Starpoint Gemini 3 News

Starpoint Gemini 3 is now officially out and available as Steam Early Access!

Prepare to experience something different, yet familiar in the long line of Starpoint series. You're not afraid of the unknown right ?!

This is our third Early Access and thanks to the awesome respone from our community, previous ones were fantastic and resulted in a much improved and expanded game.
We invite you all to this third journey together, throw your feedback at us, spam us with suggestions and help us mold the game that will fulfill your space dreams!

In celebration of this very special release for us, we've prepared some FREEBIES and special offers:

Early Adopter Package - everyone who gets Starpoint Gemini 3 within the first 30 days will get Stapoint Gemini 2 for free, even if you already have it in your library!



Starpoint Gemini 3 Supporter Pack - fancy package that, besides base game, throws in a beautiful extensive digital Artbook, and entire soundtrack, and a few unique weapons for in-game use

Starpoint Gemini 3 Supporter Bundle - contains Starpoint Gemini 3 Early Adopter Package and Supporter pack, also with free Starpoint Gemini 2 for the first 30 days

Thank you all for such amazing support over the years and see you all in Gemini and beyond!

We're thrilled to announce that Starpoint Gemini 3, fourth sequel in the franchise will follow its predecessors and enter Early Access program as well!

This momentous event will happen on September 5th 2019 and we invite all of you to join us on this path. It's been both challenging and fun in the past and we're positive this time will be no different.

Starpoint Gemini 3 is something new and different, but at the same time, it also sticks to the very roots of the series.

Stay tuned and prepare to dive in Gemini (and beyond this time!) once again!

Start your engines!

This third Devblog offers more information on one of the most significant changes we're introducing to the Starpoint franchise. Many of you noticed this change and asked numerous questions about it, so it is good time to reveal more info, but without spoiling too much of your future game experience.
One of the most important parts in this new approach were characters. You already learned humans aren't alone and alien races exist and share space with humans. But instead of offering aliens as a mere additional variable in the global scale of events, we wanted to give players a chance to really meet them face to face. See them firsthand, talk to them, observe how they adapted to living in mostly human populated territories. In addition, why wouldn't you visit their planet and learn how they live and what their ordinary day looks like? In Starpoint Gemini 3 characters are here to tell a story (both visual and in the sense of spoken words) and to show the player that they are real living creatures forced to survive and secure happiness in the same surreal circumstances as any other human. Each tragic event and each battle from the past left a scar on Gemini and everyone living there, be that human or alien. They might have different perspectives on many of these events, but the effect on their lives is profound regardless.





Given the fact that we still opted to keep our own game engine for Starpoint Gemini 3, and the fact we never used characters on this level before, creating the necessary technical support for this feature was a daunting task. First, our WhaleX engine had to be upgraded to receive and render high quality character models at all. Next, these characters don't just hang around drifting in space. They need to be placed in closed spaces, environments and rooms. That was also something we used before only in a limited capacity. It took several months to prepare the engine for the usage of internal spaces, appropriate lightning and details rendering. After that came the biggest task of all – the characters now needed to start talking and expressing emotions. Introducing blend shapes, proper expressions and speech synchronization proved to be very challenging. The selection of technology to record shapes and software to implement it took another few months, but when we first saw Remo Bo talking to us and making funny faces, we all knew it was worth the effort. He was, among other characters, now ready to tell his story and that felt awesome, especially for the things to come.





Ok, so an Exteran bartender smiled at us and offered us his first drink. That meant testing time was over, and we have established a system and a workflow that works. The available options suddenly expanded, and we wanted to use it to the maximum extent possible. Character lists were created, the storywriter gave them personalities and backgrounds while the animators worked their magic to give them life and expressions. Doing this for the first time was both fun and hard with problems appearing from everywhere. One day a Dogon alien is trying to relay a serious message to you when his teeth suddenly fall out. The next day a local trader is giving you a quest, but his body goes somewhere else and you find yourself talking to his lonesome floating head. Hey, we're not making a horror game, so this was freaky to say the least. It took some time to sort these glitches out, but in the end, we were happy with the overall quality and the impact we achieved.





