haloman30

Hey everyone! Another announcement so soon? Why, yes. Lots of stuff happening nowadays - isn't it exciting? First off, we've got the basics of the Galactiminer: Evolved website up! You can check it out live at http://galactiminer.com! There currently isn't a whole lot to it as of yet besides some links and a couple pages - but you can expect to see it continue to grow and evolve as time goes on and Galactiminer continues to make progress. Speaking of progress, yesterday we introduced a new member to the Elaztek team - @Verblendet! I'll leave it up to him when/if he wants to reveal any information about himself, but here's what I can tell you - he will be the man behind the music of Galactiminer. We hope to have some juicy tunes to fill your ears here relatively soon - but you must not rush the creative process. Music composition is a long and tedious process. Lastly, we've introduced a cool new feature for those of you who are coming over (or who formerly came over) from Chaotic United - the ability to sign in with your Chaotic United account on Elaztek - and vice versa. You can now sign up, login, and sync information between the two. If you have an account on CU already and want to quickly get signed up here, you can just click 'Sign in with Chaotic United' on the login screen. Alternatively, if you have an account here but not on CU, you can sign into CU with your Elaztek account. That's all for now, folks! Stay tuned for any upcoming progress and development on Galactiminer! And don't forget to spread our Kickstarter campaign around: kck.st/2N6bpPv

Hey, folks! We're throwing a curveball at you - a development progress update! "What? You mean to say that you're actually getting tangible work done?" Yes! Yes we are! It's a Christmas miracle! We've posted this update on our Kickstarter as well, though there's a couple other things we're going to get into here as well, mainly with future plans and such. But enough babble, let's get into what you came here for - to see our progress. Now I know, it doesn't look like much, but do keep in mind that this is all just basic functionality. First up - blocks. Blocks, blocks, and more blocks. What blocks are available? Let's take a look at each of them. First up, let's show a total mess of various blocks that was shown on the Kickstarter (and on the homepage image) to give a brief overview. Now, this gives a good idea of what blocks are in the game, but this doesn't make it entirely clear what these blocks are, does it? Let's remedy that. For those interested, each and every block (as of the time of making this post) can be found in the spoiler below. We plan to setup a wiki for all of Galactiminer's content, sort of like the Minecraft Wiki - except official and not broken as of recently for unknown reasons. (also the images below will probably look like crap because I was lazy and gyazo'd all of them) Next up, the inventory. This was a real fight. See, we decided to (kind of) get lazy and actually purchased a resource on the Unreal Engine Marketplace. That resource contained the core block building functionality you see, but we had to modify it a great deal to not suck. There was no inventory system. The hotbar was very weakly coded - it's the kind of programming nightmare you never want to see, several variables all manually bound to the hotbar. There were about 2-3 variables for the hotbar slots. No easy expandability, even the active slot was done by having 9 textures of the hotbar with the slot overlay appearing in different locations. It was pretty crap. The process for adding a block involved making changes in about 30 locations and was in general just really tacky to deal with. All of this - the hotbar, inventory, and blocks were completely restructured to be easily expandable. Adding a basic block takes no more than a couple minutes (minus the whole texturing stuff, but I'm just talking about getting it into the game and usable). So, what does it look like? Like this: Don't mind some of those broken-seeming textures and other weirdness - those are, as I said, textures. The block building system doesn't do a cool 3D render in the slot like Minecraft would, but instead uses a 2D texture - this includes those ones that look like cubes. So, we just threw on some leftover textures from Project: Infinity that were already in the project temporarily. Also, tooltips! As you can see, they aren't your typical generic tooltip of just the item name. The tooltip shows the block slot texture, the name, and the item classification. That and the blue background color will change depending on what item/block it is. Weapons would be, well, weapons. Stone, Grass, and Dirt (and related) will be Natural Materials, ores and crystals will be Minerals, and so on. Also, notice the additional space that just says Debug Item Details. That would show other stats dependent on the block or item as well. Weapons would show stuff like accuracy, rate of fire, damage, and so on. Blocks would show the minimum tool required to break it as well as the time to break, and anything else noteworthy about it. We will likely add a setting to show the debug details for you nerds out there. Maybe we'll even have an option for more simplistic tooltips, because why not? Anyways, that's about all we've got for now! Just a few clarifications before we go: You may have noticed the Halo-esque HUD, as well as the fact that most of the inventory stuff looks very much like that of Minecraft. Both of these elements will be changing as we get further in. The Halo HUD is stuff that we were testing for Project: Infinity from back when we were going to develop that in Unreal Engine, most of which is pulled from Halo 3. Except that weird motion tracker placeholder, that was a weird thing I made a while back. As for the Minecraft-looking inventory and hotbar, you can expect that to change and evolve as we go on. We are mainly focused on functionality, and I think most of you can get that but some people like to critique early alpha concepts And, remember - Project: Infinity is not cancelled - nor is Blamite. We will be keeping the applications for both of those open so that, if there are people willing and able to develop them (mainly Blamite since Project: Infinity is dependent on Blamite being complete), we can effectively develop both. If we do get enough people for Blamite to be developed alongside Galactiminer, we'll be sure to announce it. As for those looking to join Galactiminer's team, we will have applications open soon - so be on the lookout for that. Well, that's the past week or two of progress since our announcement. We hope to get these going semi-regularly as progress happens and the game continues to grow and evolve. Don't forget, we still are running a Kickstarter campaign and we have 21 more days to go - let's make it count, folks! You can check out the Kickstarter page for Galactiminer here.

