The first of the backer planets is out, along with a bunch of “quality of life” improvements to the game! The new planet is called Unnature Sanctuary, and is now reachable in the star navigator. It’s an optional side-quest planet, but check it out!
In other news, we recently added Minigames to the research lab, and Chase (our composer) released the official Aground Soundtrack!
For Mac Players: You may have heard about the new app requirements for Catalina. The good news is that Aground is already 64-bit, so the game will run. The bad news is that it is not notarized, and I will not notarize it given the complexity of the process for every update and requirement of an apple developer ID which has a yearly fee. From what I have heard, this means that you may have to go through an additional step to bypass gatekeeper. Hopefully this doesn’t cause too much trouble, and I’ll continue to update the game on Mac as usual.
In addition to the new planet, the following changes affect the full version:
- Some vehicles can now move and attack at the same time.
- Drone control can now be used while riding the mobile lab.
- Talon Copse can now modify most equipment.
- Cables and rails can now be placed on the same tile.
- Added a mini planet - Mercury. This is the last solar system planet that I plan to add before the full launch (gas giants have nowhere to land, and Venus is very dangerous).
These changes affect the demo as well:
- The starting quests now let you place the structures where you want to, and give you a blueprint for them when complete so you can re-arrange your base.
- Most vehicles and bots can now be packed up and deployed.
- Docks can now summon nearby boats.
- Trader will ship items from one island to another for a fee (pre bombardment/endings).
- Dragons can now land on water and never die by running out of fuel now.
- Mouse buttons can now be set in controls - this allows you to attack by clicking (but clicking on a GUI element will interact with it as normal).
- Surgery lab can now install vanity equipment.
- Crops can now be re-arranged in farms.
- Chests can be given labels.
- Hotkeys are now sensitive to parameters/modifiers.
This is about half of the quality of life updates planned for the game, and half of the backer planets - so look forward to the other half by the end of November!
Enjoy, and as always, don’t be shy if you have any questions or feedback - we are always happy to hear from our players. And don’t forget to join the social channels below if you haven’t already:
HerbieG
I assume that there is much more content in the game and more quests than in the initial version? Maybe it would be possible to expand the amount of medals as well?
davidmaletz
There are more achievements in the demo now than there are medals, but there's a limit to how many medals I can add so I think it's okay as is. The game has definitely expanded quite a lot - demo now is about 2x the length of the original version, and the full version is about 4x the length of the current demo.