Progress Trailer - 3 Years of Development
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A lot has happened since the release of Avorion into Early Access on January 23rd, 2017 - We've come a long way since then. This trailer highlights the most important changes since the Early Access release three years ago, while also showing off the classics of Avorion for all those people who don't know the game yet.
Note: Depending on when you're watching it, the trailer may contain unreleased content, such as the ship generator rework.
The list of improvements since the Early Access Release of 2017 is quite long by now:
A revised (turret) building mode, massively improved procedural ship & station generation, new sound effects, torpedoes & PDCs, specialized enemies, improved faction territories, new blocks, new weapons, new upgrades, boarding, completely revised economy based on supply and demand, improved faction behavior & diplomacy, commanding ships over the map, more missions & events, UI improvements and much, much more!
As promised in last week's announcement, there are still some updates in the pipeline that will be released before the transition from Early Access to 1.0.
[h2]Faction Economy & Faction Eradication[/h2]
AI Factions will soon have limited resources available (instead of unlimited resources), based on their territory size on the map and their economical strength. But don't be fooled: The amount of resources they have available will still be a lot.
This has a few implications:
1. They will have to rebuild their military ships over time and if you're quick enough you can make them run out
2. They will be able to rebuild stations
3. You will be able to completely eradicate factions from the map
[h2]Craft Generator Rework[/h2]
As you may have noticed by now, we're in the middle of a rework of the procedural ship & station generator of Avorion. Ships are generated based on so-called "Faction Styles". Our goal is that players can recognize a faction by their ships. That means that all ships of a faction have similar visual properties. That includes the color and structure of the ship, and also visual features like spikes. In addition, a faction can have multiple types of ships, which among themselves are very similar to each other, but not completely alike.
Compared to the old ship generator (not shown here), the new generator can create much prettier ships that are very distinguishable from each other. The new generator will also be moddable.
While the new generator is mostly finished and ready to use (as seen in above trailer), it's still a little rough around the edges and doesn't support as much variation as we'd like it to. But we're confident that, if everything goes well, a first implementation may be available for testing on the beta branch towards the end of January, start of February.
[h2]Endgame Content[/h2]
There are some more things coming before release: We want to add more End-Game content after you beat the final boss. That includes new really hard bosses and a few large-scale events. But we don't want to give away too much here, yet.
[h2]Final Polishing Phase[/h2]
Starting in February, we're going to go into a polishing phase where we will focus a lot less on new features and content, but instead on fixing as many issues and bugs as we can. We're also revisiting some older code to improve performance.
Alright, that's it for now, stay tuned for the next updates!
A lot has happened since the release of Avorion into Early Access on January 23rd, 2017 - We've come a long way since then. This trailer highlights the most important changes since the Early Access release three years ago, while also showing off the classics of Avorion for all those people who don't know the game yet.
Note: Depending on when you're watching it, the trailer may contain unreleased content, such as the ship generator rework.
The list of improvements since the Early Access Release of 2017 is quite long by now:
A revised (turret) building mode, massively improved procedural ship & station generation, new sound effects, torpedoes & PDCs, specialized enemies, improved faction territories, new blocks, new weapons, new upgrades, boarding, completely revised economy based on supply and demand, improved faction behavior & diplomacy, commanding ships over the map, more missions & events, UI improvements and much, much more!
Upcoming updates
As promised in last week's announcement, there are still some updates in the pipeline that will be released before the transition from Early Access to 1.0.
[h2]Faction Economy & Faction Eradication[/h2]
AI Factions will soon have limited resources available (instead of unlimited resources), based on their territory size on the map and their economical strength. But don't be fooled: The amount of resources they have available will still be a lot.
This has a few implications:
1. They will have to rebuild their military ships over time and if you're quick enough you can make them run out
2. They will be able to rebuild stations
3. You will be able to completely eradicate factions from the map
[h2]Craft Generator Rework[/h2]
As you may have noticed by now, we're in the middle of a rework of the procedural ship & station generator of Avorion. Ships are generated based on so-called "Faction Styles". Our goal is that players can recognize a faction by their ships. That means that all ships of a faction have similar visual properties. That includes the color and structure of the ship, and also visual features like spikes. In addition, a faction can have multiple types of ships, which among themselves are very similar to each other, but not completely alike.
Compared to the old ship generator (not shown here), the new generator can create much prettier ships that are very distinguishable from each other. The new generator will also be moddable.
While the new generator is mostly finished and ready to use (as seen in above trailer), it's still a little rough around the edges and doesn't support as much variation as we'd like it to. But we're confident that, if everything goes well, a first implementation may be available for testing on the beta branch towards the end of January, start of February.
[h2]Endgame Content[/h2]
There are some more things coming before release: We want to add more End-Game content after you beat the final boss. That includes new really hard bosses and a few large-scale events. But we don't want to give away too much here, yet.
[h2]Final Polishing Phase[/h2]
Starting in February, we're going to go into a polishing phase where we will focus a lot less on new features and content, but instead on fixing as many issues and bugs as we can. We're also revisiting some older code to improve performance.
Alright, that's it for now, stay tuned for the next updates!