Hey, everyone! We've got some exciting news! There is unfortunately some bad news, but it's not that bad. First off: the bad news - Project: Infinity and the Blamite Game Engine have been put on temporary hold - kind of - for a while. I say kind of because there will likely be some limited development on my end here and there, however neither of these will be our main focus for the time being. The reason for this is to introduce a new project. Ladies and gentlemen, Elaztek Studios is proud to announce the initiation of a new project: Some of you just might recognize this name, if you've been around since the Haloman Development days (or more likely, went around our website and found any of the old HMD stuff laying around). The original idea behind Galactiminer wasn't a whole lot beyond a clone of Murder Miners - but different. That was the idea my 13-year-old self had. Just a year later, the project was cancelled because my child self couldn't make games at all (shocking, I know). Long before that though, it was put on hold merely 12 days later. Yet again a week later, it was resumed again. From there, it continued to make no progress until Project: Infinity was announced - and since then, Galactiminer has sat, quietly untouched in the shadow of Project: Infinity. Until now. So what changed? What suddenly caused Project: Infinity and Blamite to be put on a sort-of hold in favor of Galactiminer? Entering the Workforce - A Mixed Bag The answer will likely come as a surprise as it's not something I ever talk about in relation to Elaztek or Chaotic United - income. As those of you on CU know, I recently (on August 23, 2018) started a job at Walmart. The work itself isn't too hard - however it does give me unbearable leg and foot pain by the end of the day every single day. But the pain isn't the main issue here - it's the time. For years, I had the assumption that a full-time job would take up roughly the same amount of time as a typical school day. This simply isn't the case. Combined with actually requiring a full night's sleep, an hour lunch built into the workday, and so on - and as a result, I have next to no time to myself during work days. As such, I'm making a dramatic shift that will prioritize income generation in a way that hasn't been done so before. Our focus will still be on making great games, of course, but we won't be ignoring the element of making money any longer. Crowdfunding We've actually launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund Galactiminer: Evolved's development and help accelerate it into the world. You may be wondering, accelerate it how? What's the benefit? Aren't your team members volunteers? Yes, yes they are. However, a Kickstarter campaign would change that. There would be both paid and volunteer employees - unless funds prove to be insufficient. The most important thing that the funds would do is allow me to quit my job and work on Galactiminer full time. A chance to truly learn more about what I want to do and how to do it better, and a chance to build a game without school or work or anything else interfering. A chance to truly bring Galactiminer to life, and to launch Elaztek for real. So, why the subtitle? Why is it called Galactiminer: Evolved, and not just Galactiminer? Well, there are two main reasons that both go hand in hand. First off, there's stuff from various corners of the Elaztek, Haloman Development, and other websites that describe Galactiminer in the context of the original idea. Which leads into the other main reason - this Galactiminer is drastically different from the Galactiminer idea as it was in 2013. I won't guarantee that the subtitle won't be dropped later, but for the time being - we're going to be sticking with the subtitle (even though you'll still probably see me and others refer to it as just Galactiminer). The Future of Project: Infinity and the Blamite Game Engine So, what of Blamite and Project: Infinity? Will they fall to the shadows, never to be touched again? Will they never see the light of day? Absolutely not - we have no plans to abandon either of these projects. It will take time, but when we make a promise - we keep it. We will be temporarily departing from Blamite and Infinity for a bit, but when the time is right, Blamite will come to life. It will be used to power all games under Elaztek once it's capable of making quality games. However, we want to develop a product that can actually be sold before that point first. What if the Kickstarter doesn't get funded? We've got some ideas, but we're going to wait and see how the Kickstarter goes before we announce any other plans. Wrap-Up If you have any questions regarding all things Galactiminer - be it joining our team, what the gameplay will be like, or even suggestions for anything along the road, or anything else - feel free to ask away on this topic! If you wish to help ensure this project comes to life, support and/or share our Kickstarter campaign: http://kck.st/2N6bpPv To visit the Galactiminer: Evolved website: <TBA> To read the Galactiminer FAQ: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2002163451/galactiminer-evolved/faqs

