- Shutting Down the Project Existence Testing Environment - 20 June 2023
https://i.imgur.com/5pxsYeE.jpg Hi all, When we launched the Project Existence Testing Environment (lovingly known as PETE) in 2020, it was designed not so much as a game for visitors to play, but a proving grounds to test and/or break potential features that might make their way into our upcoming massively multiplayer game. We appreciate those who participated in our game development experiment. We had valuable playtests, hit important milestones and enjoyed welcoming you into PETE's snowy expanse these last three years. That said, it was time to bid PETE adieu. As of today, its server has been permanently shut down, a milestone unto itself. The team have now shifted full focus toward the development of our forthcoming game, more details of which we'll be sharing later this summer. It's exciting times, and we hope you'll stick around and continue on this journey with us. We think you'l…
- Project Existence Testing Environment (PETE) Playtest Review - 17 April 2023
https://i.imgur.com/5pxsYeE.jpg Hi all! We recently concluded a milestone playtest in our newly renamed Project Existence Testing Environment (PETE). It was a twelve-hour test, with participants establishing outposts, gathering resources and working together to rebuild a monument. This was essentially the same goal as the previous three playtests, though with substantial adjustments to the time it takes to accomplish the main goal to reflect a more standard gameplay experience. We also made UI improvements, performed some bug fixes and included the addition of rocks as a new resource. Below is an infographic breakdown of the aftermath of the playtest: https://i.imgur.com/5Cold39.png We hope to add new features and functions as we schedule future playtests, with a goal of continually increasing the number of participants for each. If you'd like to participate, or know anyone who'd be int…
- Servers are live for the April Playtest - 5 April 2023
This latest update introduces a new resource, more outpost units and multiple improvements to UI. Participate in today's playtest by hopping in and playing through the tutorial mission, we'd love to hear your feedback! Feedback Form Bug Reports
- 4/5/23 12 HOUR PLAYTEST - JOIN US! - 4 April 2023
UPDATE: The servers will be live at 2pm GMT, or two hours later than originally announced! Sorry for the inconvenience. Hey all! On April 5th (Wednesday) beginning at 1pm GMT, Arctic Theory will begin a 12 hour playtest period in the Project Existence Testing Environment (PETE), with server resets scheduled for 4pm GMT and 8pm GMT. This is a big milestone for us! We welcome and encourage anyone who wishes to participate to join in and see what we've been up to. The overall goal is to establish outposts, gather and process resources and work together to rebuild a monument. For those that have joined previous playtests, the gameplay might seem familiar, but there are some new features to check out, as well as old and improved ones we'd love feedback on. For those jumping in for the first time, be prepared to see some placeholder objects and to run into a bug here or there. It's all a part…
- PROJECT EXISTENCE - 16/3/23 Playtest Dev Blog - 22 March 2023
https://i.imgur.com/P544GDz.png Hi all! Once again, members of the Arctic Theory team jumped into the Project Existence Testing Environment late last week for a new playtest adventure. We have a brief update below. _____ MARCH 16, 2023 PLAYEST GOAL / DESCRIPTION Just as last week, this playtest was designed with an emphasis on player experience, focused on the group endeavor of rebuilding a satellite dish (a "monument") in the game world. Utilizing feedback from the last playtest and most of the same participants, we wanted to see how they would react to changes made based off of said feedback. Most importantly, we wanted to gauge if players felt more like they were contributing to a common goal as a cooperative group, or if there was still a slight disconnect in that experience. RESULTS As last time, the playtest was largely well-received, with participants having a stronger sense of w…
- PROJECT EXISTENCE - 2/3/23 Playtest Dev Blog - 15 March 2023
https://i.imgur.com/5pxsYeE.jpg Hi all! As we move through early development of our upcoming MMO, codename: Annex, we will be providing consistent playtest updates occurring in the Project Existence Testing Environment here on Steam. This will allow you who participate in and/or following our progress (thanks, by the way!) a way to track what we've done, what we're doing and give you more opportunities to share your thoughts on features, systems and test scenarios we're implementing. With that said, here is our most recent Project Existence Playtest Update. MARCH 3, 2023 PLAYEST GOAL / DESCRIPTION To place more emphasis on the player experience. We have historically been very technology-focused, particularly on refining the sandbox functionality. In this playtest, We began by defining a few player-centric KPIs to see what our expectations were and how we could measure against them. The…
- Servers going live for network tests - 10 June 2022
Hey everyone! Project Existence will be live for the next few days for network tests. We’ve recently upgraded to Unreal Engine 5, so while we continue working on a new gameplay update, we decided to keep the prototype live and running to fix bugs, stability and connectivity issues. Feel free to drop in and walk around to give us some sweet data to further improve our systems. Be aware that the servers will likely be on and off for the duration of the tests. Stay tuned for news as we continue to update with new features and content in the coming months.
