Latest blog entries

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• Adaptory's new trailer

  With the support of my publisher, I’m very excited to announce the brand new Adaptory trailer!

  This new trailer was premiered as part of the incredible ANZ Indie Showcase 2024, which shows off an incredible collection of indie games made by Australian and New Zealand indie games. (Adaptory’s feature starts at the 23 minute mark!)

  As part of the ANZ Indie Showcase, I was interviewed by Caff about Adaptory, my motivation behind making the game, some of... (continue reading…)

• Coming back to PAX Aus

  Thanks again to the incredible support from CODE NZ, we are thrilled to be coming back to PAX Australia with Adaptory… next week! We had such a blast last year, meeting so many new friends and fans, and can’t wait to return.

  

  If you’re in Melbourne next week (11-13 October 2024), make sure to pop by CODE NZ booth #1140, where you can play Adaptory and 17 other amazing New Zealand-made indie games. Come have a chat with the solo developer (me!), composer, and sound designer, play the latest... (continue reading…)

• Faster saves

  (Warning: technical, but short, gamedev post)

  In the next alpha version of Adaptory, I’ve rewritten the save game format to support much faster loads and saves:

  Test	old (.ymlz)	new (.jsonz)
  Saving	1405ms	284ms
  Loading	9139ms	349ms
  File size	383kb	396kb

  In the old format, save games were YAML files (.yml), combined and zipped into a single archive (.ymlz). This worked great, because I want the save files to be readable and eventually moddable by players.

  However, I was finding that loading... (continue reading…)

• Official publisher announcement

  We are thrilled to announce today that we are teaming up with indie.io (formerly Freedom Games) as the publisher for Adaptory! 🥳

  We’ve been working towards this collaboration for many months and we are very excited that it’s now official. 🎉🥰

  

  What’s next for Adaptory?

  We’re still aiming for an Early Access release in 2025 as we add more content and polish to Adaptory and refine its identity. Indie.io has no control over what’s going to be in the game, and it’s their healthy approach to IP ownership that... (continue reading…)

• Alpha 10 + TactiCon

  Hello! It’s been a while since the last update – we’re still focusing on adding new content for the Early Access version, but we’re excited to release a brand new update for the Adaptory Demo today as part of TactiCon 2024!

  

  This is a major release that adds food and hunger to the game, that has rewritten explorer priorities to be more flexible and intelligent, and also includes lots of small improvements and quality of life fixes. The full patch notes are listed below.

  You can download your copy... (continue reading…)

• Alpha 9 released

  Alpha 9 of Adaptory – the UI update – is now live! This is a major release that has updated every single screen with brand new user interfaces that look and feel better. The full patch notes are listed below.

  

  The new Adaptory user interface

  You can download your copy on itch.io, play the demo on Steam, or by using the embedded link below:

  If you find any bugs, issues, balance problems or suggestions, please... (continue reading…)

• CODE Kick Start

  We are really thrilled to share that this morning, Adaptory has been announced as a Kick Start recipient in the inaugural national funding round from the New Zealand Center of Digital Excellence (CODE)!!

  

  This grant and support will help us continue to improve the user interface and unique gameplay of Adaptory as we get ready for our Early Access launch in 2025. (We will be releasing the first public screenshots of the new user interface in the next week or two!)

  Over the last year, CODE’s support has levelled up... (continue reading…)

• Next Fest: What's Next?

  Steam Next Fest has been an absolute blast! Adaptory has had tens of thousands of new views, downloads, plays, wishlists, and feedback. What’s next?

  TL;DR: We’re moving Early Access release to 2025, to add more content and polish.

  Steam Next Fest: By the numbers

  • 1300+ players of the Adaptory demo, playing more than 850 combined hours (so far!)
  • Five patches with all sorts of interesting and unusual bug fixes
  • 78k+ unique viewers on our SNF livestreams with our very special guest and friend, ThisIsRubyOK
  • A peak of 520 concurrent viewers on the second livestream
  • Wishlists per day increased by 10-20x during the festival
  • Lots of reviews and videos, including videos from Orbital Potato, Zeppy Game, Dr. Incompetent, Stealthyshiroean, and tons of Twitch and YouTube streamers ❤️

  

  Can you spot Steam Next Fest? Source: SteamDB.info

  Feedback

  Thank you all, so much, for all of your downloads, plays, and feedback over the last week! It’s been great to meet so many new fans and friends, and confirming that the game is heading in the right direction 😊

  From the hundreds of comments... (continue reading…)

• Steam Next Fest demo now live

  The Steam Next Fest demo for Adaptory is LIVE!! 🥳 You can download your free copy of the game on Steam:

  Full patch notes are listed below.

