Posts Tagged ‘Keen Software House’

Make it sorta: Space Engineers warps into beta status

Space Engineers [official site] is still in early access but has now officially reached beta status. I believe means Keen’s software rocket is still risky enough that they wouldn’t send humans up but if a few monkeys explode in the name of progress, so be it. Perhaps one such monkey is you. The update blasting the space craft-o-build-a-sandbox into beta has brought new multiplayer netcode, a tutorial campaign, redesigned and rebuilt blocks, magnetic boots, improvements to rendering and physics, and other such neat-o improvements. Read the rest of this entry »

Medieval Engineers Gets Big ‘Re-Launch’ Update

While Space Engineers receives a fairly steady flow of smaller updates, developers Keen Software House have been saving up for a big’un with their other early access sandbox game, the low-tech follow-up Medieval Engineers [official site]. This week has brought an update big enough that Keen call it a “re-launch”, boshing in everything from a huge new world to land claims and female player models. Read the rest of this entry »

Planets In Space Engineers Sound/Look Pretty Awesome

I haven’t played anything like enough of sandbox building/exploration game Space Engineers [official site], but the recent addition of explorable planets looks like a solid gold reason to. They arrived back in November, but this new video makes a strong case for why they demand more attention.

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Space Engineers Dev Diary Explains Landing On Planets

Last month, Keen Software House added planets and moons to their Early Access intergalactic sandbox adventure Space Engineers [official site] as “a result of some early access player feedback”. In what Keen’s founder Marek Rosa labels a “game-changing feature”, players can now manipulate the landscape as they see fit – leaving behind a persistent footprint in their wake. In a new developer diary, Rosa explains how he and his team arrived at the decision to add the game’s most ambitious feature yet.

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Intergalactic Planetary: Space Engineers Adds Planets

As well as trying to trap a brain inside a computer, Keen Software House want to squeeze the whole dang universe into one too. Their latest Early Access update to Space Engineers [official site] last night added diddy ‘planets’ and moons to its sandbox space, so you can now leap off your spaceship and plummet all the way down onto a planetoid, if that’s a thing you want to do. When their AI escapes, it’ll fire us at planets with a spacegun as revenge for trapping it, so we better get used to the idea. Or you could land to explore, build, fight, and all that, I guess. Whatever.

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You Wot? Space Engineers Devs Making Artificial Brain

Of all the fanciful claims made of video game technology, my favourite has always been neural nets and artificial brains. Imagine if video game men were alive! Your soldiers would learn from battle! They’d write letters to their virtual families – which you can read! Gasp as the life leaves their little digital eyes, and wonder what they believe comes next! Oh, it’s always a load of tosh.

You’ll excuse me if my meatbrain smirks as I respond “Whaaat?” to Space Engineers developers Keen Software House announcing plans to make an AI brain “which operates at the level of a human brain and can adapt and learn any new task”. Bit late for an April Fool, isn’t it?

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Space Engineers Shares Source Code

145,000 lines of code got the Apollo Mission to the Moon, or so The Internet tells me. It takes a fair few more than that to crash a spaceshark into Space Station Homer’s crotch. Don’t believe me? Fine, go count the lines yourself.

Space Engineers [official site] developers Keen Software House are giving people access to their sandbox space sim’s source code, letting folks tinker with the game way more than its mod tools allow. Keen also announced they plan to put up $100,000 (£63k) to support folks making total conversions. Crumbs!

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Medieval Engineers Early Access Adds Multiplayer

It was only when Marsh prematurely evaluated all over Medieval Engineers [official site] that I realised its initial Steam Early Access launch lacked multiplayer. I’m inattentive, me. But developers Keen Software House (them lot also behind Space Engineers) had shown multiplayer in its trailers and screenshots and I’d blithely assumed… that doesn’t matter now.

Multiplayer arrived in the castle-building/smashing sandbox yesterday for both its creative and survival modes. You can now smash your pal’s castle to pieces.

