Well before I talk about the work that has been done this week, let me announce that Fringe Planet is now official on the Steam store! Go check it out, wishlist it and make my day! I’ll wait for a bit while you do that and then I’ll carry on with the blog post.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1128950/Fringe_Planet/

Thanks for doing that! Now onto the what I’ve been working on this week. It, once again, has been a week of little development but much work for Kickstarter and Steam. As you already clicked on the link and wishlisted Fringe Planet, you’ll notice the store page is pretty bare bones – and way to long with content. This will be re-visited once the Kickstarter has gone live – I’ve got a very lot of cool content I’ve been making for it. It’s just finding the hours in the day!

The Kickstarter itself is pretty much completely done at this point – with the exception of an awesome video which will be done this weekend. I’m incredibly happy with the way it has turned out, the artist has been working overtime creating all the cool headers and graphics and trying to convert my crude drawings into something presentable. A huge thank you to him! I’ve also got to say thank you to everyone who has given me feedback while I’ve been testing various ideas for the Kickstarter – I’ve had a huge amount of very valuable advice from a lot of wonderful people that will hopefully result in a very successful Kickstarter.

With that in mind, what else has been happening this week? Well the single biggest change about the game is updated peon facial textures. No longer do they look incredibly generic, but now each one has a very cool new art style. It’s amazing how such a technically small change makes a huge difference to the feeling of the game. The peons now have a lot more personality and I’m incredibly excited to see what people think of these new peons. For me, they have completely changed the feeling of the game – for the better.

These faces are currently just flat textures. Nothing exciting there. The goal (as mentioned last week) will be to use these art assets, along with some procedural generation to create a (virtually) infinite number of unique peon faces. This will be one of the tasks I’ll be working on while the Kickstarter is running. Very keen to get started on it though! What has also been nice with running the new face work concurrently with the Kickstarter was that I’ve now got five unique facial textures, one for me and one for the rest of the folks who have been helping me so much behind the scenes. This is a peon version of me, the other’s you’ll have to wait until the Kickstarter to see!

I also did an interview this week with https://www.gamedevloadout.com/ – talking all about my game development journey as well as talking a lot about Twitter and how useful it is for both feedback as well as community building. I’ll post on the blog when the episode is uploaded, but it was a really fun interview and I’d really recommend listening to some of the interviews already there.

There is a lot more to read about Fringe Planet… why not try:

• Kickstarter and Steam fun – Dev Blog 56
• Thunderpeons are GO! Dev Blog 73
• Kickstarter thoughts – Dev Blog 59