Candescent Games Dev-Update

Hi All,

Since acquiring Lacuna Passage we’ve been planning out and building our new direction for the game. Today we’d like to share this direction with you and show some of our development progress. The current version of Lacuna Passage (on Steam) captures a glimpse of what it’s like to be an Astronaut on Mars. Our development goal is to build on Tyler’s original concept, while revitalizing and greatly expanding the gameplay possibilities. To accomplish this we are making some big foundational changes.

Unreal Engine
Future versions of Lacuna Passage will be built in Unreal Engine. Switching over to Unreal was something we thought long and hard about. We’re not starting from scratch, in fact we already have a lot built out. While this decision does increase the amount of development work needed, it opens up a lot of great gameplay possibilities. The first of which is the ability to greatly increase the scale of the world.

Large Landscapes
Unreal enables us to create large seamless terrain with a high-level of detail on the ground. This will allow for much more exploration within the map, either on foot or in a Martian Rover. These new landscapes can represent an area of up to 64 square KM, meaning there will be much more area to explore in both sandbox or story missions.



Real Locations
Our custom tools allow us to process data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and create detailed landscapes within the game. All maps will now represent real locations on Mars, accurate to within a few meters! You’ll see real landmarks in the distance and you’ll be able to plot any Latitude-Longitude coordinate from the game on to a map of Mars.




The Martian Sky
We’ve built a brand new Martian sky with weather patterns, seasons, and atmospheric colors. This adds striking blue sunrises and sunsets to the martian days, wispy clouds and drifting martian dust. Depending on the time of year, and your surface lat-lon coordinates you will never catch the same sunrise or sunset twice. The weather and dust will also play in to your survival decisions, more details on this in future updates.



Celestial Objects
We’re now simulating celestial objects in the Solar system. This means if you're in the right place at the right time you’ll be able to watch Phobos or Demios eclipse the Sun, or marvel at the marble-like Jupiter or if you’re feeling sentimental even catch a glimpse of Earth and the Moon in orbit. The position of these objects in the sky will be physically accurate to the game time and your position on the Martian surface. It’s an astronomy nerd’s dream and it really conveys your place in the Solar System.



In Orbit
An additional benefit of our celestial system is that we’re now simulating things around the planet. This view from Mars orbit is physically accurate and has the ability to annotate moons, planetary bodies and constellations. We have some fun ideas for new gameplay based on the orbit simulation but more on that as it develops.



The Game Plan
Our development plan is to first build a richer survival Sandbox with the Unreal build of Lacuna Passage and then add a Story Campaign mode. For now we’ll post a dev update every 2 months. Thank you for being patient as we build out Mars. We have a lot of new things to share in our next update include new habs, locations and gameplay! Here’s a hint - the new hab will have some see-through windows.




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Footnotes
Our custom map creation tools allow us to consider almost any location on Mars for conversion to a game map. If you send us lat-lon coordinates we can take a look at the NASA data available and consider it for the game.