Stars Reach doesn’t look like you remember

I’ve been remiss in posting updates on Stars Reach here. I mean, the Kickstarter finished back in March (late pledges still accepted)! Today, though, I want to brag about our awesome AI and proc gen driven worlds.

Over the last few releases, we have been rolling out yet another series of improvements to the look of the worlds. And we’re getting to the point where I think the alien worlds are starting to look like the covers of sci-fi novels (especially with some player help building weird structures):

Uh oh, the monolithI could swear I own this paperback

Remember, our worlds are effectively created on the fly. They’re run by AIs in every cubic meter. Everything you see is malleable and changes around you, and players can resculpt every inch of it. Heck, every tree and every bush is a mob.

Recently, we have done huge updates to lighting, flora seeding and propagation, and generation of distinct alien subspecies on each planet. We did a pass on material adhesion, so everything slumps or holds together more realistically. You can now fly through a wild wormhole, and in every play session, the planet on the other side will be unique… and gone by the next play session. And the look is really starting to click together, I think. I mean, just compare to the shots from my last post in early March!

Alien cacti on ZaraxaNight on a lost wild wormhole worldA wintry landscape with deerWatch out for panthersHmm, that seaweed is misplacedLooking out from the cave over the canyonFlying over the jungleThickets!Hunting by nightMore flora density!Meteors falling in the background

That’s not all, though. Players have invented ice rinks and heat pumps and most recently, even an elevator, using the in-game physics. They’re building crazy stuff. It’s awesome to see. All of this stuff is player built, using one of the three building methods (or all three!): terraforming, block building a la Minecraft, and tile building.

In the next few updates, we’ll be doing big performance updates alongside major visual updates to flora and other in-game objects, plus adding a whole bunch of features to get us closer to our current goal: keeping the servers up 24/7 by the end of the summer. It’ll be tight, but we’re making good progress.

So there’s yet another few quantum leaps coming on the game look!

Oh, there’s game stuff to talk about too. Combat has taken leaps and bounds, and there’s a huge update to that coming soon too. But right now, I just wanted to show off the visuals a bit.