After a few sleepless nights, I have the games particle effects system in and working!

This will be used to create steam, smoke, fire, explosions, dust and other volumetric phenomena.

The steam picks up lighting from the surrounding lights. (currently only one or two at the moment, so if you’re eagle eyed you might see it pop ) I hope to extend this at a later date to create really nice atmospheric lighting.

I’ll now be moving on to polishing up some character animation code. That will allow me to get some videos of the IMPs at work and perhaps even the colonists having a bumble about.

One last thing: I don’t usually blog about press, due to them then covering my blogs and then causing some sort of infinite recursion loops. However, I recently did a really long interview with PCGamesN that has got a load of detail about the game in it. Give it a read and share it!

Big news! We are planning on releasing our first alpha in mid-january! This will be a basic game-play prototype and tech demo, a few game mechanics will be fully functional, and there will be lots of interesting features to check out and play with.

The alpha release will be carried by several big name digital distributors but also be available for purchase right from the site. Get on the mailing list to be notified the second we go live!

To help us achieve this I am going to open up funding at the end of the month! I wont say what yet as it’s not 100%, but it’s going to be big! Here’s a clue: The game featured prominently in an interesting Edge articlelast week.

Using that funding I hope to employ another artist or two and a programmer on the project to help move things along towards the alpha. There’s lots to do, and few extra pairs of hands would get things chugging along nicely.