Check out the main theme from Exoplanet's soundtrack [WIP]:

[video]https:

Very cool, despite the ambition it's looking very polished. Making your own engine seems like a nightmare, but good on you for tackling that!

Thank you. Our engine is pretty good but we are improving it all the time. So it's hard sometimes but it is worth it.

We thought you might enjoy learning a bit more about the alien life of Exoplanet we have planned for our next big stretch goal.

For the first chapter of Exoplanet our initial plan was to introduce the players to the world by releasing Jack into the rocky desert of the Red Erg, a terrain that is very similar to certain areas on Earth, and remains consistent with the Western theme. About 60% of the objects in this desert biome had to be easy for human brain to identify. They still had the Exoplanet visual flair, but it was important that the player could recognize and understand their function. The rest was going to be alien planet components to discover and learn about. But then we asked ourselves: is this "alien-looking" enough for us? Where is this wild, untamed K’Tharsis we are speaking of? The one untouched by terraforming and global climate change, the land that gave birth to the local sentient aborigine race as well as strange creatures like sand sharks? Soon we found an answer!

It is deep down below the surface that has been scorched by the double suns, in an underworld consisting of enormous caves caused by the spontaneous antigravium explosions that occurred when the planet was still young. The scientists call it a unique underground wetlands biome. It houses lots of prehistoric species of K’Tharsis. Locals call it The Great Mangrove Forest.

Upon reaching the Alien Mangrove Forest Biome stretch goal we are going to include an entirely new area with new assets, enemies, and a global quest line into the first Chapter of Exoplanet. In this new area players will discover the mysteries of the aborigine race and find last remaining pieces of their ancient unique antigravium based technology. This biome is inspired by the Pellucidar setting created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Indiana Jones movies, as well as Peter Jackson's version of King Kong. All of these along with the good old concept of an alien jungle planet, often seen in the classic sci-fi books.

The topology of the Great Underground Mangrove Forest is weird and twisted, this region could be described as a conjunction of huge (up to several kilometers in diameter) spherical caves connected by a labyrinth of smaller caverns. It has the structure of Swiss cheese as thick as the planet’s continental crust. Unlike the surface, this enormous maze of caves is full of water and contains something that can be described as an “alien planet jungle”: forests of huge, mushrooms as tall as trees and strange coral-like formations growing to gigantic proportions. This world without sun is lit up by glowing multicolored antigravium and numerous bioluminescent creatures.

In The Great Forest you've got to learn new tricks to survive because local plants hunt animals and animals mimic plants. You’ve got to study them and use them to your advantage.

The original dwellers of the Forest are the savage aborigine tribes, almost untouched by civilization. Cannibals and relentless headhunters - they are the last pitiful descendants of the ancient aborigine empire that was destroyed by an unknown cataclysm. Now they protect the relics of the past, the real meaning of which they forgot centuries ago: great temples, now crumbling and overgrown by mushroom jungles and strange mechanisms powered by antigravium. These amazing mechanisms now lie nonfunctional and waiting for someone to repair them and probably make use of them. Exploring The Great Forest you must learn the language of these savage tribes and understand their customs and traditions in order to become their friend or to hunt them down and slay the cannibals for cash.

Humans entered this secret realm in search of ancient treasures and precious crystals and claimed a part of it for themselves - the mobile part. The Raft City ruled by the iron hand of the Blackthorn Mercenaries is roaming the swamps of the Great Forest, moving from one deposit of antigravium sand to the other. The dredges never stop, they work at the brink of overload to cope with Devil’s Throat mine, but there is never enough antigravium sand for the ambitious mercenary leader. A bold plan is being prepared to surprize the Terraform corporate dogs and you might become a part of it. Just make sure to pick the right side in this conflict (the winning one, as Jack always does).

In this new place you will find weapons, armor and gadgets based on the strange ancient technology involving pure antigravium. How could the aborigines who don't even know about electricity make huge rocks fly? Can an anti gravium-powered sledgehammer stop a running arphant? What does the antigravity grenade actually do? Will you be able to levitate using atigravium armor? Find out for yourself. If you manage to obtain and repair those items buried centuries ago in the secret spots of the Great Jungle.

