Dev Blog 20: POD UPDATE! SAG vs SSC and Bugs, bugs, bugs!

May Dev Blog! Breathtaking interior pod makeovers, S.A.G. playing dirty compared to other SSC companies, and a lot of bugs popping up in certain parts of the galaxy… Literally!

Don’t forget to tell your friends about Space Salvage and leave a review on the app lab page if you have not already!

S.A.G. vs SSC!

Bugs, bugs and bugs!

Ooey-gooey grubs have made their way to Errai! Disgusting right? Think again, as these critters are peaceful and helpful in times of need. They will light up the dark corridors within the asteroids in Errai to help guide you safely through them! Don’t shoot them, we’ve heard there aren’t many of them left, as they are an endangered species!

On the topic of bugs, here are some silly ones that weren’t as helpful.

You’d thought drones would be against you… I guess sometimes even the drones want to be part of the good side!

Space Pod Update!

The old pod is getting a new makeover! Feedback was taken from community testing on Discord, so don’t miss out on future feature tests! With new custom adjustable leather seats, colorful buttons, musical notes, as well as the brand-new gravity gun, all work, is light work! Explore the galaxies in style and show off your new space pod. Make sure not to scratch it, as we worked hard creating the most astonishing space pod there is! Here is the updated design built around function and comfort.

What’s to come!

We are nearing the last stretch of development, with only a few levels yet to be built. We are taking a moment to polish what we have so far. We want all our players to experience the best game possible, while still beautiful at the same time!

Dev Blog 19: Bits, Bobs, Bugs and Warehouses

April Dev Blog! Our first interior level, animated characters, new assets, and a lot of bug fixing! Read on to find out more!

Do not forget to tell your friends about Space salvage and leave a review on the app lab page if you have not already!

First Interior Level

Cervantes

Animated Characters:

Pomeline

Characters will be animated on the home UI screen using Live2D meshes. Starting new quest lines will look even better as we work on more quality of life improvements!

New Art Assets:

The past few weeks have been full of exciting developments and improvements. We have some new assets we want to share with you below!!

Towers:

Warp Gate:

What’s to come!

From behind the scenes work to new content, we’ve been busy making some impactful changes

As we work hard to bring you the best gaming experience possible, our final chapter of the game is still undergoing. Keep a lookout for future Dev Blogs for exciting new content to come!

Meet the team!

We will also be at Gamayo (10th May) for those of you attending the event. Come say hi and meet the team!

Space Salvage Blog #18:
New Levels – SFX & VFX – GDC

March Dev Blog! New levels involving cute little grubs, some fancy new VFX, and we attended GDC! Read on to find out more!  

Do not forget to tell your friends about Space salvage and leave a review on the app lab page if you have not already!

New Levels

Errai

Cervantes

SFX &VFX

SFX : DL-Drive

Warships have been upgraded to produce a more digital warp in effect. You will never know when or where they will appear, but if you see that blue mass, hear that daunting noise, something’s coming, and you better run.
(Do not forget to turn the sound on)

VFX : Fuse

Do you remember the Dyson sphere? Well, it holds many secrets and hidden vaults inside. Here is a sneak peak at some sort of fuse…? I wonder what this could be used for; I am sorry, we are unable to provide you the full information due to Corperium NDAs.  

VFX : Explosion

A large explosion has been seen from the distance, what type of artillery could cause such a giant impact?

GDC

If you remember from last months dev blog, our CEO, Paul Tapper, attended the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Fran! He met many amazing people, talks, saw a lot of crazy things, even a dancing cat…? Browse through the pictures below to see more!

What’s to come!

We have had our community test out a new pod layout and a lever to adjust your seat! Next month we will talk about how it went, what the conclusion is and showing off more levels!
If you want to keep in the loop, do not forget to join our discord!
As always, thank you for reading this months dev blog, see you next month!