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RPS Feature Castle Doctorin'

Premature Evaluation: Medieval Engineers

The toothy, undulating stonework battlements is often called crenelation, crenels being the gaps (from which we get the word 'cranny') and the protrusions being called, variously, cops or merlons. It's not entirely clear where the word 'merlon' comes from - conflicting attributions give it a Latin origin meaning pitchfork and, oddly, blackbird. One suggestion is that the word for blackbird is used in this way because it suggests things perched along a wall. Bit of a stretch, I think.

Each week Marsh Davies punches a hole through the vertiginous walls of Early Access and comes back with any stories he can find and/or watches with grotesque, wet-lipped arousal as the entire structure disassembles in a shower of hot, hot physics. This week, he makes, then mounts, the battlements in Medieval Engineers, a castle construction sandbox. And then he unmakes them, too.

Once you’ve built a castle in Medieval Engineers, you can look at it, hit CTRL-C, then CTRL-V and paste a brick-for-brick duplicate of your entire complex anywhere else in the level. Including the sky – though they are not wont to stay there for very long. Castles, despite a plethora of idiomatic song titles suggesting otherwise, are very much a ground based medium, and when placed in the sky, they attempt to revert to form, with glorious physics-enabled results.

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Smash-o! Medieval Engineers Launches Into Early Access

PREPARE FOR SMASHING.

A touch over a month after announcing Medieval Engineers [official site], Keen Software have now launched the low-tech counterpart to Space Engineers. Well, they’ve launched it into Early Access. I can’t imagine a sandbox crafty build ’em up doing it any other way, though. Actually. How would Minecraftbuts turn out if they did launch without that lengthy phase of large-scale testing and feedback? Perhaps closer to a LEGO set, made with a specific purpose in mind, than a jumbled box of bricks? Or over-ambitious and under-delivering? Anyway, I don’t have time to ramble on about that now.

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Space Engineers Devs Announce Medieval Engineers

I name this invention SMASH-O!

While Space Engineers is still in Early Access, developers Keen Software House are looking for more engineering opportunities. Today they announced Medieval Engineers. Given that I used to cheekily describe Space Engineers as “a Minecraftbut in space,” I don’t know where this leaves me. Medieval engineers in their leather aprons will dig and landscape, of course, but it’ll also have mechanical gadgets, and physics-based building and destruction with structural integrity. You can design siege engines to smash your mate’s castle, for starters. Come watch that in the trailer.

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Hack The Galaxy! Space Engineers’ Programmable Blocks

Space me good.

Even as a casual observer of the genre, I get excited when sandbox block ’em ups add programmable bits. Some of Minecraft‘s redstone devices are staggering in their scale and mechanical complexity, and I suspect we’ll see some awfully clever things in Space Engineers. An update last week added programmable blocks which are properly programmable, running C# code, which I imagine will power all sorts of delightful devices and cruel creations for me to enjoy seeing in videos. Folks have already made virtual viruses that e.g. disable ships and arm their warheads.

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Space Engineers Fishes For Community Ships

This is a ship.

Space Engineers. I haven’t been back since I accidentally broke Craig’s space shark and sent a gigantic Han Solo hurtling into the distant reaches of space but there are now exploration-based plans afoot.

The plans talk a lot about ships and stations in the game. Marek Rosa of developers Keen Software House said in a blog post earlier in December, “The exploration feature will add a practically infinite number of ships and stations to the game world, so there will always be something new to discover, explore, acquire and conquer.”

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RPS Feature Gravity Boned

The Lighthouse Customer: Space Engineers (Survival Mode)

This thing better have at least one cup holder.

Each Monday, Chris Livingston visits an early access game and reports back with stories about whatever he finds inside. This week, space-based gathering, crafting, and dying in Space Engineers’ new survival mode.

There’s a large red and white spaceship, its front end crumpled after what must have been a spectacular nosedive. There’s a tiny yellow space engineer inspecting the wreck, armed with only a handful of tools. There’s the inky blackness of outer space, the comforting glow of a distant sun, and an asteroid field of stationary rocks, chock-full of ore and minerals to mine. As the astronaut floats there, enchanted by the view, he notices a few of the asteroids — quite a few, in fact — have given up waiting for him to visit them and taken a more proactive stance. They’re delivering themselves to him. Well, at him, anyway. In an awful hurry.

