Today we are announcing our new game, NIMBY Rails! It is a management sandbox for railways you build in the real world. Design train tracks, set up lines, and get that stock rolling to make money and serve the needs of the population. Do you have strong opinions on rail projects and want to test your own ideas? This game was made for you.

https://steamproxy.com/steamstore/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/

NIMBY Rails is still in development and it will take some time to reach the Early Access release, but we have ambitious plans for it. In the meantime you can check this epic development retrospective with screenshots and videos of the prototype and pre-alpha phases of development:

https://carloscarrasco.com/nimby-rails-retrospective/

Happy two year anniversary to The Spatials! To celebrate get our game 50% OFF this week!

The Spatials are back with Galactology! Design, build and protect your space station from the many enemies you will make while exploring the galaxy and exploding their homeworlds.

Galactology is The Spatials reimagined as a more complex simulation game, implementing many requested features. Active pause, mod support, a true world simulation with many more variables and complex AI. A new focus on the station sim, with deeper gameplay systems behind every object and room. In-station combat, invaders, diseases, health care, logistics, spaceships you can control... The list of new features is long and growing every week!

The Spatials: Galactology will be released on Steam on 7th July 2016, and it will be free for everybody who has purchased The Spatials on Steam on or before July 5.

http://steamproxy.com/steamstore/app/450700/

Quick FAQ

Q: Why a new game? Why not a simple update or some DLC?
A: The game has changed and expanded so much that it feels like a new game. We also wanted the freedom to implement new features and change content, which meant going back to Early Access. Clearly that's not possible with a game that’s already been released on the market. The only reasonable option was to make a brand new game. This allows current players to continue playing and enjoying The Spatials, and we can give them a free copy of the new game!

Q: Why make the game free for The Spatials V2 customers? Do you hate money?
A: We like money! But something we like even more is having our players be happy and not feel screwed over. We started Galactology as The Spatials V3 nine months ago. We envisioned it as a free update and communicated it as such. But, as time passed, the scope and feature set of the new version kept growing, and it was clear it would require much more effort than we originally imagined (on top of breaking saves and changing too many things). We realized that being able to gift a new standalone game to current users was the right thing to do!

Q: How is the gifting going to work?
A: Around release day, every Steam user that has purchased The Spatials, or has activated a Steam code for The Spatials, on or before July 5, will automatically get The Spatials: Galactology added to their Steam Library. This process is manual and it requires the help of a Valve employee, so I cannot give an exact date on when it will be completed.

The Spatials was released on Steam on March 30 2015, and we want to celebrate this special date with a weeklong deal of 50% off the regular price. The galaxy awaits you!


Work continues on V3. The new gameplay engine is enabling new features every week. It's still a few months off, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel now. Take a look at some of the development notes from the past months.

http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2015-11-09.html

A minimal planet surface editor has been implemented, V2 civilizations will be fleshed out as full factions in V3, and new artwork has been created for them.
http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2015-11-16.html

In V2 planet surfaces featured enemy or NPC camps, procedurally generated. The algorithm that guided this generator was simple and limited. For V3 we are instead designing the camps by hand. Max has continued this week to create new designs with the graphics he finished last week.
http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2015-11-23.html

Last week the surface generator implemented the ability to spawn civ camps and was tested with a few human camps. Now the initial work for the all the civ camps is done and they have been added to the planet surface generator.
http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2015-12-07.html

New sprites for enemies, NPCs, small objects and other dynamic entities; new gizmo tool in the planet editor for placing dynamic entities in the pre-made camps.
http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2015-12-14.html

A major milestone has been reached in V3 development! Combat is now again part of the game. As a first effort AI-controlled combat has been prototyped, making use of the new tools available in the V3 engine. Here's a video showing a fight between officers and pirates, using a simple test weapon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0Uol5JuynA


http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-01-11.html

A new tileset and camp set has been implemented for planets that are not colonized by a NPC civilization. For now there's no gameplay associated to them, but we want to flesh them out better in the future.
http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-01-18.html

Another major piece of the V3 design is now in place. In V2 travel was instantaneous. For V3 we are introducing spaceships, which will need to be crewed and given orders in order to explore and visit planets. These travel orders will take time to complete, as the spaceship moves in the galaxy. And to not make your officers go into some kind of limbo while traveling, V3 also introduces a ship bridge mini-sim.
http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-01-25.html

Sectors have been removed from the galaxy. Now the galaxy screen displays all the stars in the galaxy, and when clicking on them, the star system is displayed. This will make it much easier to support other galaxy shapes and densities and to do more complex things with the galaxy generation. Gone is the hardcoded limit of 30 stars or the rigid grid of sectors.
http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-02-01.html

It was time to go back to the central part of V3, the station sim. After a months-long focus on other areas of the game (planets, galaxy and spaceships) to get them up to speed early to make sure we didn't forget about them later on, we are back to station basics. We are first tackling a new V3 feature, station combat. Here's the result of mixing some officers with some attackers in a single room:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czEaea4_LJc


http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-02-08.html

The V3 station is going to be much more complex than in V2. Your officers will be able to take on more than a dozen different jobs and tasks. At some point some of these tasks will become too menial for your high ranking staff, so it may be cost effective to delegate them on robots. Here's a first preview of the art for dedicated station robots:
The sneak system makes use of a proxy, invisible entity controlled by the infiltration system (in the video the entity is given a placeholder icon to be able to see its path in the station). This entity is effectively ignored by every security measure, including officers, since it's not an enemy entity (it lacks any combination of components that make it either a target or a threat.) Once it arrives at its target area, it runs a proc, which spawns the real enemy entity and destroys the proxy. Only the security camera is capable of forcing this proc to be executed earlier, as seen in the video. Additionally the camera tries to alert nearby officers in a wide radius, to emulate the effect of an alarm going off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scmlM3SkFmU


http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-02-15.html

A stapple of good sim games which involve construction is allowing some degree of customization. The Spatials is a bit more rigid in this regard, with the art for constructed tiles being very defined in their purpose. But for V3 we've implemented a new twist: most constructed tiles now have a "colorizable" layer, which will be able to pick up a color from a palette.
http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-02-29.html