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Space Salvage Blog #17:
Team Members – VFX – Levels

February Dev Blog! It might be the shortest month of the year but it is jam packed with Space Salvage goodness! Get ready for some awesome VFX and maybe even a group photo of all the fruity devs together.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about Space salvage and leave a review on the app lab page if you have not already!

Burning Stars

You have seen bits and pieces of our Megastructure destroy missions, but it doesn’t stop being impressive with just the giant metal sphere that you have to infiltrate and pick apart. This structure is built around a massive Star! You can use this to your advantage by hurling chunks into the flames, but be careful, get too close and you will start crisping up yourself.

Here is a lovely little transition that our star went through to get to the glorious final stage.

VFX & Models

VFX: Nuclear Anomaly

So far we’ve showed off quite a few wreck yards out in space, with ships from battles long forgotten. You couldn’t have expected them all to be safe, right? Yes sure, while some ships still have their rusty turrets able to fire when they detect movement in range, others reached a whole new level of corrosion. With no working parts left, these hunks of rust float off into the galaxy, reacting with different gas in space. Sometimes accidents happen. Keep your eyes peeled and try not to become one yourself when you see a ship emitting this anomaly.  

Crushed FUGU

FUGU carrier ships can be found in all parts of the galaxy, however it’s a grizzly sight to stumble upon the poor ships all squashed up. It takes a  particularly cruel assailant to go for these peaceful worker shuttles. If you stumble upon a ship graveyard with lots of FUGU I’d advise keeping your guard up and being extra careful when coming into contact with other pilots in those areas.  

National Space Center

At the beginning of the month, the Fruity Systems Dev team had the luxury of meeting up in person and visiting the National Space Center in Leicester! This was a real treat considering not everyone on the team lives in the UK and we rarely get the chance to have some face to face quality time. As a studio that formed during the Covid-19 Lockdowns, we cherish the moments we get to all collaborate in person. This location was great for sparking new ideas and reflecting on the progress we’ve made so far in the development of Space Salvage, while keeping us excited for what’s to come.

If you’d also like to visit, here’s a link to the Space Center:

https://spacecentre.co.uk/

What’s to come!

In the following month our CEO Paul Tapper will be attending the Game Developer Conference down in San Francisco. If you’re also attending and would like to meet up, do not hesitate to email info@fruitysystems. 

In terms of development you can expect the next month to be a bit of a slow-burner as we work on story packed missions!

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Space Salvage Blog #16:
Team Members – VFX – Levels

January Dev Blog! The start of the new year! Hope you all had a great start because we sure did! We’ve got a lot of new team members, some magic wizardy in the VFX and new levels have been built! 

As always, please follow the links to help us out more; leave a review on the app lab page if you have not already!

Team Members

We wanted to introduce you all to our 4 new members, all with their own specialities and personalities!

Peter Fox

Daniel Tunc

Tamsin Page

Oskar Wadowski

VFX & Models

VFX: DL-Drive

Oh boy is this amazing. As you may or may not know, when it comes to the Oculus, there are a lot of limitations when creating fancy things. Glow, opacity and all sorts are not allowed as it won’t run smoothly on the Oculus headset. However, Dan was able to create a shader that will allow objects to be portaled through. How you ask? Through magic wizard techniques and a very, VERY large shader graph with thousands of nodes. 

Corperium Fighters

A new unit has been spotted! The Corperium have developed an aggressive flyer to shoot down and chase anyone who comes their way. These fast and frightening machines are not to be taken lightly, so be careful when you’re out there collecting and cleaning. They show no mercy to anyone.  

Levels

So many new things have been added and implemented! One of them being the many new levels! We’ll only be giving you a small amount of information and snippets of each one, we don’t want to ruin all the fun for you

Saiph

A cargo recovery mission where a lot of valuables are hidden in cove like structures made out of asteroids. However, don’t be fooled, as they are defended by the F.L.O.C drones! They’ve got a new type of ally, a drone which can heal their allies! So they won’t go down so easily!

