We are pleased to announce the release of High Frontier version 0.13!
This is the first version of the game to have buildings automatically appear in the zones you define. They orient themselves towards a nearby pathway, and correctly avoid overlapping themselves or any path.
We’d hoped to get version 0.13 of High Frontier out this week. Alas, it’s not going to happen — but not for lack of progress! Here’s what we’ve been up to, and what you can expect to see in the next week or so.
The focus of this release is on getting buildings in city mode. After you’ve painted some zones and laid some paths, appropriate buildings should automatically sprout up as your colony population grows. Continue reading
A few players have asked for help getting started with High Frontier. Sometimes it’s just an installation issue; other times, they’re not sure how to arrange parts in Design mode, or what to do in Manage mode.
If you’re in that boat, fear no longer! We now have a handy Help page at HighFrontier.com.
Today we released the next major update to High Frontier, version 0.12!
This version has major new functionality in city mode. Several new tabs in the Manage palette allow you to lay paths, paint zones, and even place buildings if you happen to have one or more building mods. Continue reading
We recently posted some of the first buildings modeled by artists hired with the KickStarter funds. They all did great work, but we’ve selected five artists to form our core art team for the rest of the work.
One of the first things we have to do as a team is decide upon the materials the buildings will be made of. In video game terms, a “material” is a combination of texture images and something called a shader — a little computer program that runs for each and every pixel on screen, determining exactly how the textures are combined with lighting and other data to generate their final appearance. Continue reading
We’ve been working with a number of talented 3D artists over the last month or so. We asked each one to model a building for us — something with a modern-to-futuristic style. Since it’s always a nice day on the High Frontier, but land is expensive, we asked them to put the roof to good use. Here are some of the models we’ve gotten so far.
Wow, what a couple of months! We spent most of November working on our KickStarter campaign, which was a big success thanks to all the awesome folks who supported us. Then we got back to work on the code, working hard to write that “city mode” (which we’ve decided is a snappier term than “internal colony management mode”) that everybody’s been clamoring for.
That’s a very big job, but we’re excited to announce today that High Frontier version 0.11 is now available, and adds this city-mode view to the game for the very first time.
We’ve just prepared a little white paper on the benefits of High Frontier for STEM (Science Technology, Engineering, and Math) education.
There are substantially more and better paying jobs in STEM fields than in non-STEM fields, but only about a fourth of high school freshmen express any interest in STEM fields, and half of those change their minds by the time they graduate. What kids do have an interest in, though, is video games: 97% of teenagers in the U.S. play them.
So, this is a great fit — a video game that’s fun to play, and, by the way, also happens to have you doing real engineering and problem-solving in a high-tech area. Read the paper for more!
And then please, go support our KickStarter campaign!
If you follow this blog, you know that we’ve already pretty much finished the Design and Build phases of the game, but in Manage mode, we have only the external view. We’ve been working (in separate prototypes) on the internal city view — where you can go inside your colony and manage your city in detail.
Well, just yesterday, we launched our KickStarter campaign to support that phase of development!
We rarely do this — in fact, I don’t think we’ve ever done it before — but we decided to post a maintenance release, containing just a handful of bug fixes.
This is rare partly because we haven’t let a lot of bugs slip out the door in the first place, and partly because we have been doing a major release every couple of weeks, until this month. This month we’re pretty focused on two things: the internal colony simulation — which is a major new piece of the game — and the KickStarter campaign, which is quite a lot of work in itself.
But anyway, version 0.10.1 is now available at the High Frontier home page. Continue reading
High Frontier 