We've made available a version of some of the station tilesets encountered while exploring alien planets as rooms in the station. There's now 35 different room designs in the station.
http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-03-07.html

The result of combining the new hunger and sleep vitals with the existing cooking test job is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqLlJWIV-fk


http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-03-14.html

Max has drawn two new big, boss-like monsters. Provisionally called "worm" and "octopus", they will be part of the station events, and will have unique AI and attacks to make them more challenging.
http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-03-21.html

Hurting entities which have been authorized to receive medical care (by adding them a medicine-allowed-component) can now seek an hospital bed and lay on it. This makes them start healing back, albeit very slowly. It also makes a job available near the bed, the Medicine job. If an officer is flagged for this job, and meds are available, they will perform the job in front of the bed and make the rate of healing go much faster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmp8xqmS_aA

Did you miss one of our recent updates on V3? Here's the list of the past few weeks devblogs, follow the links for the full post.

http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2015-10-05.html

The new generic job state machine has been implemented and most of the week was devoted to fixing everything that broke down. The end result is a much more robust, yet generic and extensible job system. There's nothing new to show on screen, this week was all about logic coding and bugfixes.
http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2015-10-12.html

In the past week more experiments in search for a selection cursor UI were done, a job matrix UI for officers was implemented, the state machine library received more fixes, job logistics now support multiple resources and are intelligent about asking for workers only when needed, and the keyboard support was improved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0ino9_S1KI


http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2015-10-19.html

A UI strings localization system has been implemented to enable both official and community translations, and work on bringing planets to the V3 engine has started.
http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2015-10-26.html

The planet surface is now more fleshed out and entities and tools now work on it, resource nodes are now being generated on planet surfaces, it's now possible to build resource extractors on planets.
http://carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2015-11-02.html

More code cleanups, some systems for of planet resource extraction are now implemented (resource nodes, extraction objects, simplified logistics, automatic ship cargo transfers), the UI color can now be customized, and fixing a bad programming pattern before it is too late.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTFf3eoetVQ

Indie Game Riot, an indie gaming podcast, has nominated The Spatials for their Riot of the Year award. It's amazing to be considered for this award and being listed amongst some of the best indie games released in 2015. Vote for us!

http://indiegameriot.com/2015/11/01/vote-for-the-riot-of-the-year-2015/

For the past three months we've been hard at work on a new major version of The Spatials. Like V2 before it, the new version is a partial rewrite of the game, made in order to enable new and improved gameplay. At this point a big part of the technical work is done and we are now ready to share some details about this work.

Read more in our web site: http://thespatials.com/the-road-to-v3.html

I've also started a technical devblog for V3: http://carloscarrasco.com/tag/v3devblog.html

Version 2.8 is now ready for download! We've added one of the top requested features and now officers names can be customized. We've also made available a series of optional difficulty settings for players who want a challenge.

• Officer names can now be customized. Click on the pencil icon next to the officer name in the Staff screen to input a new name.
  
  
• New games now give a choice between normal difficulty and custom difficulty. When selecting custom difficulty a series of optional gameplay challenges can be selected.
  
  
• Optional difficulty: Halve production. The production of your factories is cut in half.
  
  
• Optional difficulty: Salaries. Your officers will demand a salary that goes up with their level.
  
  
• Optional difficulty: Higher prices. Makes prices for resource nodes, contracts and officers go much higher with their level.
  
  
• Optional difficulty: Permadeath. Officers that fall in combat are permanently dead. The Recall item cannot drop when this option is enabled.

A new version of The Spatials, v2.7, is now ready for download. The focus for this release has been polishing and adding often requested small features. It's also our first public version with Linux support.

• Two new enemy families can now appear in bounty missions: the Pest and the Cucurbians.
  
  
• Craved products are again a hard requirement. Both officers and visitors will refuse to consume products that are not in their list of cravings if those products are needed to satisfy a vital.
  
  
• It is now possible to set a global limit for stock in the stats screen for manufactured products. All the factories that are then toggled to obey this stock limit will automatically stop creating manufacturing tasks when the stock reaches or surpasses the limit. Use this new system to cut excess production and free resources and officers for other tasks.
  
  
• Mouse over objects and visitors in the station to get some basic info about them.
  
  
• Objects in the station now use the isometric map grid for hit testing when using the info tool. Combined with the new mouse over info label it is now possible to select objects unambiguously.
  
  
• Recall won't be casted if there's no officers in stasis.
  
  
• Fix sidebar overlapping info popups in the inventory.
  
  
• The Contracts panel now gives more information: the amounts of (potentially) gained XP and the current levels of stock in the station inventory for rewarded resources.
  
  
• Enemies will always display their health bar when aggroed, even if they haven't been damaged yet.
  
  
• Windows: tentative fix for alt-tab issues.
  
  
• Faster scripting engine.