Betelgeuse

3 Datalite towers are used for aggregating mortgage data. They are currently being activated to gather that data, however, they need to lower their shields during this time. I know, who built this? However, you aren’t able to question your boss! While the shields are down, they are vulnerable, so you’ll need to defend and fight off the pests! Just until they regenerate their shields again, are you up for the task? 

Race

A new race has been unlocked! This will be much harder than the previous race and longer! Obstructed by larger spinning objects, mines and all sorts! Will you be able to find the shortest path? Dodge all the obstacles? We hope not!

Skybox

Is that a new skybox I see? Yes! It is! Absolutely stunning work from our artist Yasmina, who is also in charge of the level designs! What type of missions would you want in this environment?

What’s to come!

More new levels, models, vfx and all sorts are to come! We are powering through Space Salvage to give you the best experience we can! So excited for this year and to carry on building this game!
As always, thank you for reading this months dev blog, see you next month!

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Space Salvage Blog #15 :VFX Overhaul-Dyson Sphere-Enemies and NPCs

Before we talk about this month’s updates, the whole team at Fruity Systems wants to wish you all Happy Holidays close to your chosen loved ones. We would like to thank everyone that has been beside us through the journey of developing Space Salvage so far, whether you’ve been reading our blog for a while or if this is your first! 

Now – grab yourself a festive drink or snack of your choosing and let’s get into it!

As always, please follow the links to help us out more; leave a review on the app lab page if you have not already!

VFX Overhaul

If you’re getting a feeling of deja-vu, you’d be correct. 

“Haven’t you already updated your VFX??”

Yes. VFX have been a very tricky part of development so far due to the technical limitations surrounding the current Meta Quest headsets available. Matching the stylized look of the world with the VFX has proven to be a long process of trial and error. Here are a few clips of a BIG SCARY LASER and explosion that we have to show off. Please let us know what you think on our discord! Hopefully version 4.0  of the stylization will be our winner in both style and performance with the help of one of our new team members tackling the problem head on.

Our team has nearly doubled in the past couple of months! Maybe soon we can do a proper introduction for the new team members

Dyson Sphere

Our art team has been hard at work as well as the rest of the team working in the engine to push levels as far as we can with technical limitations. A big ambition we had in our roadmap was to have a massive structure with a star contained in the centre, acting as a sun. Through collective effort, we were able to string along something we’re very excited about. Here’s a sneak peek. In this level, you will be destroying the mega structure by removing key components to its structural integrity and hurling them into the “sun” using momentum and your gravity gun. But be careful – being that close to a star can do some senior scorching to your D.E.R.P.

Enemies and NPCs

If you had a look over last months Dev Blog you would have seen a level with a LOT of billboards and jumbotrons. That got us thinking that we will need some NPC’s populating various areas of the universe. We’ve also added allies for your enemies, so more enemies! Check out the details below.

Heal Drones

You have seen our “beloved” F.L.O.C. drones and so far they have all been built to inflict damage on the player pod. We thought they might need some less artillery focused siblings. Introducing the new menace inhabiting the cosmos! New drone flocs will have a healer present there to make it that much harder for you to get the pests out of your way. I am sure you are all going to try and target their medic, so good luck! The little guy is skilled in…evasive manoeuvres. 

Who knows, in the distant future of your career at the SSC you might even be able to convince such a drone to side with you…

F.U.G.U.

Hopefully, you did not think you were the only capable space janitor out there? And S.A.R.A has warned that you may be replaced with A.I. soon. F.U.G.U. are non-hostile work units that are not operated by pilots. You will likely see them going about their business in busy areas of the cosmos. Be sure to say hi and be polite to the little guys. Most interplanetary companies use the model nowadays, so you might be making commercial enemies if you interfere with their daily chores.

What’s to come!

We are working on adding a lot of new levels, upgrades and story! The coming months should be packed with quite a lot of new things to show you, so look forward to them!
Thank you for reading this months dev blog, and we will hopefully see you next month! 

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