Per Aspera News

Per Aspera is at the Steam Game Festival Autumn Edition this week: visit us October 7th until October 13th! Visit us during the event to play our new and improved demo and tune into our gameplay livestreams on Steam.



To celebrate the showcase, we'll be running demo livestreams! To join, tune into our Steam page. Our demo focuses on the simulation aspects of Per Aspera: watch as we begin the first step towards transforming Mars into a verdant paradise. We'll begin by starting the basics of our new colony: finding resources, mining them, and finding the delicate balance between expansions and consumption.



You can also begin building humanity's new home yourself! We'll be offering our free demo for you to try during the festival. Our demo is a small taste of what the full game will have -- it focuses on the early stages of our planet building and resource management simulation. Our new demo has a couple of updates: we've refreshed the UI and also added building structural integrity. We hope you have fun exploring Mars! If you have the time, we would appreciate any and all feedback you may have: please consider filling out our demo feedback form!



https://store.steampowered.com/app/803050/Per_Aspera/

As your colony grows to stretch across the red expanse of Mars, newly built roads will expand your reach and workers will diligently travel to and fro building, scrapping, and transporting materials. Each time your base expands, you’ll need more roads and eventually even more workers to keep everything working perfectly. While the worker hub acts as your worker’s base of operations, you’ll find that the service area limit isn’t strict. Sometimes your workers will cross the boundary to grab or deposit a tantalizing resource that’s on the other side. This can help in unique cases where you need just a little extra help before setting up a new worker hub.



In Per Aspera, efficiency is paramount! To keep your colony running at top efficiency, use the traffic lens to identify which areas of your base need improvements or restructuring. This Lens will allow you to analyze how heavily loaded each Worker Hub is. The load is calculated with a combination of factors, the most important ones being the total time the worker is working (vs at rest) and the amount of pending cargo that is waiting to be ferried across to an area. If an area is heavily loaded, you will need to consider adding more Worker Hubs and partition your base in a more efficient manner.



You won’t want to have too many traffic jams on Mars! The traffic lens will also let you take a look at the individual saturation of each and every road and hyperloop. Keep an eye open to detect bottlenecks in the roads, as they are ideal candidates for upgrades.



As your colony grows, you may find that you’ve created a veritable urban sprawl and that it’s hard to focus on certain aspects. The traffic lens was designed to help you quickly determine how the roads and workers, which are the foundational building blocks of your colony, are operating. We were inspired by the different tools city planners use to determine efficiency and density such as isochrone maps and traffic heatmaps.

This is an example of a traffic heatmap analyzing rush hour in a metropolitan area.



https://store.steampowered.com/app/803050/Per_Aspera/

Workers are your arms and legs on the cold surface of Mars. They are unmanned rovers that shuttle resources around your base and also handle the construction and eventual scrapping of buildings. Even though they move autonomously, they are an extension of your own self.



You begin with a single worker -- it's equipped with construction drones that can 3D print entire buildings. Each worker requires a hub to operate from: they’ll use the hub to store materials and service the surrounding area. The Landing Site and Worker Hub both serve as centers for workers.

Early concept sketches of the trusty worker!

When we started working on the game, we knew we wanted our workers to replicate the kind of experience The Settlers had. While the little serfs in that game live on the roads, we’ve decided for our workers to live in buildings so they can be protected from inclement Mars weather. After experimenting quite a lot, we found it felt best to add a special building specifically for workers! That’s how we designed the Worker Hub.



Workers are built automatically in Worker Factories as long as there are vacant hubs. You'll need to build many replacements since workers have such a tough life: the harsh Martian climate and solar radiation eventually causes irreparable decay. That’s why it’s important to have factories that constantly create fresh, new workers. In a way, we were loosely inspired by Von Neumann probes -- self-sufficient constructs that can build self-replicating bases or even copies of themselves. While you start Mars with only a single yet capable worker, by the end of the game you’ll command a legion of them!



https://store.steampowered.com/app/803050/Per_Aspera/

Roads lie at the core of Per Aspera. A well designed colony is connected seamlessly by a vast network of expanding roads. In our game, it’s very important to plan your building placement carefully! The ultimate directive of AMI is to terraform the planet... but one of the first steps to accomplishing that is by creating efficient resource transportation. That’s precisely where roads come in.



The foundation of a good colony is an optimized network of roads and buildings connected with Workers. When you begin a new structure, a new road will be created that links it to your pre-existing structures. Each particular road is calculated on the fly based on the real topology of Mars. The roads will try to minimize the travel time between buildings, as the Workers travel faster the flatter the road is. We modelled the different speeds on a 1985 paper commissioned by the US Department of Transportation called “Methods for Predicting Truck Speed Loss on Grades” (by Robert Gillespie), adjusted for Mars gravity.



For the curious cats, these animated tendrils are not a visual effect, it’s the actual pathfinding algorithm running in real-time! We implemented an algorithm from a paper by Galin, Peytavie, Maréchal and Guérin called “Procedural Generation of Roads”, which consists of a hyperdense A* search on a dynamic lattice. This is a very novel technique designed to be used in real civil engineering road planification. We think Per Aspera must be one of the first games to use such a technique!



We were also inspired by classic games like The Settlers (AKA Serf City: Life is Feudal), which provided hours and hours of optimization fun! We hope our players will have just as much fun planning and optimizing their settlements.



https://store.steampowered.com/app/803050/Per_Aspera/

Do strange things happen when you play games? Are you cursed with inevitably finding bugs? Use your powers for good and help us move closer to launch: we're looking for gamebreakers to break our next milestone build. Apply here!

[h2]Press Round Ups[/h2]



While we were at Gamescom, we had the honor of being featured in several amazing press outlets. Here's a couple of the highlights!

"Per Aspera is massive and its depiction of Mars is fantastic... When the time comes, I look forward to continuing my expedition to terraform the Red Planet." -COGconnected

"When exploring and expanding, the time flies by and after playing through the Gamescom demo by Per Aspera we felt like we had woken up from cryosleep. Is it over? We want to see more of the colonization simulator!" -"Best Gameplay" from Welcome To Last Week

"Per Aspera looks less like a traditional city builder and more like an urban sprawl-themed game from Zachtronics. With symbols representing each building and resources darting between them, the game flows beautifully." -Screenrant

[h2]Did you see our new trailer?[/h2]

We debuted a new gameplay trailer on IGN's exclusive Gamescom livestream! In case you missed it a couple of weeks ago, catch it below while you're here below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv_hdcZAsSc



https://store.steampowered.com/app/803050/Per_Aspera/