The Starry Expanse

Mysterium is still ongoing, but we thought we’d post a brief outline of what we announced during our presentation just a few minutes ago.

First, we showed the gameplay as it stands now. You can watch a condensed walkthrough of that, including our brand-new sky, here (it had to be re-run since the video didn’t go through the first time), or by watching the video below.

You can also watch (or rather, listen to) the first attempt at showing the game (actual presentation starts at 4:07), which didn’t go so well because of streaming issues.

Then, we announced the exciting news that Cyan Worlds, Inc. has agreed to allow us to proceed with our project! We also showed a short video of Boiler Island as it stands now (shown in the video linked to above), and we have just recently added a new post to our dev blog for your enjoyment.

Howdy all! This is your official invitation to join us for our presentation at Mysterium 2012 in Seattle! We’re presenting the last year’s worth of work and news today, Friday, August 3 right now!

Please note that while earlier today we were experiencing technical difficulties, those difficulties have been mitigated and we are continuing on with our presentation at this moment (now). Thank you for your patience!

If you’re not attending Mysterium in person, the event will be streamed live online here via LiveStream (or you can watch it embedded in this page below)! Hope to see you there!

Check out the LiveStream feed!

Online Mysterium has come and gone, and I’d say it was pretty successful. The full log of the event can be read here! Any follow-up questions can be posted as comments here, and I (or another member of the team) will do my best to answer them.

Not only are we going to be at Mysterium 2012 in Seattle later this year, but we’re also going to be doing a Q&A at Online Mysterium, in Uru, on May 19! You can submit questions for us here, and then come talk to us in the cavern at 4:00 PM EDT! See you there!

Just posting to let everyone know that we will indeed be at Mysterium 2012, during the first weekend of August, making our usual presentation. We will, of course, also be livestreaming the presentation, and it will be available for viewing after the fact. But for the fullest of effect, you really want to be there in person!

You can see past presentations here: 2010 and 2011.

If you want to experience the awesome first-hand, register soon!

You may be interested to know that today, we launched a new development blog! We plan to post here about our works in progress, insights, and general struggles we’ve faced while developing the game. Hope you enjoy!

You may have noticed that our lovely forum is gone. This is because Convore, the service that we picked for hosting the board, has been shut down, through decisions that had absolutely nothing to do with us.

We did, however, manage to make a backup of all of the conversations on the board, so that they can (eventually) be restored to a new (and better) forum. We’re working on making our network of sites fully integrated with one another, so that one login works here for commenting, on the forum, in our bug tracker, etc.

In other news, we’re ramping up asset production again, so expect more new images soon!

And no, none of the above is an April Fool’s joke. We decided that it would be too cruel after posting so little for months.

There is now a Starry Expanse Hood in MOULa. If you’d like to join, catch someone from 59 Volt Entertainment online (like Zib or ironmagma), or find someone who’s already a member. If nobody’s online, just send us an e-mail, and one of us will hop online to help you out. Spread the love!

Hey there – Just wanted to let you guys know that work is continuing, despite our silence. I’ve posted a couple of things to our forum in the last week, and I figured I’d repost them here. They depict (very preliminary) work on the new sky system, and some rigging work on Catherine:

We’re not dead! We haven’t given up! Thanks for continuing to believe in us!

That being said, we could really use another experienced programmer or two. We’d like help developing both the engine, and some backend tools for us to manage the project. If you’re interested in helping out (in this or any other way), just send us an e-mail, and we’ll let you know if we can use you.

We don’t usually do this sort of thing, but we got such a big traffic boost from Reddit the other day, we just had to share. We’ve never seen such a drastic spike – those horizontal bars are counting thousands of unique hits, and all of the non-Reddit days still average in the hundreds – still nothing to scoff at.

We got about $55 in donations, over 100 beta signups, and some other interesting side effects. More news soon!