As the song goes, in space no-one can hear you party like it’s one-hundred-and-ninety-nine. Which is a shame given update 199 for Astroneer [official site] contains a whole bundle of things. It’s not content-heavy/content-at-all-y which I know is a source of frustration for people who are playing it through Early Access. For people like me who pop back in every few months it’s fun to see how the development process is moving, though.
In this instance it sounds like developers System Era are making some meaningful changes on the engineering and stability side which is good. If you’d prefer to know about future content stuff skip down to the part about Prototyping, otherwise join me as I get excited about the ability to change the colours of beacons – no longer will I roam the land assuming I’m going in one direction and then realising I confused one identical beacon with another…
I’m trying to do that thing of staying away from an Early Access game I’m really into so I don’t burn out on it before it gets to actual release form. Subnautica is in that bucket, as is Astroneer [official site], although I’m sorely tempted by the latter now I’m writing about exploding hydrazine cans and looking at screenshots as I read the latest patch. STAY STRONG, PIP. Read the rest of this entry »
I did enjoy Pip’s tour of her space base in Astroneer [official site] and I’m quite keen to see what she might do after the explore-a-craft-o-sandbox’s recent bug early access update. It adds ways to paint terrain, see, along with new ways to shape it. And sure, I guess it overhauls the research system and fixes bugs and blah blah but the point is: spacepaints. Have a look in this trailer for the ‘Augments & Research Curve’ update: Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature
Gives us the joy of exploring for ourselves
Tutorials are a lot like first dates. They’re awkward but necessary, can be a total waste of time, and sometimes there’s a lot more hand-holding than you’d like. It would be best for everyone if we just skipped all that uncomfortable small talk and went straight to the middle part. The good part. Unfortunately, you can’t have a good relationship without getting to know someone first, and you can’t have fun with a game if you don’t understand how to play it.
This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Astroneer [official site].
Astroneer is a space game about hoovering up alien materials with a magic gun and listening to them plop into your backpack. And in this Astroneer has cracked something very special in crafting and resource management: it’s actually fun.
Developer System Era Software has put a peculiar focus on how resources are presented and how you manipulate them, and at its centre is an idea that’s surprisingly rare in games:
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. (Apart from the next week and a half while we hide in Horace’s warm, warm fur.)
Normally when selecting games for HYP, I favour those that are at least a few years old, so that the suggestion comes as a greater surprise. But Astroneer [official site] is all I’ve been playing since it was released into early access earlier this month, and it’s lovely enough that it deserves more words written about it.
Astroneer [official site] is so lovely. It’s a really pretty game with this fondness of geometry and at the moment, in its early access phase, it’s forgiving enough that I can potter in my sleep-deprived state without getting confused. There are also ace caves to explore and weird plants and ribcages and hostile fungi to find. To explain what I’ve been up to in the last day or so I’ve made a video explaining some basics and showcasing my base! Read the rest of this entry »
I drive the short trip back to my base, park my truck close enough to one of the buildings for the cable to attach, and offload the red blob from the back of my buggy. It looks like a thorned vegetable and I plug it into my research station, which is receiving power via cables from the solar panel on the back of my truck. When the research is complete, I will have the knowledge of which resources I need in order for my 3D printer to create a drill head, which I can then attach to a vehicle and use to cut paths through the fully deformable terrain.
Astroneer [official site] is a survive-and-craft game like many others, but it throws out a lot of the cruft and grind. I played it and suddenly it was five hours later, the intervening period a blur of pretty landscapes and achievable goals.
Astroneer [official site] caught my eye at… GDC? Yes, it was GDC, earlier this year. It’s a kind of planetary potterer where you bimble around doing space exploration and terrain reshaping as you search for crafting/trading resources. I remember I rather liked the polygonal art style and figured I’d probably end up with a bulging screenshot folder when I got to playing it. It looks like my screenshots folder should start preparing itself as Astroneers is popping onto Early Access this Friday, 16 December.
This is something which got announced earlier in the year but which I’d forgotten because CHRISTMAS THINGS! until a dev update landed somewhere in my newsfeeds. Read the rest of this entry »
We have been cooing at Astroneer [official site] on and off for the past year, its colourful planets, bouncing astronauts and clicky base-building. And although we enjoyed footage of little men bounding across low-poly worlds together and carving out tunnels in the rock with some sort of futuristic matter displacer, we didn’t know exactly when it would come out. Well, we still don’t know. Not exactly. But it will be in December this year, say the developers, hitting Steam and Windows 10 as an early access game. Here’s another trailer they released along with the news.
It’s been nearly a year since I last posted about Astroneer, in which I purred with delight at its planetary landscapes, bouncy buggies and spaceships, and the terrain-deforming vaccuum that seems to fuel your creations. Development continues and last week’s PAX West brought a short new video.
Curse my rush to share pretty things. It was only a few days ago that I wrote a post about the attractive GIFs of Astroneer [official site], a game about surviving on another planet by building a base and deforming terrain. Had I know that a trailer would arrive by the end of the week, I might have resisted. Watch it below –
Sometimes game news is that a trailer came out. Sometimes game news is that a game came out. Sometimes game news is just look, look at it, look at the pretty thing, look, look it looks nice, I like how it looks.
Hey look! It’s Astroneer [Twitter page], a game about exploring big procedural planets with a dune buggy and a thing that deforms the terrain and look at it look.
