Mars Horizon 2: The Search for Life News

Hello Aurochnauts! 👩‍🚀

We have lots of exciting changes happening behind the scenes on Mars Horizon 2: The Search for Life, and we're nearly ready to share these with you.

Following our player feedback surveys last year, we've been exploring and building out an exciting new direction. We’ve updated our screenshots and Steam page here to give you a small taste of what's to come and we look forward to sharing more soon…

Make sure to sign up for our Mars Horizon 2 Mailing List to be the first to hear about the full update. You can also join our Discord to talk with our community about what you’re excited to play in the game and follow us on TikTok to see fun behind the scenes videos about making the game.

• Sign up for the Mars Horizon 2 mailing list
• Join the Auroch Digital Discord
• Follow the Mars Horizon 2 Tiktok account

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2281620/Mars_Horizon_2_The_Search_for_Life/

[h2]Enter the Auroch Digital 13th Birthday giveaway 🎂[/h2]
It’s Auroch Digital’s 13th birthday! 🎂 It’s been a wild and wonderful 13 years, we grown loads in that time, learned a lot, and released a load of great games. Check out our recent Birthday Blog Post to learn more about the history of our studio and what we’ve been up to over the years. 🎉

To celebrate the fact that our studio is now old enough to have it’s own Steam account, we are doing a giveaway to our loyal Aurochnauts. Enter our giveaway and you could win a digital bundle of a bunch of Auroch Digital games from over the years.

The Auroch Digital Birthday Bundle prize includes:

• Mars Horizon (Steam Key)
  
• Brewmaster: Beer Brewing Simulator (Steam Key)
  
• Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun (Steam or PlayStation or Xbox key)
  
• Megaquarium: Console Edition (PlayStation or Xbox key)
  
• The Colonists: Console edition (PlayStation or Xbox key)
  
• Ogre (Steam Key)
  
• Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics (Steam Key)
  
• Dark Future: Blood Red States (Steam Key)
  

[h3]How to enter
[/h3]But how do you enter this awesome Auroch Digital birthday giveaway? 🥳 All you need to do is sign up to our official Auroch Digital newsletter. We will be randomly selecting one lucky person, who is signed up to receive our monthly Auroch Digital newsletter, to win the Auroch Digital Birthday Bundle prize as a thank you for supporting us.

• > > > SIGN UP TO THE NEWSLETTER AND ENTER THE GIVEAWAY HERE 📝 < < <
  

[h3]What is the Auroch Digital Newsletter about? [/h3]
The Auroch Digital Newsletter comes out around the end of each month and is full of all the latest news about our studio including new game announcements, launches, beta and alpha invites, giveaways, jobs at the studio, as well as loads more exciting news. So by signing up you’ll get to stay up to date with all of our great goings, as well as be in with a chance to win the Auroch Digital Birthday Bundle prize.
[h3]Ts and Cs [/h3]
The giveaway closes on 26th October at Midnight so make sure to sign up before then to be in with a chance to win. Please see here the giveaway terms and conditions. You can see the Auroch Digital Privacy Policy here for more info: Auroch Digital Privacy Policy

[h2]Hello Aurochnauts! We have yet another exciting partnership to announce to you all. [/h2]

[h3]As you may have seen, the European Space Agency are at Gamescom this year, which seems like a fitting time to let you all know that we are partnering with them once more for Mars Horizon 2: The Search for Life! [/h3]


The European Space Agency is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.

ESA’s job is to draw up the European space programme and carry it through. ESA's programmes are designed to find out more about Earth, its immediate space environment, our Solar System and the Universe, as well as to develop satellite-based technologies and services, and to promote European industries. ESA also works closely with space organisations outside Europe.

🚀 >> Earlier this year we announced our partnership with Professor Konstantin Batygin, which you can read more about here!

We are going to be working with the folks at ESA to make sure we can bring authenticity and real-world science into our sequel to Mars Horizon. As the sequel focuses on The Search for Life, we are excited to talk to them about biosignature detection, sample return, and much more. Their partnership ensures that we can create an authentic game in Mars Horizon 2, as we did with the first!