Most players will probably be interested in what they'll get in the end. Who will they meet during the game? Well, now we're getting to the slippery terrain if we want to avoid spoilers. You'll meet humans; many humans. Both male and female. Aliens too, and we don't mean it as mere plural, but as in more than one race of aliens. When we talk about specific types of characters, your travels will offer the chance to meet ordinary people, traders, bartenders, heroes of past wars, twins, criminals and shady people, android like dudes, some non-humanoid creatures as well... All in all, Starpoint Gemini 3 takes place in Gemini and beyond as well, so it's a very big place and variety is mandatory.
The plethora of characters you'll encounter on various locations on planets and space stations will offer information, clues, quests and different services, pretty much similar to any classic RPG, but at the same time this new perspective will allow you to get a front row view on the regular life in Gemini – interiors, factions and their relations, design ideas, fashion...



When talking about characters, we have to offer some answer to a very important question – Are Aliens bad? In previous games in the Starpoint Gemini series, the aliens were shown rarely and usually connected to some battle and destruction. Now, many players expected they are an „Independence Day“ type of aliens. Well, they are not. First – there are more than one race of them. Second – none of them hold an inherent hate of humans. They utterly hated the Empire but once that organization was destroyed and genome experiments had ended, they had no special desire to pursue destruction of the entire human species. In Starpoint Gemini 3, years after the fall of the Empire, humans are repopulating human territories outside of Gemini once again, and they slowly accept that the A'Shriari are here to stay, and that some form of coexistence will have to be found. Additionally, as you travel outside of Gemini and the story takes you to the other former colonies of the Earth Empire, you’ll learn about more and more species out there. None of them have any choice but to live with each other. Do they like each other? That depends, but that doesn't change the fact that all of you are here to stay and finding the best way to do so, and to navigate the complicated mutual relationships, is one of the crucial tasks that the protagonist, Jonathan Bold, will have to tackle. That is – alongside the even more complicated relationships between Jonathan's former/current and potential girlfriends



That's it for this Diary, thanks for reading and stay tuned!

Yes, it's FINALLY HERE! The first Starpoint Gemini 3 gameplay trailer is official, and you can watch it below! Go, go, go, NOW!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8wAfWZXSMk
Now, before you go change your underpants, we have another special announcement to share with you:
Yep, MORE gameplay footage is coming your way in the upcoming days.

Improvements on the WhaleX engine: Part 1

In the new Starpoint Gemini 3 development diary, we are shifting our focus to improvements on the technical side of the game. Our proprietary engine, WhaleX Engine has seen a lot of improvements since our last game, Starpoint Gemini Warlords; especially in the rendering aspect.

Check out what lies under the hood of Starpoint Gemini 3 in the first part of our technical development diary.

This development diary is also an entry to the first Starpoint Gemini 3 gameplay video, which is coming very, very soon!

Explosion System Improvements

Before, explosions used to be growing, glowing blobs that were meant to dazzle. Unfortunately, getting hit by numerous missiles meant that the player would quickly be coated in a potato-shaped glow. The game suffered from a limited visual variety and the details were hardly visible.



We've added support for high-fidelity explosion animations, with frame-blending support, local light casting (looks far better than simply stacking screen-space glow) and supported the creation of these effects via the game's new Editor.



What we're planning in the near future:
We've already had small debris flying into space when hitting or destroying spaceships. It gave the impression of actually fragmenting the enemy's hull during combat. This however, was never fully apparent (mostly due to our ambients being very dark), so in addition to improving those effects we're considering a more robust hull damage model as well as hull-bending during the ship's explosion to really sell the destruction effect.


Environmental Cloud and Particle system Improvements

Previously, the environmental particle system has undergone smaller changes from Starpoint Gemini 2 to Starpoint Gemini Warlords. The art team added more variety to the system and appropriately colored particles were used in various environments. The clouds, however, never underwent any changes. While traveling through space, the player would come across some flag-shaped clouds that would periodically appear and behave in a wave-like manner. This was present in every environment.

With Starpoint Gemini 3 we decided to add more variety and depth to those clouds. Artists can now craft cloud density, depth, color, add a variety of different shapes and animations. All in an effort to make nebulas, industrial areas and open space feel unique.