You are a soldier on the UNSD Testament. Your ship was sent to explore a disturbance on this new and unexplored world. You’re preparing to gear up for a reconnaissance mission when suddenly - all the lights go out. The emergency lights kick on, the sirens start blaring. The ship is under attack. The Captain gives orders to abandon ship. You and your fellow soldiers board an escape pod and are launched towards the planet. Your escape pod has a rough landing. Most of the passengers die on the impact, but you and a few marines survive. You and your squadmates climb out of the pod and watch as the ship you escaped from is bombarded and slowly crashes onto the planet. You’re on your own now, you only have your armor, your squadmates, and the world around you. What you do from here is up to you. Welcome to Galactiminer, soldier.

This is a change that actually happened a while back, but apparently everybody just plain forgot to announce it to the public. Better late than never, though, right? So, we don't have any gameservers anymore. Just Cause 2, Ark, Don't Starve Together, CSGO, and Unturned servers are now offline. All their files have been copied over to Chaotic United's dedicated server, so that should we want they can be reintroduced. Michael wrote a "Closing FAQ" a while back, to attach to the official announcement. That FAQ is at the bottom of this announcement in the spoiler. Most of that pertains to Raven Runner, however, so allow me to go into more details on the non-Raven Runer side of things. First of all, if these servers ever come back, you will find them over on Chaotic United. Here at Elaztek, we make games - and the only reason these servers were ever branded as Elaztek is a result of some of our team being unhappy with the direction of Chaotic United at that point in time. People didn't want to be involved in CU anymore, and thus the servers were kept up under the Elaztek name. As time passed, things changed at CU and the feelings of the people here did as well - hence why the files for these servers are back in CU's hands. Any effort that was formerly put into maintaining these servers is now going to be put towards the primary goal of Elaztek Studios: game and software development. If you do wish for these servers to return, you'll have to ask over on Chaotic United. The server IP's have been removed from the services block on forums page, and all the subforums have been archived. On an unrelated note, incase you didn't see the previous announcement addendum, we updated all the banners of our own screenshots - with the exception of a select few. Despite the joking blurb on that announcement, these screenshots are entirely allowed under the Microsoft Game Content Usage Rules. We hope to have more to share soon! @JTKreates has been making some good progress with the Eon Game Engine - it's not quite ready to show off publicly yet, but it's coming along nicely. That's a wrap on today's announcement, keep an eye out for more down the road! Closing FAQ by Michael: