StarForge

The Desert Outpost

It has been a busy few weeks here at CodeHatch. We've now got everything done up with our office expect for insurance, which is currently in the works. And we plan to fully move in the next couple of weeks. We are nearly done the cube optimization, it is now fully multi-threaded and he's down to just the final LOD stages. This will allow massive buildings in multiplayer with little slowdown. 

We also built a desert outpost for the Fort Defense mode. I took it for a test run today. You can see some big alien cacti in the background. I found it was fun building on and around them so I made them really big. 

I built a wall around the vat. But the Leech want in.

So I decided to run behind the wall and attack head on. 

 

But it seemed like he wanted none of that and hit me back into a lovely shower of alien water and sawdust.

 

So once again, I tried...

But that is where the story ends. I lost the battle, and the vat was destroyed.

The leech will attack through your fortress, and do anything they can to destroy your vat. Turrets are a really good contermeasure I am finding in my play tests. By setting them up on each corner of your base, you will stand a pretty good chance. 

And they give you the chance to find a cool gun like this one, which easily propels my character into the clouds. 

Overall, Fort Defense mode is coming along well. Many design decisions are made along the way. One of the biggest we think was the pallet system and how it introduces players to make strategic desicions on what they want to craft. As running out to get palletes can be quite risky.

We have made it so that the game scales based on the amount of players playing. This way a single player experience is also very fun. 

We now go on to fixing some slowdown issues regarding the eyeball monster seen previously, lowering the atmosphere by half as it's currently ridicously high, and trying to convey through some simple on screen context the control scheme for new players. As we find new players can be a bit confused with the dual inventory method we have been using. Basically when you hit "Q" it switches from 1-9 slots of weapons, to 1-9 slots of materials. Your open chests by hitting "E". Pick up weapons by hitting "E". Drop weapons by hitting "X". We also have to fix a bug in the fatigue system between walking and running.

Progress is being made. And we really hope everyone will be impressed with the polish of it all when we finally release it.

The upcoming MP update

We believe the update will be out sometime in the next month, possibly a bit longer. We are sorry we could not finish it in January as we previously estimated.

A few things came to pass that slowed things down:

- One of our programmer's finished his internship here and went back to school as he was in the middle of a 4 year degree when he first joined us. He has been working part time through the last month. Since he handled the multiplayer, things had to wait sometime.

- The physics movement took longer than expected to finish, and we are still ironing out a few kinks here and there. This is important to give everyone the feeling of very tight jumping and movement.

- Our optimization on the cube combining is also taking quite some time. Cube combining is when you add or remove cubes in the game. It has to combine a bunch of objects in real-time based on LOD's to help run the game smoother. But this step produces some lag. In a multiplayer game, this was a critical area where we couldn't afford any lag, so we had to rewrite it from scratch to use multiple cores and be more optimized. We are still not finished rewriting it as it is fairly complex to do.

- Since we are hiring on full time 2 programmers, we also needed an office space as our apartment no longer could fit us. This took some time to find a space, secure it, and now it will take some time to set up and move in. Never mind all the other work that goes on behind the scenes to keep a business running (accountant, insurance, contract work, taxes, market research, press relations, budgeting, etc.). Every bit of this takes time especially when your hiring. And then once your hire you have to train. But once this is done, future expansion will be a breeze.

- Forward thinking. We always try our best to set things up for the long term. Since the IndieGoGo campaign we have started working with a concept artist and LoudCore. Our concept artist is currently finishing 2 desktop illustrations, and then will be moving on to fleshing out the entire world of StarForge. And LoudCore is planning the soundtrack with us and will be producing it over the next year.

- Customer service also took a good chunk out of our time as well, we've now pushed through over a few thousand emails and still receive about 20 a day. Running a campaign on IndieGoGo was a great success, but it also took a lot of time to sort out when it was done, and we still have work yet to do on delivering it's physical prizes.

- Making a new game mode is a learning process in of itself. You can only pre-design so much, but it's only when you actually program the components do you realize certain things are fun and others not so much. Then you add things and take things away to make it fun and addicting all the time.

- Making games always seem to take 2x as long as you first estimate, especially multiplayer games with new tech. When you program games, there is so much more behind the scenes that isn't apparent to the user in the end but is still needed to keep things running smoothly.

