Dawn Apart News

Welcome, Prospectors to 2024's first edition of Weekly Apart our, tbh, not so weekly but still, err, regular dev blog update on all things Dawn Apart! To kick off the new year in style we decided to make the creation of our automation game even more transparent. As our trusted Discord subscribers know, we have a whole section on our server called Glass Factory where we share a bunch of WIP footage, concept art and tech details so you can follow the development as closely as possible and almost in real time.

If you just want to wait for the demo (it's coming!) and the subsequent EA release (and enjoy the occasional newsletter such as this one) then that's perfectly fine of course. But if you want to stay up to date on the latest voxel hairstyles of in-game prospectors, take a deep dive into the fire fighting mechanics that we are finetuning right now, or have a look at the latest digging animations then you might consider joining our Discord, if you haven't already.



And since we're getting great feedback from the community we have decided to take this approach one step further: While not going into full Truman Show mode yet we do want to make the incredibly complex (and fun!) process of making Dawn Apart even more tangible and immediate for you.

That's why we, starting January 24th at 10 AM CET and so far limited to one day of the work week, invite you to join our daily stand-up meetings. On those Witchcraft Wednesdays (named after our studio Industrial Technology and Witchcraft or IT&W Games in short) you can get to know us and the process better by joining our actual daily video conference where we discuss orders of the day, share footage of current builds of the games, and make all kinds of shenanigans.



So please join our server, tune in next Wednesday and say hi. While you can just take in all of that as a fly on the wall, there we'll definitely make room to interact and answer all your burning questions. See you soon on Discord!

Welcome, Prospectors to the year end edition of Weekly Apart! As we say farewell to an eventful 2023, we wanted to give you one last update on what we've been working on, namely the foundations for our room system.

But before we delve into the depths of Aurora's interior spaces, here are some of our personal highlights and favorite additions to Dawn Apart:

- Awesome destruction physics
- Refining our conveyor belt systems
- Adding fire and water to our game world
- Debuting our epic soundtrack
- Our co-founders hitting the GDC circuit
- Fleshing out the lore and rebranding the game's evil megacorp.

(You can read about all features that we added to game since announcement 13 months ago here)



[h3]Looking for Enclosure[/h3]
In line with our modular DIY approach to building housing and factories in Dawn Apart (no pre-designed living quarters or factory floors that you can simply place on the map) we had to come up with definitions of what actually constitutes a ‘room’. We broadly define a room by its enclosures with floors, walls, doors, and windows (roofs are optional, but highly recommended), with its specification dynamically calculated based on the items, furniture, or machines that are placed within. For example, a room with less than three beds/sleeping spots will simply be a ‘Bedroom’, whereas a room with more than three sleeping spots becomes a ‘Barrack’. A room with a chemlab and chemical reactor is a ‘Laboratory’ as opposed to a ‘Metalworks’ room that has to house at least one punch press, drill, cutter, and crimper.

As you can see in the mock-up below we want the process of working with rooms as intuitive as possible. By hovering the room while holding a magic key (it’s Left Alt) you’ll get an outline around the room’s enclosing walls and be able to see more intimate details about the room in question. It’s all very technical and complex, especially because it raises questions on how to interact with our Sims-like level/roof view, which lets you see below the roofs of multi-room and multi-floor structures, but that’s for our developers to worry about and you to enjoy.



[h3]Room(s) for Improvement[/h3]
Knowing which rooms you have at your disposal (via a special tooltip) within a large colony is crucial, as you'll be able to monitor your production capabilities and readjust them by dividing space and fixing enclosures. The base room system is also a requirement for adding more complex gameplay mechanics such as temperature, light density and air quality which will affect the durability of your machines, assembly lines, and the overall quality of life in the colony.

Speaking of adding gameplay features - we look forward to further refining the gameplay loop of Dawn Apart in 2024 and finally getting a demo into the hands of our followers (if you want to test the demo before it is published Steam-wide please make sure to join our Discord server).



Do you have preferences when it comes to defining rooms in a building game or examples from other games in the genre that you particularly like (or dislike)? Let us know in the comments! Have a great holiday break and see you at the dawn of next year!

Welcome Prospectors to a, for a lack of a better word, cozy edition of Weekly Apart, our dev blog/newsletter series that keeps you up to date on all (small and big) things Dawn Apart. No worries though - our space colony and automation sim is not going to be cross over into the wholesome builder genre anytime soon. We're still striving to make a complex, hardcore sci-fi factory sim with lots of combat and gore. But today's post is all about the miniature versions of our machines and converters, and, well, how adorable they look.