  This version has been heavily tested but there may still be bugs, crashes, and unexpected behaviour. Please continue sending through bug reports, feedback, and ideas as we’ll be working on polish and tweaks over the next week. A huge, huge thanks to everyone who has played an early build 🥰

  As mentioned in the Steam Next Fest plan, the plan is to keep this demo up beyond the festival, but I might need to turn it off if something unexpected occurs. So download a copy today, and please let us know what you think!

  Voices

  In the demo, your explorers can now express themselves! They’ll make adorable noises when... (continue reading…)

• Steam Next Fest – What's happening

  Adaptory is coming to Steam Next Fest!

  

  Steam Next Fest is a week-long celebration of upcoming games, and more importantly, it will be the first time Adaptory will be available on Steam. The goal is to get as much feedback and as many wishlists as possible, so please do join the party. The new demo build has new features, art, sound, gameplay, and a ton of bug fixes, and I can’t wait to share our hard work.

  Here’s everything that’s going to be happen over the next two weeks! (You can also... (continue reading…)

• Oxygen generator

  In the next version of Adaptory, there’s a brand new building: the oxygen generator. My goal for this building is to reflect real-world water electrolysis; that is, turning liquid water into oxygen and hydrogen using electricity.

  The new oxygen generator building

  But in order to get there, the element simulation needed a bit of a minor rewrite…

  (Warning: Technical gamedev post follows!)

  The old data model

  In Adaptory, every instance of a building or explorer has its own mass and... (continue reading…)

• Alpha 7 released

  The Alpha 7 of Adaptory is now live! You can download your copy on itch.io, or by using the embedded link below:

  If you find any bugs, issues, balance problems or suggestions, please let us know on Discord or by email so we can keep improving the game! 🙂

  The focus of this release has been technology, to try get the game as stable as possible before adding all of the systems and content for Early Access. This release has been heavily tested but there may... (continue reading…)

• Alpha 7 is around the corner

  Hello! This is just a quick note that Alpha 7 is almost here, but not quite. The plan was to release it tomorrow but I’m going to take an extra couple of days to clean up a few remaining bugs and add a little bit more content.

  Alpha 7 may be our last alpha before Early Access so the focus of the release is technology. We should then be able to focus entirely on content and systems over the summer break.

  The release date is just one week away – 21 December 2023. This means you’ll have a brand... (continue reading…)

• Save game, FMOD integration and other updates

  We’re hard at work getting Alpha 7 ready, which will be released on 15 December.

  Save/load game

  A long requested feature… you can now save and load games! And autosave is supported, too – by default there are four autosave slots and autosaves are triggered every 10 minutes.

  

  You can now save and load your game

  Thanks to the internal data model, autosaving is done async, without needing to freeze the UI. Hopefully losing your base to a crash should be in the past, however serialization/deserialization is tricky so I am... (continue reading…)

• Released 0.8.2

  I’ve released another small patch for Alpha 6 today that fixes a few weird bugs. You can download your copy on itch.io. A huge thanks to everyone on Discord for your feedback and bug reports!

  Full patch notes below.

  ... (continue reading…)

• libgdx and FMOD

  (Warning: Technical gamedev post!)

  I’ve been prototyping an integration of FMOD (through lwjgl) and libgdx over the last day, and it looks like these are the steps you need to do to... (continue reading…)

• Released 0.8.1

  I’ve put together some quick fixes for Alpha 6 that should fix some of the most common crashes and unexpected behaviour. You can download your copy on itch.io:

  We’ll also be showing off this build at Armageddon Auckland this weekend. You can find us at booths B88~B90. A huge thanks to NZGDA for helping us get to Armageddon!

  

  Full patch notes... (continue reading…)

• Alpha 6 released

  Fresh off the PAX AUS floor, the Alpha 6 of Adaptory is live! You can download your copy on itch.io, or by using the embedded link below:

  If you find any bugs, issues, balance problems or suggestions, please let us know on Discord or by email so we can keep improving the game! 🙂 I’m really proud of all the work that we’ve managed to pull together for this release, and I’m excited to hear your feedback.

  New game screen

  At the start of the game, you will now be presented with your team, and you... (continue reading…)

• Solid element art

  It has been a while since the last blog post! Gamescom 2023 was an incredible experience (coupled with jetlag that took about a week to recover), and then I went straight into NZGDC to show off the game at the Kiwi Interactive Showcase.