We want to do our best job with this update and make a great first impression on the multiplayer. Even once we finish we want to spend time balancing everything as Fort Defense is a new gameplay experience. We also try to find and eliminate any causes of lag and slowdown. Once we feel it is ready and we have fixed all the bigger noticeable bugs, we will release it.

This is why we put a blanket statement on release, because from past experience, putting and missing an exact date is very upsetting to our fans and very stressful on us.

We will always try our best to let everyone know how things are going via our Twitter feed. We enjoy the interest and it always keeps us motivated, we really do love what we do, and all the amazing support we've gotten. If we could get back to every email and every question we would, but that would stop finishing the update completely, lol. So we thank everyone for their patience and understanding.

The good news, it's a huge update, and it is becoming really fun to play. Here are a few screen grabs from our latest version. The level art is just a placeholder. You will notice how the pallets and resources are becoming integrated into the main system.

 

 

Pallet System - Wood, Stone, Metal, Oil

Were implementing the pallet system into the game. The player can only hold finite amount of resource after mining it or chopping down trees. If you can no longer hold a particular type of resource it creates a pallet beside you. These can then be picked up an moved in the world as physical objects.

Resources can be extracted from them or added to them. If you craft something it takes into consider all the resource pallet's nearby and also whatever resources are in your inventory. Players will most likely be shipping these pallets across the world via freighters and flat-bed trucks to a central crafting warehouse they build.

This will enable the ability to become a pirate and steal other players resources. Or destroy their workshop. It will also help create a dynamic economy and encourage trade networks to be built.

Below is a screenshot of the Wood, Stone, Metal, and Oil pallet/containers.

Also, please help us reach the top 10 on IndieDB's GOTY vote! We've recentely hit the top100.

http://www.indiedb.com/games/starforgegame

 

Working on Fort Defense, Movement, Infinite Terrain

With the highs and lows of running a funding campaign, customer service emails (2000+ received since campaign launched), developing the game, and all 3 of us coming down with the flu (which we blame on the Canadian winter, and the fact that our igloos need better setup). It has been a busy past 3 weeks here at Code}{atch!

We thought we'd share on what we've been developing in the game.

Movement Upgrades - The movement is being re-written in some ways to allow for a much more streamlined and tighter experience. The basics are now done, the player doesn't wobble and he starts and stops very quickly. Now the jumping and parkour systems are being worked on.

Fort Defense Mode - The vat is now fully setup and working in a multiplayer environment. Both creatures and players can attack it and destroy it. Players properly respawn at the vat. When you start a game you have 5 minutes to prep a base. Then the waves come. The enemies become more numerous and harder to beat with each wave. There is a 2 minute breathing period between waves. The leech now properly attack and destroy parts of your forts. Chests also fall from the sky.

Multiplayer Inventory Work - All of the weapons and cubes now work fine in a multiplayer environment. The Procedural weapons create icons on the fly, so each icon accurately represents the procedural weapon that is stored. 3D tilesets are now managed in a separate 1-9 hotkey setup which the user swaps to by hitting "q". We are also building a display for the HUD that shows your hotkey slots. We have much work yet to do to streamline our systems, but the work is coming well.

Infinite Terrain Engine - it is being rebuilt to give more flexibility in designing how the terrain generates itself. Specifically it now uses temporary layers of voxel data which can be sampled from by higher layers to create more complex effects. This requires us to automatically allocate, generate and deallocate voxel data when it is requested, such as when a new peice of land becomes visible. The result will be much more natural-looking and interesting terrain with less memory and processing consumption.

Coming up in the next month - A multiplayer video by the end of next week. We want to release it with a week left on our IndieGoGo Campaign. Proper resource management integration. Pallets fall from the sky in Fort Defense, and it costs resources to build. Sounds for building and destroying. Effects for this as well. Some flying enemies that spawn in later waves. Further work on the infinite terrain and movement. Optimization and Memory fixes. The winch gun.

Cheers,

The CodeHatch Team

IndieGoGo Goal Reached - What More is to Come?

We're happy to announce that we've made our $75,000 goal on the morning of November 11th! Huge thanks to everyone who believed in us and our project - we've been at work preparing the rewards for people who have pledged.
Now we can develop StarForge for a year straight, without needing to worry about getting kicked out of our apartments and freezing to death on the streets! :D

Despite having reached our main goal, it seems as though our fans are still steadily pledging funds for us. Together we've all raised almost 90,000 dollars. It continues to rise by the hour, and we need your help to make sure it stays that way! :) The more people contribute, the more room we will have to make StarForge a better game:

- We'll have more time to add features, and polish existing features.
- We'll be able to buy new software, servers, etc.
- We'd be able to commission other artists and developers to help us make components of the game.
- Finally, depending on how much we make we could bring in new talent to be part of the CodeHatch team.

