Mars Horizon 2: The Search for Life News

[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.

[h2]We're back again, asking for more of your very precious time to help us shape the future of Mars Horizon 2: The Search for Life, with another survey, asking: "Who IS Mission Control?"[/h2]

You might be thinking "But you only ran a survey a couple of months ago! Why another one so soon!?" and that would be a very fair question to ask. It's because we're looking for different data.

[h3]We're looking for data about YOU as a HUMAN, not about what you want to see in the new game, as this will help us further understand who is playing our games, or who wants to, and how to make sure the experience is as good as it can be for all of you.[/h3]

We've heard what you like, what you don't like, and how you interact with us as a studio. But now we want to know things like:

• Are you more introverted than extroverted?
  
• Are you more creative than analytical?
  
• What mood are you in when you play games?
  
• Are you more cooperative or competitive?
  
• What kind of games do you play most of the time?
  

And most importantly...

• What do you like, and what do you dislike, in strategy games in general?

[h3]> > > Fill in the survey here! 📝 < < < [/h3]

We're also running another giveaway, one lucky entrant will be selected to win a £25 Steam voucher - make sure you leave your email address at the end so we can enter you into the draw. Terms & Conditions apply, more details at the end of the survey.

[h3]The survey should take you no longer than 5 minutes to complete, and we appreciate everyone who takes time out of their day to give us their thoughts![/h3]

[h3]Those of you who watched the PC Gaming Show yesterday may have noticed two of our members from the Mars Horizon 2: The Search for Life team appeared on the stream. [/h3]


You would’ve seen our Technical Artist Joseph McPhee, and Content Producer Britt Francis chatting about what makes Mars Horizon 2: The Search for Life so authentic.

Just like with Mars Horizon 1, at Auroch Digital we pride ourselves on working with real-life industry professionals to make sure the passion and the accuracy comes through in our games. We announced our first partner for Mars Horizon 2: The Search for Life last month at TactiCon, Professor Konstantin Batygin, who will be helping us accurately portray the search for life.

[h3]And of course, we encouraged viewers to sign up to our mailing list at MarsHorizon2.com to sign up for our alpha, which is on the horizon 👀[/h3]

If you did miss it, you can catch up with the video here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]