Hello, this is Kirthos speaking here,
I have a quick message before you read this last devlog. I think a lot of you already saw it but we stopped the dev on this project.
This devlog was written (mainly by Gabeux) 1 year and a half ago (January 2021) but it was never published.
Now I'm trying to sort some stuff in my life, this game was a huge experience and was really fun to work for me but it has ended abruptly. I just wanted to finish this thing properly.
Today I've put the game free for everyone willing to test and play it and published a new version containing everything that was developed, many of you followed the games and I appreciated that.
Thanks for everything and hope to see you in another game at another time!







Hello again, and welcome to the latest TAR DevLog #10!
We have a lot to cover today. First: we are announcing the release of the second Alpha Update: new major version, 1.3.0.

Here's a quick summary of the major changes and additions:

• Pawn Variety with different Skin tones, Hair styles, Facial features and Clothing items
• Brand New Lighting System and a Standing Torch furniture for early lighting
• Enemy Soldier Raids - The Communion makes its first appearance
• Saving: Multiple Saves, Auto-Saves, Quick-Save
• In-Game Feedback tool to report bugs, provide feedback or give us suggestions
• Multiple new or tweaked sound effects
• Massive internal changes game code

Full Changelog available below - check out our previous DevLog for more details!
As this version feature significant changes to the code, do let us know what you think through the brand new feedback screen!

New addition: Communion Raids

If you follow us on Twitter or have joined the Discord, you might have seen us announcing the addition of enemy units to the game:

Currently, both the Combat and Combat Orders systems of the game are really simple, which made us hesitant to add the enemy units at this point. However, following our decision to use this Earliest Access phase as it should be used, we decided to go ahead and include the enemy raids. 

They only occur later in the game and, as of now, the enemies only wish to bring death and destruction - but we do have many plans for different enemy behavior, units and goals for later, as well as more interactions to be had rather than pure shooting..those enemy soldiers were previously the Rebels' fellow countrymen, after all.

In other news: Ludum Dare 47

Our team took part in the Ludum Dare 47 - a game jam that challenges gamedevs all over the world to build and deliver a game based on a theme in just 3 days.

This challenge occurred in October 2020 (about 3 months ago, as I'm writing this in January 2021), and it was a blast for all of us.
We were still making changes at the last minute, and you can check our LDJam game page, as well as downloading and playing A Shopkeeper's Predicament right here from itch.io.

The blast we all had taking part in this challenge, however, may very well have blasted us all off-course away from TAR. More about that below.

Development Hiatus

After taking part in the game jam, development of TAR quickly came to a halt. A mix of personal. work-related and financial issues affected different members.
While some small stuff got done or looked into in the next weeks, we all were eventually out of sync, leading development to stop on its tracks. This means that this update has been ready - but waiting to be tested and released - for months.

As time went on, we all got afraid and worried that the pause could lead into abandonment. 
Speaking personally as someone who follows a lot of indie and obscure projects, it feels really bad when one of the projects I've followed for long die out, or go gently into the good night.
Being on the developer side of it for the first time, the negative feelings that come with it are not fun ones to be had.

The thought of a dead project messes all of us up, especially after nearly two years of development.
If something like that were to happen, we'd all rather come clean and discuss the issues, and try to wrap things up in a better way.

At the current moment, it's difficult to say how future development will go.
But we've released things in the past after undergoing many similar issues, and our participation on the Ludum Dare made even more clear that we do good work together, and taught each of us many different lessons.
The pause itself definitely taught us some lessons - if anything, that the game is always there, staring at us and waiting for its story to be told.

Looking ahead

We will be focusing on the Kickstarter campaign. It's taking considerably longer than we expected - especially with the big bad hiatus that came out of nowhere. 

One reason for the development of the campaign to take longer than anticipated may be due to us developing our ideas well beyond prototypes: the Pawn Variety feature of this update was intended to only be included at a much later date, once we had added the ability to change and produce clothing items and ways to customize the pawns. 
It is cool to plan for less and deliver more than we intended rather than the other way around, though.. :)

We may start focusing on developing quick-concepts and getting the Kickstarter out faster, that way we don't have to work spread around on so many different fronts. Getting the Kickstarter (and all of its' materials) out there would allow us to bring the focus back to individual updates and futures, and it's bound to make things much cooler for everyone involved.

Talking about beyond-functional Prototypes, here's something Kirthos spent a good amount of time and care on:

And one more sneak peek, with some new objects designed by Mari:

Further updates and crowdfunding campaign will be coming..when it's Ready™.

