. It has become something of a cliche but with this visual upgrade the planet has become its own character: complex, dangerous and full of surprises.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
What do you think of the new look? Let us know in the comments! And if you want to set foot on the planet yourself and give us valuable feedback about the new game world, make sure to join our Discord-exclusive playtest. See you soon on Aurora!