Dandelion Void News

[p]Welcome Pergonauts to the first Community Highlight post! As mentioned in last week’s dev blog, we’re working on some behind the scenes content we’re not ready to show yet. In the meantime we want to share some of the creative fan art that has been posted in our Discord…[/p][p][/p][h2]Deadly Popcorn[/h2][p]Discord user Redd was inspired to conceptualize an explosive new plant for the jungles aboard the Pergola.[/p][carousel][/carousel][p]Had this idea for a new plant that would be an environmental hazard in the game, it would rattle when disturbed by something touching it or moving fast near it, eventually popping and shooting out its spiked kernels. It would use the body of whatever it killed as sustenance to grow the pop-corn[/p][p][/p][p]Ideas like this are why we're so excited Dandelion Void has robust modding support. Even if we don't end up adding creative suggestions like this, the community will be free to add it themselves![/p][p][/p][h2]We have Dandelion Void at home (in Garry's Mod)[/h2][p]Meanwhile, user AnomalousBytes had this to share.[/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]I got too tired of waiting, so I made Dandelion Void at home![/p][p][/p][p]The pedigree of our team’s modding experience traces back to the early days of Garry's Mod, so seeing our trailer recreated in this way meant a lot to us![/p][p][/p][p]If you’d like to share your own fan-art, please join our Discord![/p][p][/p][h2]Content Creators[/h2][p]We also wanted to take a moment and share some of the videos folks have made about Dandelion Void's Steam Wishlist reveal. [/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink]Game: Dandelion Void - braxfindsgames[/p][p]Project Zomboid Fans NEED To See Dandelion Void - CraazyFYI[/p][p][/p][p]This is only a sampling of the English language videos that have been created, and we are flattered that there are also videos in Korean, Russian, Turkish, and many other languages![/p][p][/p][p]If you’d like to share your own fan-art or Dandelion Void related content, please join our Discord![/p]

[p]Greetings Pergonauts! Welcome to another Tuesday dev blog for Dandelion Void.[/p][p]
This week we are showing off a new terminal-controlled device, as well as discussing the role of the Pergola’s computer and mechanical systems in our game.[/p][p][/p][p]But before that, we’d also like to celebrate a milestone – the Wishlist trailer for Dandelion Void now has over 100,000 views on our YouTube channel! It can’t be said enough how grateful we are to have a community that has so embraced our game. We will continue to work hard to deliver an experience worthy of all of your attention![/p][p][/p][h2]tggl [/h2][p]Many four letter words were used during the geopolitical conflict on the Earth that the Pergola left behind, as well as during its controversial construction. One that you might not expect, though, is tggl[/p][p][/p][p]As you may have seen in a previous dev blog, the Pergola is littered with terminals that allow you to access information and control systems using a command line interface. Each command has a four letter key; for instance, list shows you the contents of a directory and/or file. tggl is short for “toggle,” which flips the state of terminal-controlled devices![/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]For the modding-curious, here’s a look at our map editor. When a terminal is selected, you can preview all connected devices.[/p][p][/p][p]The lights are a good early use case for this system due to their simple purpose and easily visible state. Players can now illuminate rooms as they explore to make loot more easily visible, keep their bases illuminated for comfort, or turn the lights out before they go to bed! This command already works with doors, and down the line, there will be a variety of other devices that respond to the tggl command.[/p][p][/p][p]The world of Dandelion Void is built around a dichotomy. On one hand, your environment has returned to a state of nature. Like premodern humans, you must gather food, seek shelter, and defend yourself from wild creatures. On the other hand, a ship is still a ship, overgrown or bare. The electricity still works (for now), the doors are powered, and the player will encounter a variety of manufacturing and life support equipment. Mastering these systems is essential for you to not only survive, but thrive aboard the pergola.[/p][p][/p][p]Fans of Brian’s modding work might already know that electrical and mechanical infrastructure can be just as much fun when it doesn’t work as when it does. Down the line, you might find that terminals and/or their controlled devices need to be repaired or serviced before you can get what you need out of them – but that’s a topic for another day.[/p][p][/p][h2]Next Week[/h2][p]We have some infrastructure tasks coming up which are crucial for the game but not particularly exciting to look at. They’ll take more than a week to finish, so we’ll update you on them when they’re done.[/p][p][/p][p]To fill the gap in next week’s dev blog, we’d like to highlight some incredible Dandelion Void fan art! We already have a few in mind, but if you have anything you’d like to be featured please share them in our Discord’s #fan-art channel.[/p][p]
Until then, it’s time for us to tggl off![/p]