We hope that this biome will satisfy those players who are seeking the true alien planet experience or just want to take a vacation from the desert surface of K’Tharsis. With your support, The Alien Mangrove Forest will become a great addition to the first Chapter of Exoplanet.

Dear Exoplanet’s backers and other players, our Kickstarter campaign is almost over and this is the right time to summarize our experience and tell you about our plans for the near future.

This month was one of the hardest experiences we have gone through during the entire 3 years of Exoplanet’s development, mostly because of the psychological aspects of having our game being exposed to the judgement of new people. This is the biggest audience we have shared our concept of an RPG with so far.

From the very beginning of the campaign we were surprised by how many people reacted positively to our pitch video (which was a bit experimental and contained mainly alpha gameplay footage) and description of our project, so we have put a lot of effort into our updates, trying to tell you as much about the game as we can in this relatively short period of time. We have not released all of the information about Exoplanet’s world, planet K’Tharsis, our characters, or the numerous aspects of the gameplay (e.g. our skill system, crafting and hardcore mode elements), so we will continue to share our vision of the game, insight into the development process, and the results of our work in the upcoming updates here on Kickstarter and on our website.

Unfortunately, our campaign didn't get coverage from the biggest game-related internet magazines and websites, but despite this fact we have reached two major stretch goals thanks to the support and active position of our backers and several smaller internet resources. We send our heartfelt thanks and feel deepest gratitude to those journalists and authors who interviewed us, and backers who have spread the word about Exoplanet across the Internet.

It is simply astounding that the content we are producing, our concept of an action/RPG game we started to develop as our hobby and then made it our professional field, has found such a large resonance within the community of PC players. For us as developers, the feedback and the ideas our growing community gives us is more valuable than money. Our goal has always been to make Exoplanet a game that is interesting for ourselves as simple players, not to follow the trends or pursuing a mere commercial profit. It seems that we have found a lot of like-minded people on Kickstarter and that feels great!

Exoplanet fans, those who believe in our dream, who fought for the media coverage alongside us to this day and defended our views despite all hardships - you gave us more than the funds to finish the development. You have given our small team of 8 a huge boost of motivation and creative energy for long time to come. Together we're going to make Exoplanet even better!

As you most likely know, the development of Sahara engine (and actually any game's graphic engine) is a constant and never ending process of research, testing and improvement of existent or adding completely new features to the basic functionality. We've already put to good use our world editor before, pushing it to the limits and creating quite an intricate landscape, but this wasn't enough: our game designer and level designers always wanted to create more complex locations with lots of vertically split terrain levels and non-linear paths, also increasing the scale of each level significantly. Old locations seen in our videos and in playable alpha were deemed too small, so the next prototype level for the Outpost 74 and its surroundings where the players will start their adventure on K'Tharsis has grown about 9 times in size. When increasing the playable and explorable territory like this you obviously will encounter some performance issues – so we came to the conclusion that we need to rework the terrain generator completely. In the last weekend a new stable version was compiled and we have tested it thoroughly, exploring the borders of the playgrounds our new tech can deliver.

The results were quite satisfying; the new terrain editor can create patches of land that have adjustable LODs and they generally consume much less processing power, allowing us to increase seamless locations up to 9 times more than before, e.g. with a new height map generation and saving algorithm our prototype level with sides 2x2km eats less GPU and RAM resources than 250x250m in older versions of the editor. The draw distance on these levels should increase as well as creating the feeling of larger and more open world where you can reach every point of interest you can see.

The next new and really enjoyable for our designers feature that was added recently is the tool that allows us to “drill” or cut holes in the terrain and cut the edges of the terrain patches, shaping them as we want. Now we can create overhanging cliffs and any cave entrances we could imagine with ease, obviously improving our level design capabilities.

But as we all know very well, the technologies themselves will not make a great game with distinctive visual style, so the steady hand of an art director is required to guide the ship of the game's development to the visual brilliance and integrity. Thanks to our generous Kickstarter backers we were able to hire one for Alersteam. In fact we just signed a full-time employment contract with an artist who was working for us for quite a while and has proven his design and illustrator skills many times before. Having a full time art director is profitable for us in many ways, our game designer will spend more time with the level and mission design and this will produce more quests and better dialogs for the next big updates.