 

We've outlined what your additional contributions will go towards on our IndieGoGo page:
Indiegogo.com
You can read details about them here: Starforge.com/goals

We'll be making updates (hopefully with video) going into more detail about how we hope to implement the features listed above and why the additional funding is important.

Again, a huge thanks to everyone!

Cheers,
--The CodeHatch Team 

Our IndieGoGo campaign will launch in just over 4 days!

Wow... this is such a busy time for all of us. The past 3 weeks we have been working 7 days a week getting everything ready for the 25th! We've made significant progress and we can't wait to show everyone in our next full length video. We hope it will blow everyone away like the first one did! There is tons of new cool stuff that you haven't seen in StarForge yet. A couple things being really huge!

But I can't really say much more than that because we want it to be a surprise to everyone when it is released.

So stay tuned and look for our IndieGoGo campaign and new video on Thursday morning! We can't wait to reveal everything we have been working the past few months on. We look forward to your support as we really need it to keep going.

- Will, Steve, Nathan

Buy StarForge Directly - No More F2P + New Build - Play Infinite Voxel Terrain

We decided after much thought and discussion that we have to change our business model from FreeToPlay to a Notchware model (similar to Minecraft, Towns, and almost every other indie game out there). Meaning that you will be able to just simply pay for the game once.

The reason for this was due to us realizing that we are too small of a development team to make F2P work financially. We eventually came to a realization that in order for us to survive we had to change our model to one that sold our tech as the forefront and not cosmetic upgrades. Basically we didn't want to be forced into selling fundamental game content that would make the game Pay2Win, so that's why we ditched F2P, because we are against that sort of thing. We originally decided upon F2P because we really liked how anyone could just jump in and join, but alas, we did not understand the business behind it. So from this day forward, StarForge is no longer FreeToPlay.

We appreciate everyone who has supported us and already bought Hatch Points. So anyone who bought Hatch Points will automatically get their accounts upgraded to having purchased StarForge. This means that you get all the future updates for free until the final release. 

As for the Founders Club members, your account will also reflect as having bought the full game, and you will still be receiving your exclusive perks in the near future. We also plan to add more perks to the Founders Club in time. You will also be receiving an additional copy of StarForge through email in the near future that you can gift to another account. 

The options to purchase StarForge are now as follows:

$14.95 - Alpha Sale, %50 off. This gets you the full game and all of it's updates until the final release.
$75 - Founders Club. This gets you a large amount of exclusive perks and your name in the game plus 2 copies of StarForge.

Feel free to let us know any questions or concerns below, or email me at sworin (at) codehatch.com - We are sorry if we caused you any confusion or disappointment.

Thanks again for everyone's continued support. We are making great progress and we think everyone will be extremely happy when they see it in our upcoming IndieGoGo launch video and game update on October 25th! 

We have also just released update V.0.1.5b which contains the first playable of our Infinite Procedural Voxel Terrain! Plus, it also contains many movement fixes such as a falling animation, tighter controls, and inventory additions.

You can get it here:

http://www.forgeplanet.net/starforge_build.php

Happy Spelunking,

The CodeHatch Team(Will, Steve, Nathan)

Working On Infinite Voxel Terrain

This past week went pretty well here. I am busy with Nathan working on some secret stuff which will all be revealed when our IndieGoGo campaign launches on the 25th. Steve has been busy working on the Infinite Voxel Terrain and the movement. 

So we thought we would show some indev shots of the voxel terrain.

As you can see in the screenshots above, we have a nice noise algorithm that can create tunnels infinitely underground. It does this all proceduraly and loads in chunks as you walk around. It's really fun to explore all the different tunnels underground.

We plan to release another game update sometime next week with the first playable infinite voxel terrain. Some other improvements that will be added in the coming weeks will be multiple material support, digging, optimization, and LOD. Steve is also working on a multitude of fixes for the physics movement system, tighter control, making it so the player doesn't jerk around, a proper falling animation, and much more control over climbing. 

