July was a month filled with it a lot of progress.
The Tau Station teams are happy and working well together, taking us closer one day at a time closer to the Alpha that we so want to offer you. A few more months of work done at this pace, and we will be able to welcome our first players.
Yes, Alpha is getting closer every day, and we are exited to announce when it will happen very soon. Stay tuned and register for our newsletter for a chance to be one of the first explorers on Tau Station.
June has drawn to a close Tau Station has continued to grow and evolve. There is, of course, still much to do, but seeing progress taking shape fuels our passion to soldier on! The new status report shows you how much we achieved the last month.
Each week brings more results, and the Universe of Tau Station is taking shape day after day. It’s a beautiful feeling that we love to share with you!
Clones and cloning are unique elements found in Tau Station. They are an integral part of our universe, serving as both interesting plot devices and essential parts of game play. Knowing how important they are to your experience, we’ve also had our art team craft visuals that help illustrate the cloning process in details that go beyond imagination.
Continue reading "A Visual Visit to Your Local Clone Center"
March is winding down and we’re wrapping up another month’s work on Tau Station. We’ve made some exciting progress this month, including adding more features to the mission builder and nailing down a format for displaying information across the game in a way that both fits with our aesthetic and supports our commitment to accessibility. These improvements, along with other work done this month, pave the way forward for even greater progress on the universe.
February has drawn to close and Tau Station’s universe has continued to grow and evolve. In some ways, it’s been a tough month. We’ve been reviewing all our processes and identifying where we need to change our approach in order to meet our development goals. This has meant reevaluating priorities, changing our focus in a couple areas, and generally pushing harder on timelines. The results have absolutely been worth it, though, and we’re seeing that difficult work delivering results. We wrapped up the month with some big additions and improvements to gameplay, accomplished our first major data migration between servers, and we’ve built up a solid momentum for moving forward. Enjoy the new status report about February.
We love a good story. The art of storytelling predates even that of the written word, and we’re pretty sure humanity’s tales will be here long after we’re gone, possibly for some alien race to pore over and ponder what kind of weird and wonderful creatures we once were.
More specifically, the narrative is one of the core pillars of Tau Station and we consider it in every aspect of game development and universe building. Through Tau Station’s missions you’ll discover the stories of its universe – its histories, its people; the living, breathing, and evolving culture of a human civilization on life support. Below, we’ll give you a peek at three of these missions that deal with different aspects of a galactic post-apocalyptic society.
Continue reading "Missions – Your Window Into Tau Station’s Universe"
We’ve started getting some great questions from those of you keeping up with Tau Station’s development, so we decided to gather some of them and share our answers with everyone. We’re loving the questions so please keep them coming. You can send them to @taustation on Twitter, or through our Facebook page.
If you’ve asked something that isn’t answered here we’ll do our best to respond to it in a future Q&A post. And if you find some of our answers a bit cryptic, maybe you should sign up for our upcoming closed Alpha so you can be one of the first to start exploring the universe.
On to the questions!
It’s been another busy month here at Tau Station! We’ve reached the point where we can really start seeing how everyone’s work fits together to make our universe come alive. It’s an incredibly exciting and motivating time, and development will continue to speed up from here. We’re getting close to wrapping up the game flow and roadmap work that we continued through January, and are much closer to announcing our Alpha launch date. We’d originally planned that for this status report blog post – but we want to be as accurate and realistic as possible when we share the news with you, so we’re going to hold off a little longer as we finalize things. Information on the Alpha launch will go out through our newsletter before we share it anywhere else, so if you want to be among the first to know make sure to sign up.
In other Tau Station news, Curtis will be attending FOSDEM this weekend to give a talk about our project. He’ll have some great stickers to hand out so keep an eye out for him if you’re there. We were also very pleased to talk with E-Access News about our approach to accessibility, and they just published the interview on their site.
Next month our game designer, Curtis, will be giving a talk about Tau Station at the FOSDEM conference in Brussels. We considered sending him with flyers to hand out but decided that stickers would be a lot more fun. Because who doesn’t love stickers?!
Using some of our favorite images from Tau Station’s background art, our graphic designer Tania put together this collection of stickers to give everyone a glimpse into our universe. Some of these pictures are new and haven’t been shown anywhere before.
You’re walking through the space station, minding your own business, when you’re suddenly attacked by a stranger. You fight back, but they’re tough and they manage to kill you before the guards can arrive to break things up. Usually, you wouldn’t be too worried about this. Most sick bays have a grim shared mantra: “If we can scrape you off the pavement, we’ll get you back on your feet.” There aren’t too many wounds they can’t fix. There’s a problem, though: you’re on Bordeaux Station and it doesn’t have a sick bay. Those fatal wounds all over your body are, for once, actually fatal.
Luckily, in Tau Station, death is not necessarily the end.
