Greetings, friends! It's time for a new update on the CryoFall.

Sorry for the lack of new dev. reports these past couple of weeks, We've been working hard on the game and it's getting closer to its first closed test as we promised! Currently we are working on the editor and a few other remaining things.

So, to better understand what our audience wants (you guys!) we'd like to ask you to participate in a poll that covers some important aspects of CryoFall.

Please follow this link to participate.

We are looking forward to hearing your opinion!

CryoFall development is progressing nicely as ever! So, this week, let's take a look at another point about the project. And specifically - the industrial aspect of it.

This is obviously directly related to crafting, as well as technology usage. And while we can't show you the multitude of planned features related to technology (electricity, transport network, communication network, etc.) what we can show is the crafting aspect of it.

So, here is an example of that:

As you can see, this is a general production pipeline for nitrocellulose (also called guncotton).

First, you need to find and mine pyrite ore. Then use special process to create sulfuric acid using chemical station. Then combine that acid with potassium nitrate to distill it into nitric acid. And then use that acid on fibers to finally create nitrocellulose! The actual process involves a bit more ingredients and steps, but essentially this is how you would produce nitrocellulose to create your ammunition for firearms.

That's actually pretty close to how it would have been done in reality. Obviously we are not aiming at 100% hard science here, but we want to give people a bit more than the ubiquitous "combine stone and a stick to get a stone axe" you see all to often in other games :)

Our approach here is to create meaningful technological trees where each player will be able to explore different areas of production and make something they feel would be most beneficial and interesting to them. This will be especially important on big servers where trade would be quite active. You will be able to sell your products to other players or join together and combine your efforts to achieve greater results.

We will probably return to that topic again later, when we can show you more of the technological mechanics of CryoFall. But for now - join us on the forums and let us know what you think about the approach we decided to take in regards to technology!

Let's continue with our overview of CryoFall! This time we are looking at some possible creatures you can encounter in the world of CryoFall.

From the examples below you can get a decent idea what you can expect to see in the game. This is obviously only a small fraction, but as you can see we have both: normal animals, such as wolf or chicken, as well as some weird monsters like spider-scorpion-thingie or cloaked lizard, which normally isn't the size of a person, but here it is.

Each creature features a custom AI that determines its behavior making interactions with them a bit more interesting than simple "This animal is my breakfast!" or "Aaaaah! Help, help! something is chasing me!".

Another possibility we would like to explore in the future is the actual ecology simulation. Actual predators-pray chains where some animals will be hunting other and it will all be tied together with the world itself.

Anyway, that's it for this week report. We will continue next week as always. And good news is that we are getting closer and closer to our first closed test. We will probably start accepting applications to this test on our forums, so if you are interested - make sure you are part of the discussion!

Let's continue with our preview of the CryoFall! This week it is time to talk about the world map. And as it so happens it's exactly what we are currently working on in preparation for our first closed test (of which you might be a part if you join our forums).

First, let's take a look at this concept image:

I think it looks quite interesting in terms of possible gameplay variations, especially with all the different biomes and climate. You can establish your settlement somewhere south and not worry about the food and other simple resources, or you can go north and find more valuable minerals, but procuring food may be a challenge.

This design is one of possible options we are considering for the game world. We are still undecided and will most likely adjust our requirements based on the first tests and user feedback, but it's good to have a few concrete options against which to judge any changes.

Anyway, let's get into more details about the game world.

Handcrafted map
The game world is partially handcrafted. Meaning that the world was randomly generated first and then sculpted by hands to make sure it is more interesting to play and properly balanced. This provides a much higher quality experience for the players (compared to "procedurally generated junk world" which we see all too often in other open world games) as well as ensuring that the world is sufficiently large. The main point here - we want high quality hand crafted map to spark interest in exploration, control of territory, trade and many other interesting activities simply impossible in randomly generated worlds.

Climate, biomes, flora, fauna
As in example picture above there are many different regions to the world, each with different climate zones. Each of the climate zones has different characteristics such as flora, fauna and landscape, as well as temperature, humidity and other characteristics that play a role in certain world simulations. As a consequence - each of these define gameplay in that region.

