It's out.
Throw a wrench, change the galaxy.
Mostly nebulae.
Windows, dunno about others
John Winder
Chris Harvey
Tom Francis
John Roberts
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Heat Signature is one Space Year old today! To celebrate, we’ve released a big free update we’ve been working on for five months, with over 20 features – including our own twist on a Daily Challenge.
Click through for details on each:
I was too nervous to read Heat Signature reviews for two weeks after launch. I was relieved to see the scores were great, and after 3.5 years of work, that was all I wanted to hear: I didn’t want to know what their caveats were.
Once I calmed down and read them, though, I was delighted: they were not only very positive, but they told entertaining stories and made intelligent points. And almost every critique I read I thought was a fair point. Hence this: Continued
For the duration of Space Halloween (27th of Space October to the 1st of Space November), life and death in the Drift will be a little different: Continued
I reshuffled this post a bit so I can link this part more easily:
It’s been great to see how much people are loving this very silly weapon, and how excited people are to send us shots of them finding it. One thing I didn’t forsee was that for a small number of people, it could cause anxiety: the fear of missing out, or even when they have it, the fear of somehow losing it. So we’re going to simplify it: Continued
Or you can buy it from the Humble Store.
There’s also a Supporter’s Edition, which comes with a bunch of fun extras: Continued
Heat Signature will be out on Steam 21st of September 2017! At time of writing, that’s Thursday of next week. It’s for Windows PCs, other platforms will depend on how this one goes.
We don’t do pre-order bonuses because I don’t want to pressure you to buy before reviews are out. But I am super grateful to those who buy at launch, because our whole future depends on how we do that first week. So we’re doing a few special things to celebrate it and thank those of you who are joining us: Continued
Surprising news!
Here’s the new video, which also shows what teleporters and the What Now? screen add to the game:
If you haven’t already, put it on your Steam Wishlist so you hear about it when it comes out. Also, if you were in on a Steam beta, it was probably taken off your wishlist because Steam briefly thought you owned it, so check. And if you want to be in on future tests, make sure you’re on the mailing list (top right). Continued
As well as the update above, I’ve been putting up some day-by-day logs of what I’m working on in Heat Signature. I’m only doing them for my own benefit, so they’re not mega interesting and I don’t do one every day I work – only when I think it’ll help.
As promised on Twitter, I recently sent everyone on our mailing list instructions on how to get in on a new alpha test of Heat Signature. Keys went out to the first 2,000 people to do so, but I’ll also be keeping the testing list active and inviting people to future alphas from there, so you can still get on it now if you haven’t already. Clarification: this says you can still get on the list, not you can still get in on this alpha test. That test is over and there’s no date for the next one.
If you’re in the alpha: Continued
Hello! I’ll be at Rezzed in London next week, 7-9 April 2016, and you can come and play Heat Signature while I watch, panic, and frantically patch it on a different PC. Saturday’s sold out, but Thurs and Fri tickets are still available. Our artist John Roberts made this fantastic piece for our booth: Continued
Excerpt from an e-mail I just sent to artist John: Continued
My summary of where we are after the last ship-generation post would be:
Last time I covered how I taught Heat Signature to build ships out of sectors, join those sectors together, lock some of those doors, then place keycards in the right places to ensure they’re all openable. I’d got the algorithm generating layouts like this, which is great: Continued
I haven’t talked about the way I randomly generate spaceships in Heat Signature since this post – before it even had actual art. That’s partly because I’ve barely touched it since then. I showed the game to developer friends and the press in LA and SF a few weeks ago, and got lots of great input and ideas, but the main thing I came away thinking was: the on-board game needs to be more interesting. And I think better ship interiors are the foundation of that. Continued
In maths, ‘natural numbers’ are the ones you might use to count observable, whole things: eg. there are six people here. Anything that doesn’t work in place of ‘six’ there, like 3.4 or -2, is not natural. They’re kind of ‘numbers you can see’.
I’d like to use the term in game design to mean specifically that: numbers you can see. Things that are represented so simply and wholly and countably that you don’t need to display an actual numeric figure to tell the player how much they’re seeing. They can just see. Continued