The holidays are over and the grey, damp weather of a new year is upon us. If you’re anything like me, you’re doubtless standing in the shadows of your dusty and disused attic, illuminated only by the weak flickering of an elderly gas lamp. The harsh whistle of the wind is probably imposing itself under shale and through cracked panes, filling the room with an uncertain and disagreeable atmosphere. Shivering, you might pull your heavy woolen shawl close around your shoulders, and look down upon the truculent heathland that surrounds your once-proud abode. Day after day – week after week – you repeat this ritual, staring out from the wreckage of your past. Standing vigil for the return of video games.

Well, we have good news.

After eight months of First Access release through Itch.io, we’re at a point where we feel Beacon is ready to make the jump to Steam Early Access. We’d like to thank everyone who took a chance on the game so far; it’s thanks to your support and feedback that the game is in a strong enough position to open it up to a wider audience, and we hope you’ll continue to enjoy the game as we progress towards full release.

Beacon will release into Steam Early Access on the 27th February 2019 for $19.99 (as well as an initial 10% launch discount). If you can’t wait that long, you can wishlist the game right now, and of course the game is already available on Itch.io. Everyone who purchases the game through Itch.io will also receive a free Steam key for the game upon Early Access release.

Before that, though, we just released another major patch to Itch.io First Access. Along with a boatload of fixes and a couple of new items, Patch 1.9A also had some long-awaited feature improvements:

• Improvements to the continue system – players will now be able to resume a game on the same level they quit on, with all items and weapons preserved.

•Tutorial screen update – The initial tutorial screen has been redesigned with improved flow and visuals to better help new players quickly get to grips with the game.

Patch 1.9A is available now for everyone who has purchased the game through Itch.io!

Finally, we wanted to give you a glimpse at a major part of the new content arriving with the Steam Early Access build — level 5. Those of you who have been playing Beacon already will probably have noticed that, as you progress further through the game, you find yourselves making your way closer and closer to the mysterious PRISM facility. Level 5 allows you to finally breach the mysterious PRISM vault, and along the way introduces new mechanics and gameplay that players will have to interact with in order to progress further.

We’ve put together a roadmap to chart out the coming months on Steam Early Access, and we’ll be going into each step in greater detail soon. For the moment, though, here’s a sneak peek at what you can expect:

That’s everything for now. We’re so excited – and scared, and anxious, and excited – to finally release Beacon to a wider audience. We hope you all enjoy it, and continue to follow us as we develop and add to the game over the coming months.

- Joe

[This content originally appeared in our Beacon newsletter, sent out on 26th March 2018. You can sign up for future newsletters here.]

Beacon at PAX East

First of all, for those of you who are local to Boston, or are heading out there specially for the show, we’re excited to once again be in attendance at PAX East as part of the Figs & Co booth. We’ll be exhibiting Beacon alongside a host of other great indie games, including Nectar Vector, Spartan Fist and many more! You can find a full list of the games at the booth and more info on the Figs & Co website.

We’ll be at the booth for the whole show, April 5th to 8th, and we can’t wait to see you all there!

Itch.io Refinery

It’s the news that at least a portion of you have been waiting for. At long last, we’re getting ready to open up access to Beacon to the public, through the itch.io Refinery.

What does that mean? Well, in the distressingly near future, we’ll be making an early build of Beacon available to purchase through this service. This will initially be in a limited quantity, and we want to stress that this will be an earlybuild. It’s only a portion of the full game, and things will undoubtedly break, but we feel that enough of the core game is ready for us to let outsiders get their hands on it. So, if you’re eager to play Beacon and to help us make it as good as possible, keep an eye on our Twitter account and website in the coming weeks.

Why not Steam Early Access?
While we considered releasing Beacon through Steam Early Access, ultimately it didn’t provide us with enough control over how we released the game at this early stage. We wanted to make sure that the game goes out to a (relatively) small number of people who understood that they weren’t purchasing a finished product, and who might be interested in helping us shape the game as it comes to completion. Don’t worry, Beacon will still be coming to Steam in the end, and anyone who purchases the game through itch.io will also receive a Steam key once the game is released there.