Player settlements
Players can travel the world and create their permanent base in some location that they find most suitable to them. Some zones may be a bit too difficult for new players, like for example the northern regions because of harsh weather and wild animals. But as the players progress in the game they can conquer even more land.

POI
As we mentioned quite a few times on the forums - it is not a prehistoric/medieval/modern times survival, the game is set in a sci-fi future which significantly changes all available content of the game. Same applies to POI (points of interest) which you can find in the world. Expect to see abandoned laboratories, military installations, city ruins and other locations. All carefully handcrafted by a designer.

And there you have it. That's the world of CryoFall in a nutshell. I hope you found this interesting. And as always, if you haven't already - visit our forums and join the discussion!

Progress on CryoFall is looking good!

So, this week for our development log we decided to have a small party in the game and see how it plays, so we joined together in multiplayer. You can pretty much guess what happened next. When I asked "guys, just stand still for a moment, I want to make a screenshot for our blog" - everyone kept running wild, laughing, hitting each other with hatchets and doing other crazy things :)

But anyway, let's take a look at the screenshot below:

As you can see we have finally finished all basic systems that would allow to play the game together, build stuff, craft stuff, fight each other and do other things you'd expect in an open world multiplayer game.

To give you a bit of a summary on some of interesting systems that we had to finish before what you see above was possible:

• Physics system
• Network replication
• Construction / repair system
• Crafting system
• Manufacturing system
• Weapons and tools
• Armor and defense system
• Mining and gathering
• Rendering routines
• UI
• etc...

Quite a lot of work as you can imagine, but we are getting close to our first closed test, where we will invite other players to try the game with us. There are still some other big tasks that are left obviously, but we are getting there!

As always, join the discussion about the game on our forums!

PS - if you are curious who's who on the picture: I'm the guy in the center (Lurler), who's holding a stone axe, below me is ai_enabled wearing Ushanka hat, our lead developer, above in the leather armor is our lead artist - Shefik, and at the most right is our PR Manager - Antubis (playing with a different nickname this time).

Another Wednesday is here and another blogpost about our progress in developing CryoFall!

This time I'd like to cover our building system. And specifically structure building, rather than objects building.

So, let's take a look at this screenshot first:

As you can see the building system is extremely versatile, yet simple. All constructions align to the grid which makes it much easier and more convenient to place everything.

Same applies to walls. By having a fixed grid you can plan your constructions easily and create elaborate buildings with many complex rooms all connected by doors, corridors, etc.

Obviously, there are many types of walls, each having their special properties such as their durability. Wooden walls will never be as strong as concrete. Doors are different too. In the picture above you might have noticed that the doors are different. Currently there are two types: normal sheet iron door and armored steel door.

Another thing is floors. You can place different kind of floors on the ground and they will affect a number of things. For example objects placed on foundations will have higher durability compared to objects placed just on the ground. Floors will also make it easier to walk (increasing your movement speed).

And I guess, that's more or less it for the building system. As always, don't forget to join the discussion on our forums and let us know what you think about the project and how it progresses!

And here's another CryoFall development blog! This time let's take a look at another important feature from the list of basic mechanics. That would obviously be crafting.

We evaluated a lot of possibilities for crafting implementation, especially in relation to requirements we set for the design and balancing of the game. One of the requirements was to allow people many ways to specialize their characters to make each player contributions valuable for the server. This necessitated the game to have branching tech tree and that in order determined our choice of crafting system.

Essentially crafting of new items can be accomplished in several different ways:

• Hand crafting - items can simply be crafted from inventory. This is obviously only possible for the most basic recipes which available to all players.
• Station crafting - essentially the same as above, but requires a specific crafting station. For example "workbench" would give you access to some more advanced recipes compared to what you can craft in your inventory.
• Manufacturing stations - This is a completely different type of crafting. When you start crafting here, the item will be added to the queue of the station itself, rather than your own personal crafting queue as in the two first options. Example of such manufacturing station would be an "assembler machine" that would manufacture different high-tech items.
• Auto-manufacturing stations - These are similar to the above, but they select the appropriate recipes automatically. Well, they function very similarly to "furnace" in minecraft. You just put some ore and fuel and boom - it will automatically start refining that ore for you. No additional hassle needed. Example of such stations include: grill, drying cabinet, well, furnace as mentioned above and a few others.