  And there has not been a moment to rest! We’re now getting ready for presenting the game to the public at PAX Melbourne in two weeks time! We will be at the NZ CODE - Booth #1140... (continue reading…)

• Released 0.7.1

  I’ve released a small update to Alpha 5 today to fix a few crashes. Thank you to everyone on Discord who has tried out the latest version and provided feedback 😀

  You can download a copy... (continue reading…)

• Alpha 5 released

  Alpha 5 is now live, with new content, systems and bug fixes! 🥳 You can download your copy on itch.io, or by using the embedded link below:

  If you find any bugs, issues, balance problems or suggestions, please let me know on Discord or by email so we can keep improving the game! Thank you to everyone who have played previous versions and sent in their feedback and ideas. 🙂

  Revamped diary engine

  The diary engine has had a major overhaul, thanks to a grant from the NZFC Interactive Development fund. Rather than pawns writing diary entries immediately after an event occurs, the event may now become the topic of a future diary entry. As soon as the pawn wants to write a diary entry (generally once a day), they will select the most important topic to write about at that time.

  

  A happy "enthusiast" pawn writing about a meteor event

  We’ve added in pawn traits, which affect how they deal with different situations. For example, a pawn that loves digging will work faster if... (continue reading…)

• Adaptory is releasing in Early Access in 2024!

  Back at the start of last year, my plan was to release the first Early Access (EA) version of Adaptory towards the end of this year. While I could release Adaptory before the end of this year, my understanding of the Steam Algorithm™ is that your EA release should be as good and polished as possible, so the game can get lots of hype and positive reviews to climb the discovery queue.

  Therefore I’ve made the decision to release EA in the first half of 2024, and to not go ahead with a Kickstarter campaign. Our recent grants from NZFC and CODE has made these decisions possible, and we’re going to release a much better game as a result!

  The specific month is still TBA, but the plan through to EA includes:

  ... (continue reading…)

• Diary entries

  Hi, Adaptory fans! Story Director Cass chiming in here with a little bit of background on how the story elements of the game are progressing. Hopefully I’ll be able to provide a little insight into what we hope to achieve with the narrative elements of this game, along with some updates on what we’ve done so far.

  When Jevon first contacted me about coming on board to help with the story elements of this game, I was excited but a little intimidated. I’ve made a few text games in the past, and mostly work in the theatre world, so I’m... (continue reading…)

• Going to Gamescom!! 🥳✈🇩🇪

  I’m very excited to share that we will be at Gamescom Köln in August!!

  And as soon as we’re done in Germany, we’re flying straight back home to attend NZGDC here in Wellington, and hopefully present Adaptory at the Kiwi Interactive Showcase.

  The trip is partially funded by CODE NZ, who have been incredibly supportive! New Zealand is extremely lucky to have this organisation supporting NZ gamedevs.

  While we’re there, I’ll take some photos and share them on Patreon 😀

  (continue reading…)

• Alpha 4 released

  Alpha 4 is now live! This release does not have any new content in it, but it has a rewritten data model that should run simulations up to 2-10x faster. All things going well, this should be the final model used through to EA/1.0 release.

  If you’re able to download a copy and give it a go, please let me know if you find any weird bugs! I’ve had to touch almost every part of the game so there is bound to be a few areas I’ve missed.

  You can download a copy on itch.io, or by using the embedded link below:

  ---

  ... (continue reading…)

• A new data model: Making Adaptory 10x faster

  (Warning: technical gamedev post)

  As alluded to in my previous post, I’ve spent most of the last month or two working on the internal data model of our base building/simulation game Adaptory, to improve the performance of the background simulations. At a high level, it’s looking really good: games now run on average 10x faster (depending on the complexity and size of your game world).

  

  Performance comparisons of the old and new data models – lower is better

  In the rest of this blog post, I’m going to do a bit... (continue reading…)

• Alpha 4 is coming

  It’s been quite a while since the last blog post, because I’ve been deep in the weeds with data structures and modelling.

  During our demo at Armageddon Expo WLG I found that the game would start to slow down after about 15-60 minutes of gameplay. Upon further investigation it was due to certain algorithms and the way data (in particular, items and errands) was being stored and modified every tick. I want the game to support big worlds and huge bases, so this had to be fixed!

  The good news is that the majority of the architecture... (continue reading…)

• Released 0.5.1

  I’ve released a small update to Alpha 3 today, which has a number of small bug fixes, and also introduces fullscreen mode (F5) and experimental support for UI scaling.

  You can download a copy... (continue reading…)

• Alpha 3 released!