Tiled Forward Rendering (Forward+) upgrade to the Graphics Pipeline

Even though Starpoint Gemini Warlords featured local dynamic lights, they were never actually used because of their crippling limitations (up to 4 lights could be cast on any individual object in the game), so instead we focused our efforts on making the Gemini Suns cast impressive volumetric shadows.

The only other place we used an additional light was at the finale of each planetary battle – the moment when you fire the doomsday beam at your adversary's planet.



Starpoint Gemini 3 has had its graphics pipeline upgraded with Tile Based Light Culling technique known as Forward+ rendering. It's widely considered the best of both worlds when it comes to taking advantage of both Forward Rendering systems and Deferred renderers. Forward rendering systems typically use less memory, and are the preferred choice in games with less objects on the screen (such as games set in space). They are, however, a lot less performant when it comes to rendering lots of dynamic lights. That is, unless you sort them out in volume tiles before drawing lit objects.

We're still deciding on the final light limit but it soon became apparent that objects can now handle 100+ lights without noticable framerate drops.

Local Reflections for interiors via Reflection Probes

We've had dozens of interiors in Warlords and managed to make them look pretty good, but we've had to limit the amount of reflective surfaces. Starpoint Gemini 3 will bring significantly more interiors which means that a good variety of surface materials is mandatory. We've developed a known technique for capturing and displaying local reflections via Reflection Capture probes and added both box and spherical projection sampling to the mix to properly render reflections of both linear and curved spaces.



The World and Material editors are now one

Our engine uses two main ingredients to visualize most of the content in the
game – 3D models and particle emitters. The material editor was previously mostly used for composing such ingredients into objects known as "assemblies". When such an object was dynamic or potentially interactive (such as a spaceship) we'd add a subsection in the editor to be able to visualize all the data that comes together to form that entity.



The world editor was a separate app that we tried to use for level design, but given the way that space was partitioned in Warlords made it difficult to load and display those assets in real time, so we mostly neglected it and the app fell behind as we moved the tech forward. For Starpoint Gemini 3 we've decided to keep all the functionality in the same app and managed to port most of the world-building UI into the new monolithic editor. It would work properly this time around because we had one less parallel rendering system to worry about and we've built the level partitioning system from the ground up.

The Cutscene Editor

While the cutscene system in Starpoint Gemini Warlords was feature rich (the camera could follow, orbit and zoom in on objects or paths, move and jump between several curves in space at different speeds and etc...) it was designed to be controlled via scripts where we figured most of the action was happening anyway. In the end, it proved too cumbersome to actually use in its entirety because there was no way to visualize the way the camera would behave before actually playing the cutscene, ramping up cutscene development costs.



This time we figured we should invest more development resources to upgrade our toolbelt to avoid similar resource sinks in the future. The new Editor features a robust cutscene creation tool with a keyframe control UI that supports chaining multiple sequences within a cutscene, new camera features like camera shake and real-world depth of field camera controls (Focal Length, Focus Distance and Aperture).



New Ship Control Scheme

All playable Ships in the Starpoint Gemini series had similar movement functionalities, mostly inherited from the first entry in the series which mimicked movement in naval combat. The only changes in controls came when we moved on from fighting on a 2D plane to full 3D movement in Starpoint Gemini 2. We added pitch and roll... and that was it. You'd still only move forward at various speeds and align your 4 shields to best cover your weakspots. It didn't bother us at the time because we expected capital ships to be a lot less maneuverable, and it added to the significance of careful
movement during battles as players were expected to commit to a course once they've set it.



Alas, with Starpoint Gemini Warlords it became clear that smaller capital ships such as gunships, corvettes and frigates needed more maneuverability to stay alive in large fleet battles, so we did our best to reduce their weaknesses by boosting their angular velocity and acceleration. With those ships taking the center stage in Starpoint Gemini 3 it was finally time to add lateral, vertical and backwards longitudinal movement to the mix, as well as improved camera behavior to properly convey such complex movement to the player. This will allow ships to traverse narrow paths in minefields, giant asteroids or derelicts with ease as well as simplify navigation during battles.

Mechanical Ally

In Starpoint Gemini 3 we're finally adding a manually controlled drone into the mix. This miniature player-controlled character has additional functionalities oriented towards expanding base gameplay as well as the opportunity to enter and retrieve resources from smaller derelicts and cave formations.