- Dev Update - The Next Chapter of Project Existence - 20 January 2022
Happy (late) new year! The team is back at the office after a lovely holiday break. Looking back at the past year, we are super happy with what we achieved, but even more excited about what’s coming next. Arctic Theory was founded with the ambitious goal of pushing the boundaries of what massively multiplayer games are through technological innovation. By bringing together elements from traditional MMO games and social networks, our aim has always been to build products that revolve around collaboration, creativity and community. Project Existence started as a project meant for validating a lot of things that were important for our studio’s journey towards that goal. We decided early on that we wanted to be transparent with our work, so we created a live prototype and made it available for anyone to jump in and try out. Whether it was a silly mission where players would receive a Hallow…
- Server Maintenance - 29 November 2021
Hello everyone! We'll be taking the servers down for maintenance over the next few days, while we work on some pretty cool changes that are coming to Project Existence. We want to make sure Project Existence has the room to showcase different aspects of our work as we continue developing new systems, features and technology. This maintenance will give us the time and space we need to implement more significant changes and solve potential issues and bugs that might pop up with these updates. We're excited to share more information on these changes very soon! Stay tuned for another update when the servers are back up - you can also join the Discord server to get notified.
- 0.4.151 - Server side performance improvements - 10 November 2021
Fixed log spam on server Fixed performance issues with the settlement blockout (level unloaded) Fixed performance issue with RTV (track simulation moved to client side) Update to the bridge environment Cave added to the world (Landscape visibility, hole test) More information added to the player state for for easier debugging Debugging events (cycle counters) added to GenOS harvesting for performance tracking Missions data size optimized ( this means that all missions are reset for all players)
- 0.4.143 - Mission progression and physics-simulation for resources - 3 November 2021
- Added notifications to indicate mission progression - Implemented physics-simulation for harvestable fields - Walking towards trees or rocks will change it to a dynamic element - Improved our internal logs to catch bugs and errors more easily - Started work on upgrading the bridge area into something that can be interacted with in the near future
- 0.4.136 - Mission sequence - 27 October 2021
- Mission sequence! There are a few missions now that can be completed one after the other - Missions now have a better overview - Pressing G will open a window showing your active missions and the steps you have completed - Updated the emote system - There are now 9 emotes that are bound to the keys 1-9. These emotes will pop up over your characters head! - Disabled the emote interactions with other players - Fixed a bug where players were unable to interact / harvest some resources
- 0.4.125 - Harvesting Trees, first Iteration of emotes and "auto harvesting" - 20 October 2021
- You can now remove trees and rocks from the world - Added the first version of an emote system! Interacting with other players will bring up a menu where - - You can select the emote you want to use - Further adjustments to the weather and day & night cycle - Added an autoharvesting function to the player camp. Establishing a camp will now periodically remove all resources in the camp's vicinity. - Moved the debug menu to a different UI so the creative view isn't as cluttered - Enabled analytics for general data collection (things like playtime, client errors, in-game actions, etc.)
