Engineer Alpha's Log #83: Making Things Unlocked Earlier
In the last update to Engineer Alpha I moved around both Magnetubes and Cranes in the tech tree to make them reachable earlier. I did this for several reasons but will go into each individually. Conveyors have been causing me a fair bit of lag in my personal playing of Engineer Alpha. Of course buildings/objects that are inefficient are always going to be looked at to be improved. When it comes…
I have updated the demo of Engineer Alpha to the latest version. It had been over a year since it had been updated so it was past time. The demo will likely not be updated for a while again but hopefully not as long as before. If there are any significant gameplay changes the affect the demo (which is limited to the very early game) I will hopefully get a new version of it out. In other news I…
First thing is that version 0.7 is planned for release on Tuesday the 12th of March barring the finding of any catastrophic bugs. Balancing and changes will still continue to happen even after the release. Now to the far more interesting bit I have decided to increase the throughput of conveyors. in my playtesting I found it too difficult to move a significant quantity of items around especiall…
Playtesting is one of the most important parts of making a video game. If you don't play it yourself and enjoy it why should other people? Honestly I am not always as good about thorough playtesting as I should be, some days it feels like it would be a waste of time. However when I do playtest I make a whole lot of changes that I hope are for the better. So far I have gotten through about Mech…
Version 0.7 is coming along nicely and this week I added 2 more buildings into the steel tier; the Steel Boiler and the Quarry. The steel boiler serves as as an upgrade to the iron boiler that has higher energy output and improved efficiency. It can be found relatively early on in the steel tier and does not even require Mechanical pack 2 to be unlocked so you can start to power more things in…
You may have noticed that in version 0.7 there are no new science packs. This is intentional as I was starting to feel like there were too many for both me as the developer and the player. Replacing all 4 types of science pack every tier was just too much to keep track of as well as too much to refactor the production of every tier. So I have made the change in the next build that science will…
Version 0.7 got it's first development build last week and while things with it are certainly not perfect it is mostly functional. A new build will hopefully becoming out tomorrow that will include freight containers, assuming I can get a few more bugs fixed, as well as dynamite that you can place or throw. There are still a few more features that will be added to 0.7 in the coming weeks as it…
Version 0.7 is now available for you to try out. Most content is in Including updated cranes, blueprints, and Magnetubes. Unfortunately freight containers have not made it in yet they will be added shortly when a few more bugs are fixed. When you find bugs please post them here on Steam or the official discord and I will get around to fixing them as soon as I can.
I hope you all had a good holiday and new year's, somehow we made it into 2024. Last year I made a road map with all of the planned releases for the year and while that went ok I am not planning to do something that far looking at this time. I do have many plans for what updates are going to be I am just not ready to share them yet. The final release on the roadmap Version 0.7 was planned for r…
I have been finding that there is a small issue with shafts and gearing. When ever I make a machine that uses rotational power as its input I find that there just are not enough options for its power requirements. What I mean is there are only a few generators in the game and a limited selection of options so a shaft in will for example be a whole steam engine or a half and not in-between. I wa…
First thing is October's video will be out in the next few days so keep an eye out for it. Also 0.6 public will be coming out on Tuesday 10/31. ***Please be aware that all GUI's shown in this log are not final in any way and will change.*** One of the great things about Engineer Alpha is that is takes place in a 3D voxel world, however this presents the problem that you can't see anything insid…
It has been a tough road these past couple months but I am starting to get back to developing Engineer Alpha full time. I built a new computer at the beginning of this month. My old one was past its 7-year expected life span and personally I prefer to update before things start having major problems. For the curious nerds out there I decided to go all "Team Red" for the first time ever and desp…
We are back up and running! It only took a fully day of troubleshooting and a small fire that left me with a graphics card shaped paper weight. Version 0.6 is finally here for you to test out. The full list of patch notes is in game but the highlights include a world revamp, cable shovel, and even doors and beds. There will be bugs and things that need to be fixed. If you find something please…
Two weeks ago I posted that Version 0.6 would be delayed due to a fmily emergency. Fortunately everone is alive and recovering well. The plan was to release 0.6 today as a am finally in a place where a can provide the bug fixing and support you all deserve with a new release. However this morning the main PC I use for developing the game and everthing will not turn on (I am writing this from my…
I work alone on Engineer Alpha at present and while it has its perks it also has its downsides. Unfortunately one of the biggest just happened. Due to a family emergency I will have to delay 0.6's release. I expect it to be a week or two before it releases and I am able to fix bugs quickly and efficiently. Thank you for your understanding. Aaron
The world of Engineer alpha is changing in version 0.6 and I want to give you an early look at what things are going to look like. Everything is of course subject to change before version 0.6 comes out and and some of it will change for certain and some could even change if you give feedback here on it. I there really isn't much to say and I hope the images speak for themselves.
One of the hardest things to make in a fully editable game world is water. The pendulum of efficient and accurate always swings hard in one direction. For the water in Engineer Alpha I have gone for the efficient side of things for now but I can almost guarantee that things will change somewhere down the line. Water in 0.6 will spawn in "lakes" throughout the world. You will be able to jump int…
Starting this month I will be creating a new series of videos that will be talking about new content that will be coming to Engineer Alpha. The first video is available right now. I plan to do one of these every month so the next one will be in August. The goal for these videos is to have a better way to show off new content to you. Previously I have done the "Megalogs" and while that did work…
As you may have noticed the UI design of most machines is very modular. There are individual UI elements for things like an inventory or a liquid tank that I can arrange together into one window for a machine. This is largely because the back end of Engineer Alpha is also very modular. I can drop together any set of machine elements that I want and have a working prototype of a machine in a mat…
When creating a world through procedural generation there are 3 major variables that determine what the world surface looks like; Height, Precipitation, and Temperature. Today I want to talk a little about temperature. In update 0.6 the world generator can now calculate a Climate Temperature for every location in the XY plane. This value ranges from -10C to 30C and and is not a function of time…
The 0.6 world update is coming along well and today I want to talk about what you are going to find below ground more on the ground level and above at a later date. Ore generation has been completely overhauled and now produces something like this: We will start at the top and work our way down. Dirt generation has been altered instead of being a single layer every where it is now between 3 and…
As you may have noticed in 0.5 damage indicator numbers were added to to some things when you hit them such as trees and buildings. This was a good start but is was not ideally what I wanted. In the 0.5 version the numbers are drawn on the screen and not in the world. This makes them fine for damage that is caused by the players actions at the point they are looking at but not anything else. It…
As you may have noticed the inventory visualization boxes (the red, green, and yellow ones) cause a bit of conflict with the grid outlines for buildings as they want to live in the same space. I have decided to move the ability to see where buildings can connect to the grid. in 0.6 when you move a placement object near a building you will see its grid just as you do now however there will be sy…
I know it has been a little while since my last log and unfortunately that is because I didn't have much to say. This week I have something to say and hopefully will every week for a while. I have been figuring out what exactly is going into version 0.6. Unfortunately things have not worked out exactly as I had hoped with the whole world revamp. Things on that front are going to be scaled back…
On Friday I added in what is planned to be the last major feature for 0.5 the Master Item List. The old cheat menu item list was a rather crude first attempt at doing an all items list and I was never happy with it. It worked by gathering all recipes and looking at their products then adding in several other lists that I manually edited whenever things needed to change. Needless to say it neede…
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