Welcome, Groundbreakers!

This week’s post is a little on the lighter side compared to our usual, but we hope you find it illuminating.

I can’t promise that those will be the last of the horrible puns in this update, but I will apologize for them. I’m sorry.

As we march towards the Early Access launch of Techtonica, we’re making lots of updates to stuff like optimization and tweaking items and basic recipes. At this stage, we’re not really adding new content to what will be available at the launch.

But! We did want to take time to update the light sticks before the game’s ready for players. That’s what we’re exploring today. We’ll showcase the new lights, compare them to the old lights, and talk a bit about why we wanted to get them upgraded ahead of launch.

Let’s dig in!

Hey, who turned on the lights??

These are the new light sticks in Techtonica.

The light sticks stand at two voxels high and one voxel wide. They come in white, red, blue, and green (for streamers, of course), and they are additive in nature.

What do I mean by additive? The colors of the light that shines off of the sticks change based on the light mix nearby. Combine blue and red light sticks in a close area to get a purple shine. See that below.

The lights we lost…

The light sticks that these fresh ones replace were, much like other things early in development, placeholder lights. The asset was temporary, as you can tell, and the design work done on them was incredibly basic.

Here’s what the lights looked like before this internal update.

Why the rework?

Oftentimes, teams like ours have limited resources when it comes to tackling projects like updating light sticks. As we move towards Early Access launch, there are some elements of Techtonica that we’re comfortable with releasing in a work-in-progress state. These elements function as intended, but they will be improved as development progresses.

So, why did we tackle the light sticks ahead of launch? The main sources of light in Techtonica are plants, machines, and bioluminescent water. With Power Floors down, plants harvested, and factory construction in far-off corners, the subsurface world can get dark, quickly.

We overhauled the light sticks because we know players will want to replace the natural light with something they physically build and place. We wanted a strong set of options for lighting at Early Access launch, including a selection of colors.

Techtonica will evolve through Early Access, of course, and we have so many plans for lighting and factory decoration that we can’t wait to share.

Thanks for reading, Groundbreakers!

While you’re here, don’t forget to Wishlist Techtonica!