Animals, Machinery & Phantoms ( Autonomica Digest #6 )

Howdy, Autonomics!

How've you all been doing? We've been pretty busy grinding away towards the alpha in September, and we've got a little bit of everything to show you! Grab a snack, get settled, and let's have a look at what we've been up to!

We're so excited and so appreciative to be involved in Mix Showcase and the Cozy Friends & Family event. With the Mix showcase, we brought another trailer to life with some new footage, and we'd love to share it here with all of you!

Crop Growth & Balancing

Our team has been hard at work polishing and balancing the growth stages of crops, while also updating new crops to follow a unified visual system. This is still a work in progress, but our goal is to create a sense of continuous progression, where your fields feel alive, and every stage of the crop's life is clearly visible as you play.

Fuse Boxes & Energy System

Next up: fuse boxes! Our artists have completed the models, and our programmers have started laying the groundwork. As you know, many of your machines (and even your house) will require electricity to function, unless you decide to go full manual mode, of course. Managing your energy usage, monitoring stored power, and handling peak loads will be an important part of gameplay. And if your power demand gets too high? The fuse might blow, but don’t worry! Just flip the switch on the fuse box and you’ll be back online in no time.

New Machinery Panel UI & Botanic Station

While our artists and programmers were busy with systems and visuals, our UI/UX designers rolled out a brand-new panel for machinery. Previously, everything was displayed using raw numbers in a semi-transparent black window. That’s now gone. We’ve replaced it with a sleek, intuitive interface that we think looks awesome! Check it out and let us know if everything feels clear and readable.

We spoke about Stations in one of our updates, but if you missed it or are new here, these Stations are how you progress through your research and tech trees. This one is the Botanical Station, which will allow you to research and improve your farming technology. It's an early step towards unlocking better tools and methods of production!

NEW Animals Incoming

We’ve also welcomed a new addition to our in-game family… a fluffy kitten! We hope you’re cat people though we’ll admit the debate is still ongoing within the team: cats vs. dogs. What’s your vote?

Straight from the Savannah, we've got a baby zebra! Did you know wild zebras sleep standing up with one often taking watch over the others?

Phantoms, Hunting Mechanics & VFX

We’ve made big strides in the phantom hunting gameplay too. As you may know, capturing a phantom involves weakening it first, then using the ProtoVac to break it into atoms and seal it inside a nano-container. Check out our latest VFX, Sounds and a sneak peek at the working game mechanic that handles this process. It’s spooky in all the right ways.

Besides capturing phantoms, we’ve also made progress on new ones. We’ll share their full history and briefings once they’re complete, but for now - meet The Hugger. This is a medium-level enemy, so tread carefully when encountering it. Despite its name, this is not a hug you want.

Here's a model of it next to an average sized character (though your mileage may vary, as we did unlock the character height slider).

Optimization, Optimization, Optimization

Of course, no update would be complete without mentioning optimization. Every single day, our team squeezes as much performance as we can out of the code to ensure the game runs smoothly across a wide range of systems. We take this seriously, and it’s always ongoing.

World Map, Points of Interest & More

Beyond all of this, we’re also deep in development on the world map and adding new points of interest to the island. There’s a lot in the works, and we’re excited to show you even more cool stuff in the upcoming updates!

Community Corner

Our friends Linn & Hunter are making Autonomica in Minecraft! Super creative!

One of our talented Discord users, Cherry, made some really cool artwork of the Hugger and being terrified of it, a feeling we think everyone will relate to!

Another very talented Discord user, Bananadanis, who's work we've shared before, has drawn the adorable Mossy Moosey, who's heard from a bird about the new bull in town. Very cute!

That's all from us this time! Thanks for tuning in! And hey, if you like these Digests and want to stay more up to date, join our Discord and sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date with the latest from Autonomica!

Stay Connected!

We’ll continue posting often updates here, but if you want behind-the-scenes looks, daily progress or to just hang out with the devs -> join our Discord.

Thanks for being here.

Sincerely,

💙❤️💛 Crytivo Team