The first Update Pack for Techtonica will arrive tomorrow, January 16th, 2024, with v0.2.1.

That’s right, it’s Oops! All Concrete, and we’re here today to preview what’s coming in this small update. We’ll also get into how and why we’re doing these updates in addition to our larger milestone updates like v0.2 and the future v0.3.

Let’s dig in.

All concrete pieces to play with

As Lauren shared last week, the Oops! All Concrete update is all about giving players some metal-less pieces to build with. Those metal seams can look weird or off in some places, so we’ve created variants for walls, pillars, and cutaways that are immediately accessible in the variants menu without any unlocks once you have the pieces in question.

What does this look like? Here’s the same wall done two different ways to show you how the All Concrete variations feel. We’ll start with the standard base building pieces.

And now for the same wall with All Concrete variations.

Much cleaner… I love it.

A trove of base building parts presented much earlier

Lauren also talked about this in last week’s update, but we’ve added several chests to VICTOR’s front porch (as I often call it in my mind whenever I play). Inside these chests? A treasure trove of base building pieces for you to play with.

We understand that players want to interact with these pieces earlier in-game, so we’ve given you enough to build a small base near VICTOR before you head off into the wilds to scan, upgrade PT XRAY, and construct pieces of your own.

Here’s a sample of a small base that can be built with the parts in the chest at PT VICTOR.

Will you need to start a new save to get these parts? No! Boot up an old save or start a new one, you’ll find the new chests waiting for you at PT VICTOR. Enjoy!

What’s up with these Update Packs?

As we’ve already said elsewhere, v0.2.1 marks the first small Update Pack we’re doing for

Techtonica. We wanted to take a moment to clarify why we’re doing these and how they’re impacting our production schedule.

Let’s start with the latter.

Game development doesn’t happen all at the same time. That is, it’s not normal for art, design, engineering, and QA to be working on the exact same thing at the exact same time. Teams like ours rely on a producer to coordinate production schedules and divy out tasks, and that means an engineer may be working on something an artist finished a month ago.

What does that have to do with these packs? We build a lot of systems in Techtonica. Base Building, for instance, is one such system. Once the system is built and launched, it’s a lot easier for our team to make changes and additions to it. We know players want more stuff to play with, and our production schedule means that we have artists with time to spend on making extra elements for existing systems without impacting engineering time as that team works on building bigger projects in Techtonica.

So, that’s where Update Packs come in! We have production time available to push out these smaller updates that both introduce new content and provide minor design changes and bug squashing while we cook the next milestone update.

As for why we’re doing it? We want to give players more new stuff at a constant rate while staying responsive to their immediate bug and design needs. This smaller update in between bigger update structure means we can be faster for our fans and slower for our engineering team, so both parties win.

That’s it for the preview of v0.2.1, Oops! All Concrete. Reminder: the patch is slated to drop tomorrow, January 16th, 2024.

Thanks for reading and watching. Build something cool, join our Discord, and share it.

See you soon!