I'm nearly done planning the IndieGoGo campaign alongside it's perks. We plan to have cool things like T-Shirts, Posters, and lots of unique ingame content. It is alot of work to make a proper campaign but we think it will be worth it! Once the main campaign is planned, I will start working on a new video.

Thanks for your support and we look forward to your feedback,

Will

The Future Of StarForge

Over the last few months we've been working super hard. We quit our day jobs after the game went viral at the end of May, hired an employee, and now are coming to a stage where we really need everyone's financial support to keep going past the next month.

We will be launching a StarForge IndieGoGo campaign October 25th!

We have been developing some super secret innovative systems the last few months, some of which have never been seen in games before. On October 25th, everything will be revealed in both video and in a major game update. We are super excited as we think this will rock everyone and change the way you play games. There will be a lot of awesome perks and unique swag for everyone who supports StarForge.

So mark October 25th down, and please tell your friends about it. We look forward to your support when that day comes.

 

Infinite Terrain & Save Game Update:

We are now hard at work on Infinite Terrain. Things are coming well, we already have the voxel terrain creating procedurally and also it is infinite. Our next steps are to enable digging and lighting. It is being developed to be multi-threaded and use an Oct Tree. LOD methods are also being experimented with to allow the possibility of very long view distances.  We hope to have it for everyone to play in an update sometime next week. 

A save feature is also in the works along with a memory fix for 3D Tileset building. 

The Blog:

From now on we will be updating our blog once a week every Friday. We understand that everyone is as excited about this project as we are. And we want to allow everyone to play updates much sooner. However, everyone will have to understand that with more frequent updates comes less completed features and more glitches and bugs. But at least you will be able to see what we are making more often. 

The Winch Gun:

The winch gun is the answer to how the 3D Tilesets are constructed in StarForge. In a future update you will be creating all your cubes, objects, turrets, and vehicles through it. It can beam in objects or beam them out at great distances. The object you select will be displayed in hologram form near the handle. When you shoot it, it is tranformed through the central tube and then beamed into the world. 

Not content with just a device that creates matter. We also attached a winch on to the end of it. This will extend a fully physics based cable. You can wrap this cable around objects and pull them in or pull yourself up. Winch on the back of a vehicle and be pulled around. Tie two objects together. Or just hook on an object and swing across great gaps with it.

The last component of the Winch gun is it's kicker. Once you pull an object in with the winch cable, you will be able to "boot" it back out at a very fast speed. This allows you to use the objects around you as ammunition.

We plan to release in the Winch Gun in the next couple months. It is an essential tool of anyone interested in building. Please let us know what you think.

- Will, Steve, Nathan

Update v.0.1.5a has been released!

We have released the new update for StarForge. It contains many new features such as ingame inventories and a main menu system. It was alot of work developing, as we had to make many design decisions along the way. However, we hope everyone enjoys it and please let us know what you think!


What's Changed In Version 0.1.5a:

- New atmosphere and cloud system. Much more optimized than our last and should work on all computers. 
- You can now buy items in our online store and play with them in-game
- 2 New 3D Leaf Tilesets can be bought in our store
- Full Inventory/Crafting system
- Full main menu system and In-Game Menu system
- Hologram system for placing objects, "E" key to delete objects, use scroll wheel to move hologram forward or back, and hold down left mouse to rotate hologram before placing.
- In Game Web Browser supporting flash and secure HTTPS
- L-Shape turret, will be useful for stopping vehicles in the future.
- Many tweaks and fixes to the physics movement system
- Enemies use physics to hurt you now
- Death and Blood
- New Canyon Level
- Multiple enemy sizes
- Space background improved
- Dynamic wind effects while falling and dynamic reverb
- Alot of other backend changes for optimization ect. 

Some Notes:

- You can create infinite blocks and place them. Just go to the crafting screen, click on the blocks, then click the craft button. They will now be in your inventory where you can place them on hotkey slots.
- When in the inventory, simply click with you mouse to pick up an entire stack of your crafted gear. By holding and dragging you will only move one at a time.
- You will have to log in to play. Please let the store page(the one that loads after you login) load up fully, this is required for authentication.
- Digging is disabled for this update. It will be in a future update. 

Known Bugs:

- Our menu currently has a bug where you have to hit the main menu twice after being in the browser. 
- Your gun shoots if equipped while your in the inventory

Click The Link Below To Download The Update:

http://www.forgeplanet.net/starforge_build.php