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roadmapupdate

Astroneer Development Roadmap: Pre-Alpha and Beyond

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Hey everyone! I’m Veronica, producer at System Era, coming to you live with my very first blog post.

Way back in December, on the eve of Astroneer’s Pre-Alpha release, Adam shared the first version of the roadmap. With excitement and anticipation, we offered a first look at some of the ideas the System Era team was kicking around along with a promise to keep in touch about how those plans develop. A lot has happened since then, and we haven’t kept in touch as well as we’d have liked, but the team has been steadily growing and steadily working to make Astroneer the best it can be. (more…)

may2017-team

The Last Six Months & The Future

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Adam here. Any time System Era updates Astroneer, we spend some time doing a post-mortem of how things went. I thought since we are at the six month mark, I could look back and call out the stuff we did really well, what we could have done better, and what is happening next. Astroneer is in a great place, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have areas that we can improve upon.

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Augments

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One of our primary goals with Astroneer is to provide an open-ended gameplay experience that incentivizes creative problem solving. The socket (snap) system is a big part of this desire, and it was specifically designed to facilitate as-of-then unplanned gameplay systems and interactions. With this update, we’re introducing our first new system that leverages that potential: say hello to Augments! (more…)

Making Research More Fun

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letsgo

Hi Astroneers! I’m Samantha, a game designer and one of the new members of the Astroneer dev team. I’m really happy to be here and I wanted to take some time to introduce myself to the community. I’ve got about ten years of experience in the game industry, which have strongly shaped my approach and sensibilities to game design. There are a lot of you who love Astroneer and want to see it continue to grow and evolve in the best ways, so I’ve tried to hit the ground running and start contributing sooner rather than later. The team has an established culture of transparency of development, which I think is great because I get to participate in conversation with all of you. Today I get to start a conversation specifically about the design details of my work so far – the new research system. (more…)

Signal Failure

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On April 15th, a mistaken notice was sent out about a Steam Daily Deal that discounted Astroneer. The discount was then ended early. This was the result of an unfortunate series of communication failures, entirely our fault, and compounded by the turmoil of tragedy on the team in the last month.

For this, we deeply apologize. Regardless of how things happen, it’s supposed to be our job that they happen the right way, and that our customers are never misled. We feel that we lost the trust of some of our fans, and that trust is what we value most.

In general, our communication about game discounts hasn’t been nearly as good as it should be. It is our promise that from now on, all discounts will be clearly announced through all our communication channels, and once a sale is announced, it will never be modified or canceled. In the mean time, we’ve reached out to Steam to discontinue any advertising of this sale that may still be public.

– System Era

Going Faster.

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I worked on this.
I worked on this.

Hello, this is Zabir from the Astroneer dev team. The last time I wrote a blog post I spoke about the important of optimization and bringing that to Astroneer. Lately I’ve been focused on our plan for increasing performance and stability of the game, and was responsible for the first pass of a bigger update to performance that you would have seen in Patch 125. Performance is an on going challenge of building a game this early. So, I wanted to quickly talk about Astroneer’s performance and what is our plan going forward? There are three major ways we are going to attack the performance problem: streaming system, optimizing algorithms, and better OS/hardware interaction. (more…)

New Office Space

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Hey, Riley here. As Brendan mentioned in our last blog post, 50 days, our team is growing and changing offices. For me, that also means moving to Seattle to be in the office full time. For the past few days I was out in Seattle looking for an apartment. (Mission accomplished.) While I was there, I had a some extra time to drink a lot of great coffee and take a look at our new office. It’s exciting to finally get to move into a place of our own, it’s quite the upgrade from our 4 person co-working office space.

Brendan and I took a quick tour of the new place. Take a look for yourself:

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Astroneer now available on Steam, Xbox One, and Windows 10 Store

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Astroneer is now available on Steam Early Access, Xbox One, and Windows 10 Store Game Preview for $19.99 USD! In addition to purchasing the game itself, Steam users will have the option of purchasing an Astroneer + Soundtrack bundle for $24.99.

As a reminder, yesterday we talked about the future of Astroneer and its road-map and how you can be involved through our forum. The day before we discussed what you can expect of multiplayer on Day-1 and beyond. Be sure to check those posts out while the game downloads!

You can find Astroneer on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and Twitch. Astroneer also has its community growing on Reddit, Steam, and the Astroneer forum.