How much will it cost?
The initial itch.io Refinery release will be priced at $19.99. This will get you the itch.io build and all future updates, as well as a Steam key once the game is released there.

What will be in the itch.io Refinery build?
The first 4 levels of the game will be included, with 20+ enemy types, over 50 potential mutations, and more than 125 different items (including over 50 weapons). Naturally, as we continue to develop and add to the game, the itch.io build will be updated to include new content.

Will Beacon be coming to the Xbox Insider Program?
Unfortunately, as a small team we just aren’t able to release the game on both Xbox and PC at the same time. We’re still committed to bringing Beacon to the Xbox One, but this may not be until a full release is ready.

Beacon at GDC 2018

Finally, we’re fresh back from showing Beacon at GDC, where Unity was kind enough to host us alongside a bunch of amazing games at the Unity Art Challenge booth. We had a great time showing off the game, thanks to everyone who came along to check it out! You can find out about our fellow exhibitors at the booth on the GDC website.

Hey, it’s Joe back again for a roundup of everything we’ve been sharing over the past couple of weeks. This time that includes a bit more than just the standard screenshots & gifs.

Keep reading

As promised, here’s our bi-weekly round up of everything we’ve been throwing around on our social media pages. Enjoy!

Keep reading

Hey, would you look at that. This place still exists!

We know it’s been kind of quiet over here on the devblog lately, so we’re taking a bit of a different tack. The previous longer, in-depth blogs will still pop up occasionally, but to keep things updated in between we’re going to start showing off the smaller stuff we already post on Twitter and Facebook.

So, every two weeks or so, we’ll be posting some nice new screenshots like the ones below. Check them out!

Keep reading

Now that GDC 2016 is over, we thought it was about time we updated the Beacon devblog! We thought we’d go through a quick recap of our GDC experience as well as update with all the latest media, including our freshly released trailer.

GDC 2016

This year was our largest presence at GDC since we initially formed the company in 2013. Along with being accepted into Microsoft’s ID@Xbox Loft Event, we were also invited last minute to exhibit at the Unity pavilion on the expo floor! It ended up being a great platform to formally announce Beacon on and our best GDC to date.

ID@Xbox Loft Event

Applying to this event was our main focus for the last 3 months and pushed us to finalize and polish a lot of new features in the build that we wouldn’t have been focusing on otherwise, which was very good for us. Along with pushing to have all of the core features fully implemented, we finally introduced controller support and were able to make some large strides towards refining the gameplay. Although the build we ended up bringing with us to GDC was still a bit rough around the edges, we are still proud of what we accomplished and were very happy with the response it got at the event.

Showing at the ID@Xbox event was a new experience for us, as it was a press only event and none of us had ever really talked to press before. It was much more laid back than we were expecting, and very tightly run. After the first few journalists came through we had our talking points down, and it was very relaxed having people come through the rest of the day to play.  A highlight of the ID@Xbox event was having Phil Spencer play Beacon and give feedback on it!

We’d like to give a huge thanks to Microsoft for believing in our game and hosting us at the event! It was a great start to GDC and the best platform for our announcement we could have hoped for.

Thanks to Greg and John from the Element team (http://elementgame.com/) for keeping us company while exhibiting next to us as well!

Announcement Trailer

Once we were accepted to the ID@Xbox event we continued to polish up the build and put in some final features, but we also started to finalize our trailer that we had been working on for months prior. Over about 2 weeks we brought the trailer from a basic scene with a few temporary animations to the final video we announced with! As always we wished we would have had a bit more time to polish it up, but overall we’re very happy with how it came out as well as with the media coverage we got from the announcement. If you missed it, check it out below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKXeK1XcVow

Unity Expo

Us exhibiting at the Unity pavilion was very last minute, but we were very excited they asked us to come show the game with them. We’re always happy to help promote the tools we use to make Beacon, and it was a great way to get to meet and get feedback from people interested in the game.

The day after the ID@Xbox event, we showed up at 8AM to the expo floor to start setting up our station where we exhibited Beacon for the 3 expo days. It was a tough 3 days, but luckily we had a few members able to rotate in and out of exhibiting so we could take breaks, and it was definitely worth it to get all of the playtesting and feedback we got from watching people play for 8 hours a day.

