TerraTech Worlds News

Continuing on from last week’s post about Community-driven development on TerraTech Worlds, we wanted to share some recent changes we’ve been making to the Tech Yard!

The Tech Yard is an integral part of TerraTech Worlds: it’s your home base, where you’ll return to again and again after a tough day of pew-pew’ing enemy Techs and narrowly avoiding being crushed by falling trees. We weren’t 100% happy with the version of the Tech Yard that you would have seen in the Next Fest demo, and so we’ve been working on changing it based both on player feedback and our internal test sessions.

Here’s a look at some of the initial concepts we’ve been exploring, focused around portability and projection (the first image shows some original concepts we had for the Tech Yard’s new holographic function, whilst the second shows the Tech Yard in its ‘stored’ state–please note that both of these designs have since been iterated on and that the Tech Yard will look closer to the screenshot you can see a little further down this page!):





TerraTech Worlds’ Principal Designer Andy Harmon explains some of the thought process behind the recent development work on the Tech Yard:

“The design changes to the Tech Yard have been focused around 2 main ideas:

1. ‘The (current) Tech Yard requires too much work and infrastructure to use.’
2. ‘The Tech Yard is an important structure and it needs to grow in importance as the player progresses.’

First, we’re going to make the Tech Yard a ‘true’ structure, one that’s functionality isn’t dependent on putting down ramps. This new Tech Yard will still have an ‘active’ area as before, but that area will now be a virtual space adjacent to (and projected by) the Tech Yard. This will project on terrain or platforms, and will be easier to interact with. Next, we looked at the progression of the Tech Yard and the features around it that we still want to explore and expand on. The Tech Yard in the demo was functional but not as identifiable/distinct as we wanted it to be, and the experience of upgrading the Tech Yard with more storage and further upgrades wasn’t what we were really looking for.”



This piece of concept art shows what we’ve currently settled on, with the blue beam being the ‘active’ projection area that Principal Designer Andy talked about above. No more needing to build a ramp and carefully drive up it to restore any lost Restore Charges!

And this is how it looks in-game:



Let us know what you think of these new changes/ideas in the comments below: we’re always keen to hear your thoughts in the lead-up to Early Access. And remember to wishlist us over on the Steam Store page if you haven’t already, to stay up-to-date with all the latest news about Early Access!

Until next time!

The TerraTech Worlds demo may be over, but we’re starting down the road to Early Access, which is arguably an even more exciting path, one filled with devilish bugs to squish and delicious new ideas to uncover. Thank you so much to all of you for playing throughout the two weeks that the demo was live!

As we continue our journey towards Early Access, we wanted to show you some of the things we’ve been working on, based on your feedback from the demo: if you still have ideas or suggestions that you’re sick of crying out from rooftops to no avail, we’d recommend posting them either on the Steam Discussions page, or in one of the relevant channels on our TerraTech Worlds Discord!

Here’s some of what we’ve been working on: please note that everything we’re sharing here is very much work-in-development, and may change over the course of TerraTech Worlds’ development as we work towards Early Access. Everything shown below is not the final product!

[h2]Claiming Rewards/Objectives Tab[/h2]

During the demo, we heard some feedback that some players were unsure where to claim their rewards from completing tasks, and some of you weren’t even aware that there were rewards to collect!

Based on this feedback, we’ve had a re-think about how rewards are claimed in TerraTech Worlds, and you’ll now claim task rewards from the "Objectives" tab whilst in your Tech Yard. The "Rewards" tab has been removed.

[h2]State Lights[/h2]

One thing we heard a lot of feedback on from the Next Fest demo was that some of you were confused about when machines were actually on/off, as well as in-use or not in-use (actively working to create ammo, refine resources etc).

To help signify these states a bit better, we’ve added these new ‘state’ lights, which will light up as different colours depending on the state of your structure(s).



Here’s what all the different light colours mean:

• No light means that the structure is currently toggled off
  
• Red means that the structure is not generating and/or receiving power
  
• Yellow means that the structure is either Blocked (cannot output items into slots), Starved (does not have any item in its inputs) and/or that no recipe has been selected
  
• Green is good: it means that everything is working as intended and that your structure is doing whatever you set it up to do!

[h2]Key Bindings [/h2]



Whilst you were able to set mouse/key bindings for some elements of TerraTech Worlds during the demo, such as setting certain input bindings for tools like the Resource Laser or Tractor Beam, we received a lot of feedback from players that they’d like the opportunity to re-map all of the game’s controls to their own preferred settings.

This is something that we’re currently working on implementing for Early Access, and you can see a (very early!) version of what we’re putting together for you in the image above.

[h2]Audio Issue(s)[/h2]

Some TerraTech Worlds players were experiencing a bug which caused in-game audio (both music and SFX) to be completely absent when playing, which was happening regardless of which audio output(s) players were using.

We’ve now squished this bug so that in-game audio should be functional for all players: you’ll be able to hear the crashing waves and laser pew pews in all their glory during Early Access!

[h2]Always Online Bug[/h2]

Some of you were experiencing a bug which meant that, to play TerraTech Worlds, your device was requiring that you were connected to an online network at all times.

TerraTech Worlds is not intended to be an always-online experience, and we have worked to fix the issue which was causing this to be the case for some users.



That’s all for now: we’ll continue to keep you updated as we get closer and closer to Early Access, and we’ll keep looking at all of your comments and suggestions to help inform future versions of TerraTech Worlds.

Remember to Wishlist us over on the TerraTech Worlds Store Page to be notified about Early Access updates: see you soon!

Hi all!

Thank you so, so much for joining us for Steam Next Fest last week: we received a plethora of feedback from you all that we’ve been collecting and passing onto our dev teams to help inform future versions of TerraTech Worlds.

To celebrate such a successful week (and to thank you all for playing!), we’ll be extending our demo until Monday 19th February at 10 AM GMT, so you can play TerraTech Worlds as much as you like until then! As before, you can still play with up to five other Steam friends.

Please remember to Wishlist TerraTech Worlds over on the store page to stay up-to-date with the latest news and updates, and please continue to provide any feedback or suggestions you may have over on the Steam Discussions page and the TerraTech Worlds Discord server.

Thank you again for playing: we couldn’t have made it this far without you all!

Tune in to watch us celebrate Next Fest by playing TerraTech Worlds.

Tune in to see Dean and Cassie taking on TerraTech Worlds together.