Interstellar Rift Development Update 002

Well it’s been two weeks and just like we said in our last blog post, it’s time for another update.

This week we’re going to enable virtual tour mode. This will allow you to walk around in your ships. When you’ve built a ship simply save it, go back to the main menu and press play. Make sure you place a teleporter in your ship, this is where you’ll spawn once you jump into a ship. Without a teleporter inside the ship it cannot be saved, as there’s nowhere to spawn.

Besides this, we have made several usability features for the shipbuilder based on your feedback, such as rotating props by click-dragging the mouse, border scrolling and of course saving different files. Naturally, we received far more feedback than we were able to implement in just two weeks. More features will follow with each update so please keep giving us feedback, show us your creations, and check back regularly.

The Interstellar Rift Alpha V0.0.3 can be downloaded here

for more info and the complete patch notes, please refer to our forums here

Interstellar Rift Ship Builder v0.01 released!

Two weeks ago we revealed Interstellar Rift to the world, and the responses have been overwhelmingly positive. Today we hit our first major milestone and we’re ready to let you guys play with our ship builder. With today’s release you’ll be able to create a space ship interior and hull. Over the coming days/weeks/months we’ll continue to improve and add new features to the ship builder based on your feedback. From today and forever you’ll be able to download the shipbuilder for free! as a standalone download. And when the alpha release rolls around you’ll be able to import the ships you’ve designed right into the main game!

The Interstellar Rift Alpha V0.01 can be downloaded Here

This pre-alpha build will allow you to design a ship from the inside out, however, please keep in mind that this is a pre alpha build, so there will be bugs, crashes and a lot of missing features. We plan to update the ship builder every two weeks with new content in the form of building blocks, visual improvements, new features and more, and walking around is just over the horizon.

For more instructions on how to use the ship builder please visit this page.

 

However we need your help to make this game the best it can be. Play around with the builder and let us know what you like and dislike, put it through the wringer, try to break it! We want to know what you want to see in Interstellar Rift and what we should probably leave out.

You can reach out to us through these channels:

Facebook
Twitter
Or go to our Forum

We are only human and we know there are infinitely more creative people out there than we can ever be. So show off that amazing new ship you’ve built. And let’s find out what we can do to make your creations even better.

We hope you enjoy the ship builder in its current incarnation and that it gives you a taste of what is to come.

Interstellar Rift Development Update 001

After about a year of hard work, It is time to officially announce our game, Interstellar Rift. A game where players will explore the galaxy in their own custom spaceship. We are thrilled to show some of the progress and explain how the game works.

To briefly explain the game. In Interstellar Rift players will be able to create their very own spaceship and explore the galaxy. Players will have to walk around in their ship to manage it, fly the ship in space, and above all, this can be done in multi player. For a more detailed description of Interstellar Rift please check here.

The ship in this video is about 170 meters long and is considered to be a medium to large ship. We categorize ships as small, medium, large and capital class.

Interstellar Rift is made using our own in-house engine, this allows us to cater the technology directly to the unique needs of our game. For example; because we want to give players maximum freedom in designing their own ships, the engine needs to be able to handle tons of dynamic lights and custom geometry without taking a significant performance hit. Therefore we opted to create a deferred rendering engine for ship interiors. and a forward renderer for the less customizable space environment. This has allowed us to keep performance high while still providing a visually appealing experience on low end systems.

We are very happy to say we have working prototypes of all our main gameplay pillars and we are working hard to merge them together into one working game. The ship builder is where most of the work has been done and while we still need to tweak a bit with it we feel we’ll soon be able to let you guys play around with it, we have tons of assets to place in the game, we are fairly happy about our workflow and pipelines, walking around in the ship and the outside space world work together in harmony and as I said, the renderer is working smoothly.

The very basics of spaceflight are also in working condition. There is not much to be found in space yet, but it is possible to fly around and the ship’s handling, acceleration and speed are based on the ship’s size and engines.

So what does all of this mean for you guys? With the basics in place, we should be able to implement features relatively quickly, and you will be able to see the game grow. Please check out our forums and let us know what you think about the game and the concept, what you like or what you dislike, what you would like to see or just your general opinion.

Thanks for reading our blog post, you can follow us on twitter and facebook, be sure to check back soon!