[p]Hey everyone! Welcome to another Tuesday dev blog for Dandelion Void.[/p][p]This week we’d like to give you a peek into a new status effect we’re working on, and discuss our general philosophy on stats in survival games![/p][p]To complement the clothing system we have in Dandelion Void, we now have a cold status effect for the player character.[/p][h3]It's best to suit up during the cold, night-like power cycles aboard the Pergola[/h3][p]Temperature management will be a relatively minor detail in our first demo – your healing is reduced and you perform actions more slowly while cold, but you're not about to lose any fingers or toes to frostbite. As we progress through development we would like to add new areas and/or ship system malfunctions that make keeping warm a matter of life and death.[/p][p]We also plan to expand the number of ways your character can keep warm, like hovering over a camp stove, cozying up in a sleeping bag, or enjoying the warm steam rolling off of a nearby reactor pool…[/p][p]“Survival” is a broad category, and there's a wide spectrum of how much individual games simulate the task of keeping your character alive. On one end you have games like Minecraft or Subnautica where you have health, a hunger meter, and maybe thirst. These titles are more focused on building and exploration, so taking care of your body is pretty simple and you will rarely if ever starve to death. On the other end, games like ZERO Sievert and Project Zomboid have stats like happiness, entertainment, drunkenness, and a variety of bodily injuries; keeping yourself alive is a task that never ends. [/p][p]Dandelion Void is somewhere in the middle, but leans towards the latter category. We are interested in the mechanical challenge and gameplay texture of managing a wide variety of needs; hunger and thirst of course, but also boredom, well-restedness, environmental comfort, and now body temperature. [/p][p]If we just gave each of these stats its own meter, our UI would quickly devolve into an overwhelming mess. Instead we use a status icon system which tells the player only what they need to know. Each stat has a unique icon with multiple variants to indicate the severity of the effect. [/p][p]Negative statuses range from mild yellow, to urgent red, to a deathly pale gray. Positive stat enhancements become a deeper green. One of the advantages of the system is that if a stat requires no action – say, if your hunger is at 90% – we can just omit it completely so as not to overwhelm the player with unimportant information. [/p][p]In designing the icons themselves, we've tried to pick playful visuals that evoke what your character might be feeling. Hunger is a depleting stomach; sleepiness is a heavy-lidded eye, etc. Others get a bit more metaphorical – boredom is a puzzle cube that becomes more and more scrambled, while your environmental comfort is a chair whose upholstery slowly repairs. [/p][p]In general we avoid over-relying on iconographic tropes – although as you can see with the cold status, sometimes it's best to stick with familiar symbols like a snowflake and a thermometer. [/p][p][/p][p]At their best, status effects add texture to gameplay, create fun minigames for players, and offer role-playing opportunities. But when overused or poorly balanced, they become irritating chores which distract from the actual fun of the game. By thinking hard about which statuses we implement, hiding irrelevant information from the player, and constantly playtesting through our development, we are working hard to make sure that these features are a net value add![/p][p]If there's ever a specific aspect of the game or our development process that you would like to learn more about, please feel free to let us know in our discord so that we can consider it for a future dev blog![/p][p][/p]