[h3]Sign up to our Newsletter to be the first to hear about Alphas, Betas, and other news.[/h3]

[h2]Where to find ESA: [/h2]

• Twitter
  
• Facebook
• Instagram

[h3]👀 Read more about our partnership on our blog! [/h3]

[h2]We are thrilled to announce that Mars Horizon 2: The Search for Life will be part of Simfest – the Steam festival celebrating all things related to simulation games. [/h2]

From today through the 24th of July, 10am PDT 2023, you will be able to experience some of the latest and greatest simulation titles, in addition to what the future holds for the simulation genre with other coming soon games. From simulators which cover hobbies you would love to experience to job simulators which revolve around your dream career (even out of this world ones), Simfest will feature a wide variety of titles in the genre.

Simfest is a Steam festival co-hosted by Auroch Digital and Stray Fawn Studio. This year’s event will be the second Simfest, after Simfest: Hobby Edition took place in 2022.

[h3]Join Mars Horizon 2: The Search for Life and many other incredible simulation games in Simfest 2023. We hope to see you there!
[/h3]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2281620/Mars_Horizon_2_The_Search_for_Life/

[h2]We're driven by data 📝[/h2]
You may remember that we ran a survey way back in April of this year (and yes, the winner of the giveaway has been contacted!) and now we are running yet another one (which hasn't closed yet, so you still have a bit of time to enter the giveaway)!

We run these surveys to learn more about our dedicated players, you. Our community and our fans are one of the reasons we are so passionate about making Mars Horizon 2: The Search for Life. We want to make sure we get it right and we need your help to do that. We can't get it right without your feedback and input though - so if you've taken the chance to fill in either survey, (or maybe even both!) then we can't thank you enough.

To say thank you, we thought it'd be cool to share some of the results from April's survey, on top of the £25 Steam gift card giveaway of course. And then we'll share the results of June's survey at some point too.

[h2]Who else here loves stats and graphs? 🙋🏻‍♀️[/h2]
In this post we've decided to pull out some of the more interesting pieces of data for you to feast your eyes on. Let us know what you make of the results in the comments below, or if you think the majority of respondents were completely wrong! We'd love to hear your thoughts.

[h3]First up, we had a huge number of you respond to this survey![/h3]
We got way more responses than we could've imagined, we're so excited that so many of you are so keen to help shape our game! Thank you (again)!

[h3]Next, let's take a look at where you're all living 🌍[/h3]

The majority of our participants live in the USA, followed by UK, Germany, France, Canada, Italy, Russia, Australia, and Netherlands​. If you don't see your country listed at the bottom of the pie, don't fear! To make the data readable we only included countries that were listed over a certain amount of times. Your feedback is still super valuable to us!

[h3]Which subscription services do you use?[/h3]

Nearly half of you do not subscribe to any service, but following that the most popular service is Xbox Game Pass, followed by Prime Gaming, Nintendo Switch Online, and then PlayStation Plus.​

[h3]What platforms do you play on?[/h3]

The most popular platform that you would like to see Mars Horizon 2 on is PC, closely followed by Nintendo Switch. Who wouldn't want to search for life on the go?

[h3]Anyone here a Mars Horizon 1 fan?[/h3]

To those who said they had played Mars Horizon 1, we asked what they would rate it out of 10. The average rating was an amazing 8/10, with absolutely no one rating it 1/10! Thanks for the warm fuzzies on this one 🥰

[h3]Ok, so you rated it an 8 out of 10, but how long did you play it?[/h3]

Look how many of you played over 20 hours of Mars Horizon 1. That's a lot of hours! And a lot of people!

[h3]And finally, what were your top 3 favourite things in Mars Horizon 1?[/h3]

The most popular features were In-Game Events, Mission Planning, and Vehicle Designing.​ Closely followed by Decision Making, Researching, and Rocket Launching!

[h3]Phew, what a load of data! 📊[/h3]
We hope you found it useful to see why we like asking you questions about your experiences as a player, and as a gamer in general. It really is so helpful for us to make sure decisions we make throughout development are backed up by data, and it also means we get to know you, our community, that little bit better!

If you haven't yet, make sure you fill in our latest survey here. You can enter our £25 Steam Gift Card giveaway and also let us know your thoughts on strategy games. You can read more about what the survey is asking here.