Yes, I'm releasing the first version of Adaptory next week!!

It will be released on itch.io, and it will be a free downloadable alpha – on both PC and Mac.

As an alpha, it's going to be very short and sweet. There's about 15 minutes of gameplay, with a short introduction, some of the basic systems, and an end-game goal.

I'm working hard to make the game as smooth and bug-free as possible, but as alpha software, I know there'll be bugs. There will be many more releases (and much more content) before we hit early access.

I would really love to know what you think about the game! All feedback, positive and negative, is gratefully appreciated.

For Alpha 1, we're adding in the first bits of the story and gameplay.

You and your crew have been sent to search the farthest reaches of the galaxy for a new planet to call home. After finding a promising candidate, all that's left is to settle in to cryosleep...

Adaptory now has hand drawn pawn art, made by @careously!

There are eight different body types, with nine skin colours, 16 types of clothing, and 32 different hair styles, which are all randomly selected and combined when creating your team.

These skins are then used with our animation software Spine to create the smooth animations and transitions you can see in these videos.

With this mix-and-match approach, it should be easy to add new styles in the future too. Plus, I think they look awesome!

In Alpha 1 you'll be able to build five different types of base buildings:

• Tiles block out liquids and gases, and your pawns can stand on them
• Ladders don't block anything, but help your pawns climb up and down
• Doors are impassable until opened, and divide space into rooms
• Trees, when lit, consume carbon dioxide and emit oxygen
• Lights emit light but require a ceiling tile

It's been a ton of fun adding new buildings and I'm looking forward to adding more. Internally it's state machines... state machines everywhere!

One of the reasons I started making Adaptory is a desire to play more complex and less CPU-bound base builders. Internally, I'm designing the multiple simulations to run multithreaded, so hopefully you can play with huge and complex game worlds for hundreds of hours!

In Alpha 1 I'll be testing out this framework to see how well it works on a variety of machines. So far the results have been very promising.

I wrote a blog post about the process of making Adaptory multithreaded if you're interested.

My major goals over the next few months are:

A new diary generator will allow your pawns to write diary entries on a more regular cadence, and with more context. You'll also be able to see them scribbling away.

Electricity and food production are the next major gameplay systems to be added. My goal is for each system to build on top of the previous one, making Adaptory super interesting and complex!

I'd like to revisit the way liquids are rendered to make them appear smoother and more organic.

And, I'm hoping to get Adaptory listed on Steam to start building up hype and wishlists! I'll need your help with this one.