[p]Hey everyone! Welcome to another Tuesday devlog for Dandelion Void.[/p][p][/p][p]We’ve spent this week on some under-the-hood improvements to the game, including a new title screen and some low-level optimization. While less romantic than new content, infrastructure work like this is a crucial step towards making a standalone demo for streamers, partners, and beyond.[/p][p][/p][p]To make sure our fans still get some treats we’ve also answered a few of your frequently asked questions – see below![/p][p][/p][p]After 2 years of development, we got around to adding a title screen! This campstove screenshot has been particularly resonant with people online, and we’re really happy with how it communicates the tone and ambiance of Dandelion Void. We’ve also included a short preview of the new soundscape our composer Catton has been working on.[/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]This update also includes some improvements to the loading flow of the new game experience.[/p][p]The modding API for Dandelion void uses a Lua scripting layer that sits on top of a more traditional Unity engine codebase. We’re really happy with the development experience we’ve set up, and are now looking for ways to optimize the memory and CPU usage of this layer. Every frame counts!
[/p][h2]Is the game 3D, prerendered, or a mixture of both?[/h2][p]Dandelion Void is a fully 3D experience! We use low resolution textures and crunchy-pixel rendering to capture the feel of prerendered isometric games, but every character, creature, furniture piece, and ship component you see is a 3D model. This makes it easy for us to get powerful lighting effects, place furniture at arbitrary rotations, and opens us to more dynamic camera effects down the line.[/p][p][/p][h2]What’s with the terminals? Is coding knowledge required to play Dandelion Void?[/h2][p]The Pergola runs on 70’s era computing systems, and every now and then you’ll have to use a command line interface to open doors or manipulate devices. While players with knowledge of present-day CLIs will feel at home, we are very much designing these with the blank slate player in mind. All players should be able to master the system after a small initial learning curve.
[/p][h2]Will the game feature human NPCs?[/h2][p]Human NPCs are not on the roadmap for Dandelion Void, but the player is very much not alone. You see small streaks of motion skittering in your peripheral vision. You find strange tools and structures built at a tiny scale, skillfully crafted but obscure in purpose. Diligent players might be able to learn more about this presence, and even form a working relationship with it – but it will always remain somewhat elusive.
[/p][p]In the future, we hope to make a feature roadmap to clarify our goals for the game and answer questions like this ahead of time, while keeping plenty of surprises in our back pocket[/p][h2]If there’s no other humans in the game, where did the player character come from?[/h2][p]Your character is a descendant of the Pergola’s original crew, but you’ve found yourself in a part of the ship where you are the only living human. Where you came from and what happened to your family is clouded in mystery.[/p][p][/p][p]In the future, the specifics of your background might be a part of character creation. Let us know if that's something you would want to see![/p]

[p]Hi everybody! Welcome to another Tuesday Dandelion Void Development Blog. [/p][h2]Business[/h2][p]Today marks two weeks since we launched our steam page, and we are now up to 40k wishlists! It’s common in the industry to use the wishlist count after a game’s first 2 weeks to predict momentum, and we are thrilled beyond belief by these promising numbers -- especially for a small team that hasn't spent a cent on marketing. We continue to be grateful for the support of our rapidly growing community![/p][p] [/p][h2]Timeline[/h2][p]This week Brian is shifting gears from marketing mode back into full-time dev. Our goal is to spent the next few months creating a strong standalone demo build that we can send to streamers, YouTubers, and early playtesters. To be the first to hear about playtesting opportunities, join our Discord![/p][p] [/p][h2]Dev Progress![/h2][p]We've received a lot of questions about the Pergola and the Earth it launched from, so this week we've been working on adding discoverable lore snippets into the game. Currently these are accessible via terminals, but in the future we'd also like to attach them to in-game books, adhesive notes, and other objects. [/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]Our biggest inspirations come from literary science fiction, so as a worldbuilding exercise we've been writing a series of unpublished short stories. Some of these snippets come from these "narrative concept art" stories![/p][p]That's all for this week. Thank you very much and take care![/p][p]Robin and Brian[/p]