But before we show off chibi versions of drills and smelters, a quick reminder, if you haven't done so yet, to join our Discord server, which is just short of 700 followers and offers all kind of shenanigans from dibs on playtests and demos, a look into our Glass Factory (dev updates in real time essentially), and exclusive artwork. Also please check out our TikTok channel and leave a follow - but be aware that we're still getting the hang of it and may have overdone it with green screen memes lately;)


[h3]Machine Mini-Mes[/h3]
In the past week, in the process of redesigning our various assembling machines and tweaking our workbench mechanics, we discovered a glaring omission: We didn't have miniaturized voxel assets/symbol of machines for when they leave a workbench or assembler and are manually hauled by colonists or moved by conveyors. So we put our artist in residency/intern Leon to the task. And lo and behold he came up with these amazing miniature versions. Watch below for a sped-up video of his work-flow and see how he adds all those tiny details when scaling down the size of a machine (in this case the punch press):

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Keep in mind that in order to colonize Aurora and mine massive amounts of Lucrum you'll eventually have to move hundreds of machines and resources into and out of your stockpiles and around your compound. Previously, when you crafted an item or built a machine we simply used boring-looking brown boxes as placeholders, which you couldn't tell apart from each other. But now we have tiny versions that nevertheless still have all the details so that you can identify each machine from afar.


[h3]Pro (Tool)Tips[/h3]
Speaking of assembling and crafting - we also overhauled the tool tips of the workbench, which now handily displays the amount of machines that can be crafted based on the resources in your stockpile - or which resources are missing to do so. We also updated the Prospector modal that displays the skills, mental state and needs of each colonist as well as fine-tuned the priority window that documents how attuned each person is to the various tasks of running a successful colony.



Last but not least we began implementing a cool new definition for our redesigned solar panels. This actually includes a Solar Energy System which produces energy for all solar panels, determining the production level based on the current time of day. Solar energy, along with other sources of power, will eventually play a key role in Dawn Apart and we'll share more about the system soon (including of course the smooth automatic realignment of panels to the location of the sun).

What do you think of our "baby machines"? Let us know here in the comments or on Discord and see you soon!

Hey Prospectors,

We just wanted to let you know that Dawn Apart is part of the Turn-Based Carnival hosted by the good folks of Acram Digital. As you can already guess the festival features hundreds of greats games with turn-based gameplay mechanics and/or strategy components. Make sure to head over to the festival homepage and check out amazing discounts, great demos and upcoming games (you can spot Dawn Apart in the 'Coming Soon' section).



Also shoutout to strategy game afficionado and streamer Orbital Potato for making a YouTube compilation of the "BEST Automation Games To Watch In 2024/2025" and prominently featuring our little factory and space colony sim in his video. Once again, we're in great company of other really cool looking automation games, so please make sure to watch the video and leave a like or follow for OP's channel!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
See you here soon with our regular development updates for Dawn Apart!

Welcome to another installment of Weekly Apart! You may have noticed that this week we don't address you as Pioneers anymore. This is actually a deliberate choice as we did a little market research and found out there are way too many games on Steam with 'Pioneers' either in the title or in their lore.

That's why we asked our trusted Discord community which name they'd prefer and collectively decided to use 'Prospectors' in the future (to be fair there is an upcoming sci-fi game which also uses the term but who knows if and when it comes out:)



This name change actually is part of a greater refinement of Dawn Apart's (purely optional) lore, specifically that of the Kobayashi-Schwarz, the interstellar mining megacorp. that sends you to the planet Aurora to set up a flourishing Lucrum mining business. So while one part of the team was busy fixing AI bugs - like stopping Prospectors from blindly walking into fire and then running through the compound like a human torch burning down the whole colony in the process (see GIF above) - the other half redesigned the corporate identity of KS.

[h3]A fresh coat of paint[/h3]
The first step was to create a new company logo including an accompanying font. We had already decided on red and white being the primary colors of all 'Assets' belonging to Kobayashi-Schwarz (that includes spacecraft, machines, and, yes, employees or Prospectors). Red, a color that regularly signals evil, represents KS's ambition, aggression, and power, while white is usually chosen by companies to symbolize purity, innocence and simplicity, yet often involuntarily conveys a certain coldness.



For the logo we opted for a shape that mixes triangular and square elements which combined not only evoke mountains, rocks, and mining but also aggression and a militant attitude. Overall, in combination with the new font (spectrashell) we went for imagery that is assertive, powerful and solid rather than fluid.


[h3]We want you![/h3]
We tried to nail the tonality and bring it all together in the form of a recruiting poster above. In order to attract engineers and fortune hunters KS launched the "Prospector" scholarship program, a tax-exempt charity designed to give impoverished youth the chance to travel through the galaxy and work on distant planets - think of the Peace Corps but with ulterior motives.

What do you think of our new art and lore direction? Let us know in the comments or become an official Prospector by entering the Glass Factory on our Discord server and get development and art updates in real time. See you next time!