Archive: Media

Meet the Florans

One would expect a race of sentient humanoid plants to be peaceful, nature-loving environmentalists – that presumption is what allows this hyper-aggressive tribal civilisation to thrive. Unwitting explorers are prey of choice to the carnivorous Florans, who frequently salvage or reverse engineer the technology they bring to enable their colonisation of the stars.

Introducing space travel to the primitive Florans had the undesired effect of Floran colonies spanning across star systems, each with their own customs and levels of aggression. Despite this, individual Florans have been known to split apart from their society to lead their own lives in isolation or in the solace of other races, at the cost of being cut off from the collective and considered enemies of all flora for good.

Though a unisex race, Floran culture values survival through reproduction and expansion over environmentalism or any percieved bond to Mother Nature. Cannibalism during funeral rituals and wars with rival factions are commonplace, though it remains unclear whether it’s out of conservation or simple tradition.

Their aggressive nature appears to be borne from a lack of a concept of non-plant life as opposed to outright contempt. Owing to their relatively young age as a species, this tenet dominates their culture and justifies their treatment of visiting races, though there are signs of some beginning to question this, implying that Floran individuals might not be inherently “evil” as previously thought.

Guest Wallpaper for October!

Hey everybody! Happy Halloween-Eve! Or, you know, Halloween, depending on where you are!

This month’s wallpaper is by Skech! Looks like it’s time to go hunting for some penguins!

For more of his work, you can check his Deviantart!

EDIT 11/16: It seems I’ve made a slight error with the crediting. Sketch did the lineart, but Maesma did the colors. You can see more of her art at her Deviantart! Sorry about that you two!

 

Guest Wallpaper by Skech

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Building Demonstration

Hi guys,

So we’ve been a little quiet lately because we’ve been working away on the game like mad. It’s coming along really nicely, we’re working on a whole bunch of stuff like quests, unique npc behaviours and generated towns.

The building mechanics are becoming close to complete, so we thought we’d show off some of the basic systems (there will be lots of tools to find!).

 

 
Each player is equipped with a gun that can levitate, place and remove blocks and items. It’s capable of placing single blocks or blocks in groups of 4. So you can very quickly fill the space you need to fill whilst having the option to tweak smaller details. Every object that looks as if you can stand on it or place another object on top of it functions as you’d expect. Removing blocks with the block tool is quite slow (it’s not intended to replace mining tools), but it has the benefit of long range.

Any block can be placed in the foreground or the background, left click places/removes blocks from the foreground whilst right click places/removes blocks from the background. Allowing you to quickly alternate between the two.

We’ve tried to create a very visual means of building so the experience plays out beautifully in multiplayer, where you can see exactly what your friends are doing and build in a cooperative way.

There’s also some very basic usage of the wiring system in the video, watch out for that. Needless to say the wiring system is capable of much, much more.