"Now planets and the sun are positioned correctly, so you can get glorious views like this..."

Spaaace

I've been quiet for a wee while because I've been hard at work adding (back in) a really major feature of Before We Leave.  Up until now, the players in the Closed Alpha could construct spaceships, but couldn't launch them, and now at long last they can.  We're off into space!!

Wooden rocket blasting off into space!!

As well as doing a bunch of work to get the old space gameplay that I created ages ago (only so that I could get it started, and create some screenshots for store pages and the like), I also significantly changed the way that I render, or more correctly, position planets.  Up until now, when you were looking at a planet's surface, it was at the centre of the world, and the sunlight was always coming from over your right shoulder.  But with going back out into space, I'd always wanted to update that, so now planets and the sun are positioned correctly, so now you can get glorious views like this:

Sunrise!!

There's still more to do of course (and when isn't there?), like making nighttime look properly night-time-y while still being playable, but it's a huge leap forward, both for how the game looks and for the gameplay, so I'm super stoked.  And on top of that, Rafał has been working on some really nice updates to the way the buildings are rendered that I'm really looking forward to showing off!