Marek's Dev Diary: January 23, 2025

What is this

Every Thursday, I will share a dev diary about what we've been working on over the past few weeks. I'll focus on the interesting challenges and solutions that I encountered. I won't be able to cover everything, but I'll share what caught my interest.

Why am I doing it

I want to bring our community along on this journey, and I simply love writing about things I'm passionate about! This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly. Any plans I mention aren't set in stone and everything is subject to change. Also, if you don't like spoilers, then don't read this.

Space Engineers 2

Only 4 days until SE2 launches on Early Access. Everyone is really curious how it will go, but I think the community mood is very good - everyone is looking forward to starting this journey with us. It will take several years to realize the full vision of SE2.

We had an SE2 Press Event today. Many YouTubers, influencers, and journalists came to visit us, talked with our team, and saw a presentation on the vision behind SE2. Our ambition is to go 10x beyond SE1 in areas like intuitiveness, visuals, scalability, performance, richness of the world, and more. Expect some sneak peeks to be released soon.

We are already finishing VS 1.1 (UGC Workshop). Did some playtests this week and the previous one. Now it's up to finalization and polish, and 1.1 will be released quite soon.

Also working on VS 1.2, mainly:

• Improved animations continuing - now focusing on start and stop phase of walking and running, ensuring dynamics and sense of mass being accelerated + making sure feet aren't sliding on the surface; polished paint tool animation (better aiming, finger on the trigger moves, and improved particle effect)
• The good feel and feedback from animations, sounds, and particle effects is very important for me personally, both as a developer and as a player. 
• Improved sounds
• Debug gun tool - new model + hand animation + voxel destruction
• Jetpack 2.0 mechanics with new charge-up phase and boost, plus new camera shaking
• IK for character feet so they adapt to the surface below, don't levitate, and copy deformed armor nicely
• "Pause game" is finally in game (small but important feature)
• Rotation controls - in the end I decided to keep the one we currently have in SE2, it's more intuitive than the one that was always aligning perpendicular to the surface you are snapping to.

And working on VS 2 - we already have trees in the game, new blocks like the truss block (looks amazing when fractured), new O2/H2 generator block, new method for designing fractures with a rim on the exterior part for more realism - all new blocks will have it. New connector automatically snaps your ship to another one (no need to manually position it; feels like two magnets).

Work on Water is continuing, now focusing on visuals. We added water particles and it looks incredible - looking forward to showing it to you soon.

Just a reminder: the UI in SE2 has temporary aesthetics. We're mostly focusing on functionality, knowing we'll be redoing things, so we aren't settling on final aesthetics yet.

Pioneer Edition (which you can buy on top of SE2) - I love the OST & the vault book with behind-the-scenes materials. We put significant effort into this. Karel Antonin (our composer) constantly works with musicians on orchestra recording improvements, editing, recording new vocals, and more. We're already planning new tracks to add free in upcoming updates.

AI People

We just released a new update with Level Editor and two new characters: Marek Rosa and Donnie Bluff. The editor is a useful update - now you can make levels and play in them with our AI NPCs.

The next step is a new game scenario set in a world after ASI damaged humanity and left our world. People live in barren land and try to survive. You play as one of them, collaborating with your village people, surviving, farming, exploring, meeting people in other villages, etc. Bottom line: we're adding challenges, consequences, reasons to play, game loop and long-term progression. For me, this is the last step that should turn AI People into a fun game, so I'm really looking forward to it.