We have yet to decide on the actual terminology, specifically how to name these types of crafting stations, but the mechanics are there.

And here are some screenshots:

Above you can see an example of such crafting station. In this case it is a "chemical laboratory". You can craft different chemicals there. Number of recipes is still tiny, as we just added it into the game. Plus it doesn't even have categories. All of that will come later.

And that one is current implementation of the basic "furnace". Just place your ore and fuel in there - it will convert it to metal. With further player advancement in the game there will be more advanced mechanics for metal refining. Such as using different and more complex processes for that, including other chemicals to increase yield.

Another thing I want to mention - the UI in both examples above is obviously still mostly a placeholder and as the game progresses we will significantly improve the visuals.

Anyway, that would be it for today's blogpost! I hope you found it interesting. As always, don't forget to join us on the forums!

Let's continue with our CryoFall discovery and explore another facet of the game. This time it's something simple, but still very important. In fact this is an element of the game you will be seeing most often and that is of course the inventory screen.

As with our other design choices the inventory screen is extremely simple and self-explanatory. However it hides a lot of interesting nuances, so let's take a look.

Firstly there is the defense stats on the right - we discussed the damage types in our previous blog post, so you can go back and read it if you haven't seen it yet. So, when you equip a piece of armor or equipment you will see your defense stats go up accordingly.

Next is the character itself, all equipment will be visually represented on your character, so you can choose something that looks cool. This is a multiplayer game, after all.

Next, and the most interesting part is the actual inventory slots that your character can use. There are three basic equipment slots (head, body and legs) as well as two additional slots that a race specific (yup, there will be different races in the game). And on the right - there are five "device" slots that allow you to equip some special devices. This can be anything, from simple flashlight or portable battery pack to something like "force field generator" and so on.

And there you have it. I'm sure you will enjoy the simplicity, yet tremendous depth of the game we are building! :)

As always - don't forget to join us on the forums and let us know what you think!

It's Wednesday now, so it means we are going to continue talking about CryoFall. Last time I explained about weapons in the game, so this time it would be logical to take a look at the opposite side of the equation - the equipment in the game.

Above you can see some simple pieces of equipment: normal clothes, as well as some military gear.

Each piece of equipment provides a number of bonuses to your character, but main thing why you would want to get yourself good gear is obviously for its defense stats. So, how does it all work?

Above you can see the icons for all damage types available in the game, but let's go over everything and see what's what.

• Rupture (icon with three slashes) - combines different melee attacks, mostly from monsters, but also from other sources.
• Impact (icon with bullet holes) - generally represents defense against kinetic weapons (you know the "pew-pew" kind).
• Fire, Cold, Electricity, Chemical, Radiation, Psy - represents defense agains different enviromental hazards as well as some specialized exotic weapons.

Before settling on this list of damage types we had a whole list of types that we were considering. If you are curious: Impact, Blunt, Slashing, Rupture, Piercing, Burn, Freeze, Chemical, Poison, Radiation, Electricity, Explosion, Psy. But in the end I think what we have now covers the most diverse array of possible weapons and enviromental effects without overcomplicating the system.

VoidExpanse is updated to v1.7.0. That took quite some time to do, but it is a very important update! Not only does it address numerous issues reported since the last update, but more importantly it has some internal changes to allow for more updates later. So, let's see what happens next!

As always you can find the detailed list of changes on our forums.

We've been considering several topics for this blog post, but in the end I just want to show you some cool art we have for the weapons in the game, so here it is!

Below you can see some of the weapons currently available in the game. As you can see there is a clear progression from the most primitive weapons (like bows) towards a more advanced options. And at later stages of the game you will be able to use some of the futuristic weapons as well, such as plasma rifles, railguns and such.