  Alpha 3 is now live!! 🥳 You can download a copy on itch.io, or by using the embedded link below:

  This release is packed with new systems, gameplay, sounds, and art for you to play with. And there’s a lot more coming!

  If you find any bugs, please report them to our Discord server or send me an email. We’ve tested this build on a number of machines and setups but I’m sure there’s a few sneaky bugs hiding in the woodwork. Thank you for all your feedback and support while we create Adaptory 🙂

  Random events

  In Alpha 3, we’ve introduced random world events that will challenge your base’s ability to adapt. The frequency and intensity of the random events increase based on the number of tiles that you have dug, and... (continue reading…)

• Beds and happiness

  Alpha 3 is fast approaching, make sure you sign up to the mailing list to get notified! Over the last two weeks I have been focusing on improving the gameplay by adding two major new features: pawn happiness, and beds.

  Happiness

  Pawns now have a happiness meter which will go up and down based on what they’re experiencing, and later this year we’re going to use pawn happiness to trigger different types of diary entries.

  To start off, pawns will work faster when they’re happy, and slower when they’re particularly sad; they’ll also express their emotions using... (continue reading…)

• Random events WIP

  Over the last week I’ve been introducing random world events to Adaptory. As you play through the game, your base and team will be challenged with random events, starting with:

  • Solar flares, which shut down all of your electrical buildings for a time; and
  • Meteors, which crash down from space and make a mess with their contents all over your base.

  WIP random world events in Adaptory

  The intensity and frequency of the events will increase based on your progress... (continue reading…)

• NZFC Interactive Development Fund

  I’m really thrilled to be able to share this news: Adaptory has been announced as a successful applicant to the NZFC’s Whakawhanake Te Ao Niko – Interactive Development Fund!!

  

  The news hasn’t quite settled in yet, but we’re honoured to be alongside some really inspiring projects from other New Zealand studios. This grant unlocks some funding which we’ll be putting into developing the character generation, diaries, and story-telling events of Adaptory.

  Thank you so much NZFC!

  (continue reading…)

• Power layer

  I’ve finished most of the new liquid and gas shaders and they feel a lot nicer. Here’s a video comparing the before and after:

  Comparison of old and new gas shaders in Adaptory, I'm also slowly getting better at video editing 😅

  I’ll be using these new beautiful graphics to update the Steam page for Alpha 3, which I think will help with wishlists a lot!

  Over the weekend I also quickly put together a brand new mechanic. One of... (continue reading…)

• New liquid shaders

  Over the last week or two, I have been revisiting the way liquids are rendered in Adaptory. And I think they look awesome!!

  Comparison of old and new liquid shaders in Adaptory (WIP)

  I’ve received a lot of feedback about how the gas and liquids weren’t very clear in Alpha 1 and 2. I found that the rendering was quite slow on less powerful computers. And I thought I could make them look a lot better.

  I’ve essentially rebuilt the liquid shaders... (continue reading…)

• Alpha 2 released!

  Alpha 2 is now live!! 🥳 You can download a copy on itch.io, or by using the embedded link below:

  Over the last few months I’ve added electricity, refined diary entries, added in the first background music, fixed a bunch of bugs, and generally improved the whole user experience. If you’ve submitted any feedback, thank you!

  Electricity

  Following on from the previous update, some buildings (such as lights, and the transmitter you need to win the game) now require power to function. You can either... (continue reading…)

• Coming Soon on Steam

  Very excited to share that Adaptory is now listed as Coming Soon on Steam! 🥳

  Wishlist on Steam

  If you can wishlist and share the game, that will help a lot 😀

  Today/tomorrow I’m releasing Alpha 2 of the game on itch.io – which involves sending out mailing updates, blog posts, writing release notes, all the jazz. There’s a lot more interesting gameplay in the next version, I hope you all enjoy it.

  (continue reading…)

• A new year

  Happy new year again 🎉 I hope you’re having (or had) a great break. I took the month of December off to recharge, but now I’m back into gamedev (and loving it). 2023 is going to be a big year!!

  I’m aiming for an Alpha 2 release in just under four weeks time – the end of January. Thanks to everyone who has downloaded a copy so far and provided feedback 😊

  Right now I’m working on a new gameplay mechanic that should be in this release. Introducing: electricity!

  

  First screenshot of electricity networks in Adaptory (WIP)

  Some of the new buildings include:

  • Consumers, which require power to function (such as lights or refinement machines);
  • Generators, which generate power on demand (such as solar panels or coal burners); and
  • Batteries, which store any excess generated power, to be released later.

  There are also... (continue reading…)