First off, we’re excited to announce that we’ve picked July 20 as the ZeroSpace Early Access launch date!
Before then, we’d love for you to support ZeroSpace by playing during Steam Next Fest, June 15–22. Tell your friends and be sure to wishlist the game. As an indie team, word of mouth means everything to us.
We’re super excited to have partnered with GamerSky! They’ll be publishing our game in Asia, as well as providing us with marketing and localization for the region.
We believe a partnership with them works well as they can help us get ZeroSpace into players’ hands all across Asia, where they have strong regional expertise.
You can already see the benefit of our partnership with Chinese localization available in our new demo!
We’ve added a new tonemapper to ZeroSpace, AgX. This tonemapper helps create both a better cinematic experience and in-game feel by preserving colors and giving a more “realistic” look, and allowing us to have more control over the colors and contrast in the game.
We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Aaron Kambeitz and his team to significantly raise the quality bar on ZeroSpace.
Aaron’s experience from founding Relic Studios and co-creating Homeworld has already proven to be instrumental, as you can see in his redesign of the Protectorate models.
The goal of the Protectorate update was to create models that provide a clear faction identity and convey the tone that we believe the story of ZeroSpace deserves. We aimed to have cohesion through materials, shape language, and sense of scale. We think we’re close to nailing it here and have already brought a much more immersive experience to life, especially on the more lore-focused campaign side.
However, the work is not done, and next on the docket is continuing to iterate on the new models based on feedback from new playtests and impressions. One area we’re focusing on next with the new models is readability.
Aside from the Protectorate, we’ll be looking at Grell buildings next, followed by a few merc factions after.
Check out the new models and some of the concepts we started with, and let us know your thoughts!
Commando and Harvester
Protectorate Army Marching Forward
Initial Concept
Later Render
We made a change that we feel will make a big impact, increasing the size of our unit hitboxes in this update. Units won't clump up as tightly, making larger armies look as imposing and powerful as they actually are. This should significantly improve readability as well.
Before:
The same units after the change:
Our campaign is steadily coming along and we’re seeing good progress. Recently, our team has been working on difficulty tuning so you can play at whichever experience level you feel most comfortable on; whether it’s Casual, Normal, Hard or Brutal. We’ve also been working to get all our recorded voice lines in-game and beautified with SFX. It’s been exciting seeing all of the bits and pieces start to come together into an immersive experience we hope you’ll enjoy.
In addition to art and campaign, we’ve also started on a new tutorial specific to Co-op gameplay. We hope this tutorial will better prepare you and your friends to jump into co-op missions and dominate the galactic map.
We now have tutorials for campaign, co-op, and versus, so anyone can quickly learn the ropes for any way they’d like to play.
Localization has also been on our minds, as we’ve been working on translations for Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, and Italian. The love for RTS is truly global and we want to be sure our game is accessible to everyone.
We also haven't forgotten about Quality Assurance. We’ve recently hired on a QA team who’s very passionate about RTS and who’s been doing an amazing job finding bugs so we can squash them.
We’ve also done a team color update to match our new tone mapper
Xol is also still in the works behind the scenes. We’re polishing their animations, adding more VFX, and crafting their unique music tracks.
Get a small taste of the Xol here:
Our user interface is now one of our main focuses as we near Next Fest and our Early Access launch. So far, we've got a new Home Page video, have started on icons for things like unit abilities, some in-game layout updates, and introduced new command card buttons.
In addition to the Protectorate models, Aaron and his team helped us create a campaign teaser trailer. Check it out here.
Our CEO, Marv, sat down with Insider Gaming to introduce viewers to ZeroSpace for their upcoming Insider Gaming Showcase. We’d appreciate you tuning in on May 28 at 3pm ET/12pm PT/8pm UK on Insider Gaming’s YouTube channel. You’ll get to hear from Marv and also learn about a bunch of other awesome indie games that can use your support. Don’t miss out.
We’re working diligently to update our roadmap to give you a full overview of everything we will have available for Early Access, and what we will be working on after launch.
Our next update will include that roadmap as well as our Next Fest plans, so stay tuned.
For our amazing backers, your backer rewards are being worked on and we’re expecting to have them shipped out this year. We appreciate your patience as our team has been focusing on getting the best version of ZeroSpace ready for Early Access and beyond. We are working very hard to deliver you a game that we hope you’ll love.
In the meantime, remember to mark your calendars to play our new Steam Next Fest demo starting on June 15! You can help us by spreading the word with friends: this will be the best time for them to try out ZeroSpace before purchasing. Every extra person checking the game out during Next Fest makes a big difference.
Thank you for all of your support, it really means the world to us.
- The ZeroSpace Team
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