We were very cautious about this important decision and were considering a trustworthy candidate and only after lots of tests and discussion we actually took this person in. As usual, according to our development philosophy we were looking for an artist who both shares with us views on the process of the development and has sufficient experience of being an art director, which combines with the actual concept art drawing with lots of task-managing and communicating with other departments (like 3d-modeling guys and animators). Finally we decided that Ivan Taranenko is the right person we need to take care of our visual design affairs.

In the one of the upcoming updates Ivan will tell you more about his personal game development experience, his tasks as a lead artist in Alersteam and things he is going to change and improve in Exoplanet in order to turn it into a visually recognizable and more immersive game.

A word about rewards

While the development of the game goes full on we didn't forget about the physical and digital rewards. Currently we've decided on the posters, mousepads and t-shirts designs.

We've almost finished the voting process on the t-shirt sizes. As soon as we're done with it, we'll start shipping, since the posters and mousepads are ready to ship.

A couple of words about digital rewards, the exclusive wallpapers and badges.

Unfortunately the production of wallpapers is slower than was expected, since we weren't satisfied by the quality of the first versions and decided to rework them. We're striving to reflect the style and the feel of our project even in these matters. When your friend looks at your wallpaper he should ask you "Wow, what's that game?!"

Those who've already registered in our forum (alersteam.com/forum) can check out the badge near their avatar and nickname which shows his role on this planet. The badges' design isn't yet finalized though.

On another important note, we've improved the pre-purchase feature on our website. Each Kickstarter backer has his own account now with his respective pledge and contribution. You can also increase your pledge via our website now, in order to receive additional rewards, such as t-shirts and others.

Our website alersteam.com has also undergone a visual upgrade. We're glad that because of Kickstarter we could breathe new life into Exoplanet's development, and we'd like that visitors of our blog will know that. That's why we've added a Kickstarter badge.

There's also a progress bar at the top of our website which shows current progress till the next stretch goal. At the moment of writing there's less than 14% required to reach 80,000, which will unlock the stretch goal Random Encounters.

Howdy, dear Exoplanet backers and RPG fans. This update came up to be a bit long and a little late, since we wanted to reach a certain important milestone and show you the results of our hardworking art director and lead 3d artist, who were working on such important environment details like rocks and cliffs. 80% of K’Tharsis’ surface is a rocky desert, and we wanted to build the first levels of our game in this particular biome, to set the player up for a western style at first, before throwing him into exotic alien landscapes. The results of our work are described in detail below, followed by first demonstration of the modular armor system and general ideas for weapon redesign. We’re hoping that both players who know a thing or two about the process of game development and those who are more knowledgeable in this regard would find that kind of information interesting. Have a nice read!

K’Tharsis’ rocks: on our method of landscape design and decoration.

In our previous updates we’ve already talked about the process of creating a level and also showcased our heightmap editor that supports terrain patches with holes in them, which allows us to create a more complex geometry such as caves, overhangs and other types of advanced land patches for player to walk on. However, the current generation of gamers wouldn’t be satisfied by a simple heightmapped terrain painted by a couple of different textures as it was done in years before 2006, since generic hills and valleys wouldn’t look convincing even with the help of advanced terrain projection algorithms. Surely, we at Alersteam wouldn’t want to create such simplistic pathetic excuses of levels. Our goal is to create locations that are fun to explore, that have a vertical aspect to them as opposed to plain old and boring runway strip level design, that literally screams “You’ve reached the end of the world” at you, when you hit its invisible borders. All Exoplanet’s locations will have natural boundaries that don’t make the player feel as if he isn’t allowed to go somewhere because of, ahem, reasons.