But that's not the full extent of it! We were able to go one step ahead of most other games and have a few more interesting features:

Firstly, we implemented a universal system that allows us to create completely different behaviour for each weapon, based on the proto classes that we can extend with new properties and functionality, so it becomes extremely easy to create new types of weapon with different behaviour. Naturally modders can use this system as well to create their own weapons.

Secondly, we implemented a common ammunition system which becomes a cornerstone of our combat system. Each weapon can use different types of ammo with different damage types and behaviour. For example shotguns can use slugs that have a straight trajectory or pellets that spread quickly, but have a much higher damage at closer range. Same idea applies to other ammunition types and weapons.

And lastly, we have a very interesting and complex damage calculation system with seven different damage types for weapon/armor interaction. I will have a separate blogpost on it, when making a post about the armor in the game.

Anyway, I hope you find this interesting. And as always - let us know what you think on the forums.

Greetings! As some of you may have seen already, we've just announced our new game - CryoFall! This project is something we've been thinking of making for quite some time - it is a server based open-world survival multiplayer online action game.

At the moment we estimate that our brand-new Renkei engine can easily support comfortable gameplay of over 200 players per server. As you can imagine it enables quite a lot of player interactions. And here lies the main feature of CryoFall - unlike many "typical" survival or competitive openworld games CryoFall focuses on creation, rather than destruction! So, the more players are engaged in the economy the better experience becomes.

We're currently working on the CryoFall fulltime and the game progresses at a quite fast pace. So, we decided to share the first look of the main game window. This is something that you will see when you boot the game for the first time, so why not start here?

As you can see, the "Home" screen hosts a number of blocks:

• First one, "News" is pretty self explanatory. We decided to include it so the players can always be aware of any updates to the game that we make available.
• The second one, "Forums" will show you new and updated topics on our forums. Of course, both blocks are clickable and you'll be able to take a look at the news in your browser.
• Third one will be quite useful as it shows the list of recent servers you played on. You can use it to quickly hop in the game again.
• And lastly there's a fourth block, with links to social networks and our other discussion platforms.

Now, let's take a better look at the "Servers" tab. There you will be able to choose one of several server categories:

• First one is called "Official" and there you can find a list of officially hosted servers, that will have our full support.
• The second one is "Community Servers", it is for the player-hosted vanilla servers. This is pretty much the same as official servers with a crucial difference that all these servers are hosted by the fellow players.
• Next one is "Modded servers". This is almost the same as above, but these servers include a list of mods to expand the gameplay and add custom server features.
• And finally there are "Favorites" and "History" to make it easier for you to track things if you decide to play on several servers at the same time. History is updated automatically and in order to add a server to "Favorites" you just need to click a single icon.

And there you have it! First look at the first screen that greets you upon launching the game.

Please note however, that everything we are showing is still a quite early WIP version and some of the things we mention may be subject to change.

Please follow our blog for more info on CryoFall developement and don't forget to share it with your friends if you think it is something you can enjoy!

Today we are proud to announce CryoFall - our brand-new title powered by an in-house developed Renkei engine geared towards massive online interactions.

What is CryoFall?

You have survived falling from the skies. Your ship is destroyed. You've landed on an unknown planet not marked on any starmaps and have no idea what’s going on. Find your way out from this world or make it your new home.

Discover the story of this planet, reason why it's not marked on any starmaps, its dark secrets dwelling behind the closed doors of sealed laboratories. Travel through uncharted lands with various biomes, all carefully hand-crafted by our designers.

Togeteher with dozens of other survivors create your own cities, economy, industry, invite your friends to join you in your exploits and uncover the mystery behind this world.

What's ahead?

From this day onward you may expect more news on CryoFall, various screenshots and devblogs dedicated to the development of the game! So stay tuned and welcome to CryoFall!

Greetings, Void Explorers! Today we'd like to share our final video-guide in the series of guides about ships of VoidExpanse. In this video we talk about the engineering ships and their use in the game.

As always, don't forget to share the video and subscribe to our YouTube channel if you haven't already!

Friends, today you can see the fourth video guide in our series of guides dedicated to ship categories of VoidExpanse. This guide will tell you about the transport ships - workhorses of the game.

Don't forget to share the video and subscribe to our YouTube channel!