- 0.4.117 - Framework for missions, general adjustments and optimization - 13 October 2021
- Added a new test mission - Added framework for accepting, completing and turning in missions - Added textures to the Remnants area - Made adjustments to the weather system - Added more details to the landscape - Increased the number of trees in the world
- Small Update To Project Existence! - 7 October 2021
Adjusted the weather system so that it changes more frequently Improved the landscape textures and added a bit more details like grass, moss and smaller rocks Enabled arrow keys for movement (works alongside WASD) You can now adjust the camera distance from your character by using the scroll wheel
- Stabilizing the current build and laying the groundwork for what's to come! - 28 September 2021
Hello everyone! It’s been a while since we’ve released an update and we’re well aware that Project Existence has been quiet (and slightly broken) for a bit. That might sound like a negative thing, but for us it’s quite the opposite! For those of you who have been with us for a while, you might know that Project Existence is our studio’s way of exploring new ideas and testing out what we’re working on in a live environment. Some of you might shake your head at us for having the prototype available on Steam, and others might find it interesting to follow us and see how the world evolves. Either way, Project Existence is extremely valuable to us as a team, since it allows us to validate our work early on in the development process. For the past few months, our artists have been hard at work on realizing the game’s art style and visual language, and we have a ton of concept art coming throu…
- Visual Improvements, Player Settlements & New Character Model - 9 July 2021
We’ve released a new update, focusing on the visual aspects of our game world along with some new and/or improved features! Project Existence has always been a sort of development sandbox for us to test out the things we are working on, and explore ideas we have for our upcoming game. For the past few months, we’ve been focused on testing our landscape simulation technology, and we’re happy with where it is right now. That’s why we want to start focusing more on the gameplay aspects, but more importantly, focus on fleshing out the world we are creating! What this update includes is still a work in progress! I want to emphasize that Project Existence is not supposed to be a fully fledged game, but more so a world that evolves and changes over time as we take new ideas and inspiration to create something fun and interesting (at least in our opinion). What’s new in Project Existence: Added…
- Dev Update - Evolving the Visual Narrative - 30 June 2021
It’s time for a new dev blog - and this time it’s all about the visuals! Our team has grown quite a bit since our last update, with three talented artists joining our creative team last month. After releasing the Valley of Sand update to Project Existence, we wanted to focus more on the art aspects of the game and continue evolving that visual narrative. In this post, I wanted to dive a bit deeper into what we’ve been working on, how the process has been, and show a bit of what you can expect to see soon in our live prototype. Let’s start with our vehicle asset. We previously had created some 3D models in order to explore the visual style that we wanted to go for. One of these assets was the RTV truck, and while this solidified the design we had in mind, we wanted to iterate on it and improve the quality of the model. Enter our new environment artist, Alexander! The workflow we used was…
- Enter the Valley of Sand - 16 April 2021
The Valley of Sand is here! This update brings a lot of changes to Project Existence and should give an idea of the direction we’re going to as we move forward. We consider this to be the start of phase two of development here at the studio, and to kick things off, we’ve completely overhauled the graphics and introduced a massive new world level to the prototype. In the coming weeks, you can expect to see new features implemented as we continue to flesh out the world and explore new ideas! Here’s some of the features and things you can do in the most recent update: Walk around (very slowly), sprint and even jump! Left clicking on an element brings up a context menu that lists the different actions that are available Actions that are currently enabled are harvest (blow up) rocks and trees and place down structures in the world Check out the update, let us know what you think and be sure…
- Dev Update - Phase 2 of Project Existence - 18 March 2021
Hey everyone! It feels like it's been forever since we put out a development update, so here goes. Somehow, we're already halfway through March! Time flies when you're completely overhauling the graphics and working on large features having fun. Our studio started with an ambitious idea for taking the MMO genre to the next level. This idea is what we call Annex (a working title), a massively multiplayer game focused on exploration, manufacturing and collaboration. When we started development, we had so many cool and exciting ideas that we wanted to put in front of players as quickly as possible! This led to the creation of our prototype, Project Existence. Making it available through Steam had us motivated to constantly implement new stuff to try out and test, and having real player engagement was just the icing on the cake. These past few months we’ve been in phase 1 of development. By…