WIP: part of our location built with modular rocks and walls

But you can’t really make an interesting level with soft hills made by heightmaps even with the help of generic rocks. When a level designer wants to create a more interesting terrain with valleys, ravines, uniquely shaped rock formations and whatnot, it’s impractical to achieve this with engine level editor. This is where custom meshes come to the picture, where particular points of interest are created as unique meshes. When working with artificial levels, technical objects, various sorts of machinery etc a large number of different meshes could be created which are then assembled into a specific piece of machinery or a laboratory of some sort, not unlike LEGO. Assembled from simple pieces, in able hands it could be used to create stunning structures.

Most of the games which inspire us are using the same level creation process or some sort of a variation of it. In our case, it allows us to work mostly without relying on 3rd-party editors for shaping the complex landscape and our terrain geometry. We can just generate a heightmapped patch of a desired size (or several of them), mold it to our desire, cut out holes for caves and various unique locations (a cavern with openings in the stone ceiling for instance, or a cave system at a side of a canyon), and decorate the level with meshes, decals etc, all without leaving our editor. In theory, a modmaker would be able to open one of our existing levels, and be able to change the terrain, add/delete objects and have access to all of our assets right there in our editor, as well as the possibility to add their own assets, import textures, and even create completely new levels from scratch.

U- and C-shaped walls in editor (the seam is left visible intentionally)

We’ve started by creating a couple of rockface drafts to help us decide on a final form and by working on a level prototype to find out the scale of assets and distances from which they should be visible without fidelity deterioration. First of all we’ve made some convex and concave walls for the level with a starting height of about 60m, since this is approximately the average height difference in our level’s terraces. The mesh set should contain at least 3 of those meshes for each of those big walls or cliff faces, if you will. They could be easily extended if needed.

Each of these meshes has a unique diffuse, normal and specular maps in 2048×2048 resolution. We could have used tileable textures of a lower resolution, but a unique texture looks better and emphasizes rock edges and overall relief. Despite the fact that modern PCs have a plenty of VRAM to handle large textures, we don’t want to be too wasteful by making the resolution of our texture maps too large, since in this case the player would usually see these meshes from a distance. Natural barriers that the player would be able to come much more closely would be smaller in size and respectively with a larger visible texture fidelity. Additionally these huge U-and C-shaped walls are modeled as one-sided meshes to lower the polygon count in the scene (the player is not supposed to see their backside), though they are shaped in a way that makes it easier to combine them with each other and with the terrain without visual inconsistencies.

Gameplay simulation, from player’s perspective. Camera angle makes a lot of difference

Flat rock formations are also needed for hiding horizontal seams and building ledges as well as decorating lower cliff faces. These ones are examples of the middle sized meshes, they are limited by 15m in height and from the player’s point of view the texture is more detailed in terms of texel to screen pixel ratio.

Each flat rock has different geometry on its sides for more visual variety

We’ve also thought about introducing some variation into such surfaces that look the same for example a protruding rock formation. That’s why we’re also making separate rock assets we call I-shaped rocks or simply I-rocks. They are also suited for a larger relief and are about 40m in height, which is of course also could be scaled up or down to some extent. I-rocks can help to decorate larger natural formations or work as standalone assets if needed. We’re planning on making a whole set of such rocks to give our level designers and modders a higher degree of freedom, and more building blocks for their creative

I-shaped rocks can be rotated to show different looking sides

It’s also important to note that our rock texture doesn’t have a particular direction. This was made deliberately, and allows us to rotate those assets any way we want. They don’t have a visible “up” or “down” sides which makes it easier to fit them into any creative arrangement one might think of. This approach does have a downside of being more generic and less realistic, but in future, due to decals and lighting it won’t be noticeable. We’re also using a well-known detail texture technique, for those who like to check out cliff surface very closely.

Detail texture applied to the large mesh: the difference is clearly visible

Needless to say, unique rock formations will have their own unique meshes, like natural bridges, peculiar obelisks, arcs etc, though those aren’t a priority at the moment. At the final stage of building the level all seams should be well-hidden beneath smaller details like a bunch of smaller boulders and rock slides, broken cliff pieces, flora etc. This way we’re trying to create a more naturally looking environment, where the annoying seams and transitions between traversable terrain and natural vertical boundaries are almost unnoticeable.

Mysterious big structure teaser