Thanks to Unity for hosting us at their pavilion and believing in the game! A highlight for all of us at the event was definitely walking into the expo floor and seeing our game up on Unity’s big screen. We’re all very grateful that we were able to be a part Unity’s presence at GDC.

Post GDC

Now that GDC is over, we’ll be getting back into development of the game. Right now our focus is to push more content in and to do some final polish on all of the currently implemented mechanics before hopefully finding some Publisher support.

We’ll also be getting back to doing monthly blog posts now that we’ve got our announcement out of the way.

To close off the post, here’s a media dump of some new images of the game, as we haven’t posted any here on the blog in a while.

See you next month!

Hey everyone. Kiefen here again to talk about the weapons in Beacon!

In this blog post I’m going to go through the general design mantras I follow while we brainstorm weapons for Beacon, then we’ll go through a few of the starting weapons in the game based on Freja’s faction.

The one goal I have when designing a weapon for Beacon is for it to feel completely different than every other weapon in the game. Being that the player can only carry one weapon at a time, I aim to have each one to feel completely unique and change the way the game plays. Each weapon is designed to have one unique function that it performs well, whether it’s a rapid fire assault rifle or a severed witch’s head that fires explosive homing projectiles.

Our current approach to weapon design offers a bit less randomization than roguelikes like Binding of Isaac in that we don’t have dozens of mods that apply to every weapon. That’s not to say that we don’t have weapon mods that apply to all weapons, but it’s not a main focus for us right now to come up with dozens of mods that all work seamlessly with dozens of weapons due to the amount of time it takes to make sure every interaction between mods works seamlessly.

An example of this is that instead of providing a weapon mod that adds penetrating shots to whatever weapon you happen to be using, most of the Prism weapons will have penetrating shots as a unique property only found in weapons belonging to that faction. Other than saving on development time, we believe this also helps each faction’s weapons feel more unique and helps theme them more strongly to the faction outside of just having matching models and particle effects.

Now I’ll go into detail on a few of the starting weapons in Beacon that originate from Freja’s ship.

Ship Weapons

In the Beacon Universe, the most well known military weapons manufacturer is Kaiser-Schmid. With Freja being highly paid employee of a private military operation, all of the weapons originating from crashed pieces of Freja’s ship are manufactured by them. They are generally the weakest weapons in the game, and will often be available in the first level or two as a quick upgrade over the plasma pistol. Their functions are simple and they are quite easy to handle. 

Click on the weapon names to load a gif of them in action also! 

Plasma Pistol

Being the starting weapon in Beacon, the Plasma Pistol doesn’t pack much of a punch, but you can make use of the semi-automatic firing mechanism to fire off shots as quickly as you can click. Even though it’s just the basic starting weapon, if you can get the muscle memory to fire quick enough it’s quite powerful.

Assault Rifle

The Assault Rifle is the first automatic weapon you’re likely to run into in Beacon. It sacrifices accuracy for the ability to consistently spray over an area with a barrage of plasma rounds. It’s very good against larger groups or large single targets, but individual enemies can become difficult hit precisely.

Riot Shotgun

A solid early upgrade over the Plasma Pistol, the Riot Shotgun fires a wave of plasma projectiles, giving you a wide area of weaker damage at range or a heavy burst of damage on a single target from close up. Being one of the first weapons to drop in the game I expect people to spend a lot of time with it. It was one of the first weapons we put into the game, but it’s still one of my favorites as it gives you the chance to feel very powerful early by being able to one shot lower tier enemies with good positioning. It also is the first weapon we implemented that has a unique reload mechanic, reloading one shell at a time instead of with a magazine.

Grenade Launcher

One of the most powerful Ship weapons, it fires off high impact grenades that deal heavy damage in a small AoE. The high damage output comes at the price of it being a Heavy weapon, removing the Freja’s ability to Sprint while wielding it. It will be interesting to see how many people will favor its killing power over the ability to sprint. If you mutate your Speed statistic down though I’d definitely avoid picking it up.

In the future we’ll go through a few of each of the other Faction’s weapons, where things start to get a lot more interesting. That’s all for now though! Check back soon for another blog post. We’ve had some pretty big developments with the game the last couple months that we haven’t had a chance to post about much yet.