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I Will Survive: Space Engineers Adds Survival Mode

Come back! I need you to live!

I have seen things in Space Engineers, readers. Horrible, crotch-related things. I got so wrapped up in seeing those things that I didn’t actually notice if there was any sort of game in there. Now I’m fine with pure building and messing about being considered gaming, but if you absolutely insist on there being some drama then the newly released Survival mode might be for you. There are a number of toggles that you can set, as well as plenty of starting scenarios to launch from, but the basic gist is everything needs energy, and if you don’t have enough of it you’ll die. Better get engineering.
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RPS Feature Pip Pip, Hooray!

Worlds Of Wonder: The Space Engineers Steam Workshop

Can't get enough of that wonderful Duff

I wanted to know what state Space Engineers was in, because it’s been a few months since I last tried it out and it was already pretty impressive back then. How much could a game about building space ships and flying them change in a few months?

Well, on my first playthrough I was slinging ships across the void, watching as they met and crumpled and cooing at the damage model and simple building tools. Since then they’ve added multiplayer and Steam Workshop support, which was how I ended I ended up flying a spaceship the form of a shark into the crotch of a monolithic Homer Simpson. I apologise in advance.
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RPS Feature Space Cubed

Hands On With Space Engineers

I am a friendly ship.
There’s not a lot to do in Space Engineers, but this is the first Early Access game I’ve played in a while that works, and, well, isn’t completely broken. In fact, it’s given me a bit of hope: the content is light, and it has crashed a few times, but it doesn’t feel like a game being held together by good intentions and hope. It’s the kind of offering you might pay for. And it’s a surprisingly slick demonstration of building and destruction. In space.
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Start Your Engines: Space Engineers On Early Access

Come. Joooooooooin usssssssss.

Do you want to be an engineer? I can understand if you don’t really feel like it’s your cup of tea – especially if you’d rather be a professional tea brewer. But what about a space engineer? Well of course you’re saying yes now. Space makes everything better, except breathing. Happily, Space Engineers would rather suck the life from your lungs via the good old-fashioned method: time. It wants all of your hours, and it looks like it could well offer some pretty tantalizing reasons to hand them over. But skepticism is still healthy, especially in the wake of developer Keen Software House’s lackluster Miner Wars 2081. Steam Early Access, then, offers a chance to see if Space Engineers is really on the right track.

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Space Engineers ‘Crash Test’ Footage Looks Smashing

Oh Space Engineers, let me count the ways. For one, you’re a hyper-ambitious extraterrestrial builder rooted in near-future NASA technology, but also, you’re not going to Kickstarter. Not that I have anything against crowdfunding drives per se, but it’s nice when a game doesn’t thrust its clanking cup in our direction from time-to-time. But yes, the game looks quite excellent, with a physics engine that takes me back to my days as a starry eyed tot playing with toy rockets. “RrrrrrrmmmmmKABLLLOOOOOMMMMMSPLRRRSSSSHH,” I’d snarl as I set countless imaginary pilots on collision courses with certain doom. Space Engineers “Crash Test” video is just like that, only it looks even better than these things did in my head.

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Space Engineers Are The Best Engineers

I reckon I’d be happy to do most things in space. Things that I’d normally consider to be chores or hard labour would become pleasurable, at least for a while, which is probably why Space Engineers makes welding, joining and glazing seem like the best jobs in the world. It looks superb, as you’ll see in the video below, but don’t just rely on images. Here are some words:

Space Engineers utilizes a realistic volumetric-based physics engine: all objects can be assembled, disassembled, damaged and destroyed. [It] is inspired by reality and by how things work. Think about modern-day NASA technology extrapolated 60 years into the future. Space Engineers strives to follow the laws of physics and doesn’t use technologies that wouldn’t be feasible in the near future.

Oh yes. I kept waiting for the press release to mention crowd-funding but it doesn’t. Watch.

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