Kickstarter

We’re pleased to announce today that TerraTech will now be available on GOG.com, via their newly launched ‘Games in Development’ programme. We’re really proud to be among the first wave of games on here and excited to see another platform supporting the community driven approach that has served us so well.

And to celebrate, the game will be 30% off for the first five days! Yay!

You’ll find it here: https://www.gog.com/game/terratech

We’re still totally committed to our Steam and Humble players, but we can’t wait to welcome some of GOG’s great community into ours too. We’ll be updating the game just as regularly over there as we currently do on Steam so pick your platform and come and join the fun!

We wish our friends at GOG huge congratulations for the launch of Games In Development, and lots of luck for its future success.

It’s amazing to think that the first TerraTech prototype was created almost three years ago, and the game has been in active development for nearly two years now! We are incredibly proud of how far we have come in that time, and even more proud of our wonderful community, who have embraced and supported our development approach.

When we launched our Kickstarter last year, we had to set dates for delivery of the ‘finished’ game and various rewards. We set April 2014 as the target, though we hoped (and still hope) the game would remain live and growing for a long time after.

TerraTech is a living project, which evolves with community activity and feedback. Naturally this means things don’t always go according to plan! We also had to contend with challenges like growing our team, which took a lot longer than we hoped to reach full strength. As a result, it took until February to enter Early Access on Steam, and we now believe the game will be not ready to leave Early Access this year.

Of course, lots of projects suffer schedule slip, and although our community has been consistently supportive, we didn’t want to be one of “those” projects that leave their backers feeling disappointed when the end result takes extra time to deliver. That’s why, if we have to re-evaluate the schedule, we always look for ways to stay true to the spirit of our original pledges. For instance, when we delayed the original “1.0″ date from April, we offered all our backers a Steam key, so they wouldn’t have to wait to play the game.

Now we’re looking at the schedule again, and we remain fully committed to everything we talked about in our “Road to 1.0″ blog, but we feel it doesn’t make sense to attach an arbitrary deadline to this. The Early Access approach has worked really well, both for us and our player community, so we think it’s best to continue this model, and focus on doing justice to each new feature rather than rushing them out.

This means we will remain in Early Access for a while longer, so again we want to make sure no-one loses out, by having to wait to get something they were expecting at a certain time. In particular, this affects some of the original Kickstarter rewards that were tied to final release – we’re now looking at delivering these rewards early, so we’ve put together a quick survey for Kickstarter backers, to get input on when and how you would like to receive these rewards.

If you backed for at least £40 ($60) then please complete the survey that we’ll be sharing around soon. There are also some questions in there for non-backers – for example, some people have asked us about the possibility of selling ‘slacker backer’ rewards similar to the original Kickstarter ones – so please tell us what you think.

We would like to extend a massive thank-you to everyone, for your tireless support and enthusiasm for TerraTech and the Payload team! We feel immensely privileged to have such an amazing community, and we continue to work as hard as we can to make this game awesome for you.

with love, Payload Studios

As you all know, we recently celebrated the 1-year anniversary of successfully completing our Kickstarter campaign.

One of our higher tier backer rewards gave you the chance to design your very own in-game block. This is no easy task but our first ‘Corporation Vice President’ gave us some great ideas to work with and over the last few months we’ve been bringing his vision to life.

Simon Allen’s Fireworks Launcher block is now usable in the main game and we’ve documented the story of how it came to life.

It may seem like a simple process to come up with a new vehicle block for the game and get it working, but there are way more stages involved than you might expect. From the core of the idea, described in an email, Simon worked with designer Kris and artist Stig to visualise a concept of how it could look and operate.

The concept stage almost always starts with pen and paper, before transferring the ideas into Photoshop to refine the look. It’s important that every new block is able to function and attach to existing blocks in a way that’s consistent with the rest of the pieces and doesn’t break any existing rules or conventions so we tweaked the design until it fitted those criteria.

From there, our 3D artist Anton took over and started to model the block in 3DS Max, not just to start locking down the look and feel, but also to start experimenting with how it will move and animate when it’s in use.

In many cases, we know which in-game corporation a block is best suited for before we start work on it, and in this case we felt that Venture was the best fit for the rocket launcher’s distinct abilities. So as soon as we got the block textured in Venture livery we dropped it into our internal R&D mode to start experimenting with combining it with other blocks and adding it to techs to see how it looked.

Our lead programmer worked his magic on it too, putting all the systems in place for it to function properly in the main game, including all the firing and particle effects that come from each firework launched.

Anton also got to work on designing and modelling the look of the actual rockets themselves, and lots more experimentation in all the game modes followed, including that all-important design balancing to make sure that it sat well alongside all the existing blocks but was still fun and entertaining to play with.

We were eventually ready to include it in the full R&D arena for our early Canary testers to start experimenting with. We tried to stay true to Simon’s vision of what the block could do, but our testing and R&D process with the community is vital for any new block we introduce.

Once we’d integrated all the community feedback and thoroughly tested it out, it was ready to go into the main game. We exclusively revealed the block on one of our daily Twitch streams and added it to the latest Steam build for the world to play with.

Every new block goes through this process and often it’s even more complicated and drawn out than this, depending on the nature of the block and what we need it to do. But that’s why we love the way TerraTech is being developed - the whole team works together to make sure that even the smallest piece of new content in the game is cool and fun. This one was pretty special though - without you, our amazing Kickstarter backers, last summer we wouldn’t be where we are today so to finally have our first backer-designed block live in the game is a great moment.

A huge thank you to Simon again for his support of the project and for working with us to come up with such an awesome block.

Check out the full video of the process here: https://youtu.be/zZPtj4I429c

In case you missed it, we've just released the latest update of the game and we're pretty excited about how it's looking and playing right now!

The whole team have been working really hard over the last few weeks to get in a tonne of bug fixes and optimisations to make the game run more smoothly than it ever has before. We've fixed some of the major issues that some of you were having, as well as improved the graphics and overall stability.

As well as that, we've also introduced a whole new opening sequence and tutorial, and introduced some new parts to help you out with defence and damage repair too.

We've had an amazing response from many of you already but if you've not played the game in a while then maybe now's the time to jump back in and see what you think. And if you like what you see and wanted to help boost our Steam ratings by giving us a positive review then that'd be grand!

Head to our Steam page here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/285920/

This summer is going to be a big time for us here at TerraTech Towers - we're getting stuck into multiplayer and a load of other cool features in the game, we're nominated for TWO Develop Industry Excellence Awards next month, and we've just welcomed our brand new Art Director into the team - say hi to Jason! You can find out more about him over on the Team page of our website here.

But, as always, it's you guys who make everything rock - keep spreading the word, telling your friends to check out the game (or to come back to it), and don't forget to join our progress daily on Twitch at 5pm UK time on weekdays: www.twitch.tv/terratechgame.