Thanks for hanging around and checking in on this new chapter of the Rebellion. I'll leave you with the Full changelog, below!
- Gabeux - on behalf of the Tech Age Rebellion team

1.3.0 Full Changelog

Tech Age Rebellion Indev 1.3.0

Additions:
Add item icons in the Storage screen and in the interface instead of the name of the item.
Pawns now have different hair style, face, body with different colors.
Pawns now have different clothing, shirt, pants, etc.
Add gender.
Add Last Survivors event and Game Over event.
Add real lightning system, now light don't go through walls and the light look a lot better than before.
Add particles system, some pawns action now create particle (chop, mine), generator generate smoke when running.
Add a Feedback button: it opens a form to send bug reports or feedback to the dev team.
Add an error popup that show when the game encounter an issue, and you can directly send the bug report through our new form.
Add "speak bubble" with emoji that the pawns can show to express themselves (for now, only used for asking food and when they want to sleep)
Add better rotation for some objects.
Object that are 2 (or more) tiles height now only occupy the bottom tile - now, you can place an oven next to a wall!
Now, all the interact orders should be a bit more intelligent and allow you to replace an order with another one (e.g. replacing Cut order with a Harvest order)
Now possible to have multiple save files.
Add an interface to select what save to load and add a way to delete save files.
Add progress bar when you save the game.
Make the saving use multithreading, basically, it should be a lot faster depending on the number of cores your processor have.
Add Auto-Saving.
Add settings to configure the number of Auto-Saves to keep, the time between auto saving, etc.
Make the game save itself at the creation of the world.
Add quick-saving and quick-loading: pressing F5 will save your game and double tap F9 should load your latest save.
Add number on the selection box to display the size of the current selected area.
Add Kindling: crafted with Wood and Plant fiber and used as a more efficient fuel than raw Logs.
Add an above icon container to display some status icon for an entity (example: enemy Raiders show an Aggressive icon over them).
Add a status icon to the entity that you "target to be killed".
Add a cancel button to cancel the kill order.
Add an Explore icon when you give the explore order. Made that order possible to cancel.
Add Communion raiders, with good armor and gun (pretty dangerous for your pawns)
Add Communion Raid event: the event occurs on mid-late game with different possible outcomes.
Add multiple hotkey to directly open different screen of the game.
Added multiple new sound effects (for orders, selection box, interaction buttons and more)
Added High Winds ambience sound
Added spatial event sounds + lowering of volume of other sounds during an event

Changes:
Change how item work internally in the code, this make the game slightly more optimized.
Tweaked starting Research projects to be faster, as well as starting with Jewelbeans planting unlocked
Only colonist who are at 0% food can be targeted by the starvation event.
Make default pawns stance set to aggressive.
Reorganize the build menu in more sub-category.
Change how the game load the map, it should be a lot faster and cause a lot less issue when reloading without closing the game.
Change sprite for beds.
Change sprite for plant fiber.
Change sprite for clone vat.
Fixes, tweaks and changes to the sound system, volumes and some sound effects
Enabled (probably temporary) default Research sound for crafting tables
All crops set to Auto-Harvest by default when the research is finished
Research jobs now have more priority over other jobs by default
Pawns emit weak lighting at night
Storage Screen resets its filter when using crafting button / Add Reset button to Storage Screen
Made Smeltery work with fuel - Smeltery uses 3x more fuel than Stone Oven
Added fuel Filter for Smelter - Logs disabled by default
Rebalanced Coal usage
Planks can now be used as fuel - disabled by default
When refueling, Pawns now get as much required fuel as needed (or available) from one stack in one trip
Changes for the Speed modes: 1 is 1X speed, 2 is 3X, and 3 is 5X (playing should be more comfortable now, but careful with 5X on the early game!)
Made most items not be Tracked by Storage Tracker window by default
Made Storage Tracker sort by Category (with Resource, Processed and Food categories coming first for now)
Double-Clicking Storage Tracker makes it order by Quantity (like before)
Made Writing Research Table much faster to build

Removals:
Remove Build Copy button from Smooth Walls

Fixes:
Fix flower pot bug when you try to plant something while the pot is still in construction.
Correctly show the notification when a pawn die from lack of food.
Fix Settings rounding issue.
Fix door sometimes not rotating correctly on loading.
With the huge refactoring of big part of the game, the game should be a bit more stable than before.
Refactors and changes potentially fixed different previous bugs.
Fix for colonist count going up for no reason
Fix for an issue with sleep
Colonists' pathing in combat
Fixed long music delay time issue and rebalance music times
Storage screen tooltip typo fix and faster appear
Fix for a bug with the prototype iron armor
Fix multiple loading issues
Fix an issue with the stockpile filter button
Fix zoom working when scrolling the interface
Fix open storage panel and open research panel sometimes not working correctly
Fix entity info panel not showing info about fuel and food value