AI Personalities: Adam Recounts His Journey Down The Rabbit Hole
Adam - @adam_blahuta Hey fellow space junkies! The creative journey of game development is very strange. If your goal is to engage players with novel experiences, design innovation is a powerful tool. The inherent challenge is that it's difficult to understand a problem in a vacuum. You have to try different approaches and see how they succeed and fail before you start getting an accurate picture. And you never know how deep the rabbit hole goes until you've already started falling into it. In order to do justice to the thing you're trying to build, you have to be willing...
Systems Design, Spreadsheets, and Data Visualization: An Astrobase Command Weekly Update
Hi everybody, We're going to keep this week's update very short because we've been driving hard to tackle a key milestone, and have been focusing our efforts on production. We've just wrapped up a meeting where Dave exposed his latest (and hopefully final, Stars Willing!) systems design in its glorious entirety. It's super exciting, as we've really been into the weeds for quite some time, using interim systems, and haven't had an opportunity to see Astrobase Command as a fully integrated project in a while. It's also a thing of beauty; at least if you're into spreadsheets and elegant mathematical...
Revamping Space Bureaucracy: Upgrading the Desktop
Adam - @adam_blahuta Hey everybody! This week was a continuation of last week's desk work. Along with a bunch of bug fixes, I got the new rolodex up and running. Not only does it look a lot nicer than the last one, but its interaction flow is a lot better and its shape allows us to use a nice graphical trick to reduce the number of actual cards displaying inside it, which helps performance. I also started integrating the filing cabinet, which will allow us to better manage character personnel profiles and provide an accessible dumping spot for documents players...
The Membranous Plant: Your Generator When You Crave That Sweet Biochemical Energy
The Membranous Plant! For all your biochemical energy production needs! Daniel - @Polygonatron Hi everyone! This week I've been continuing my work on the social rooms. It's great fun to be able to put in some focused time to get these right and create interesting new designs. Adam - @adam_blahuta Hey space-friends! I'm glad to finally be coding full-time on the project again! My first priority this week was to improve our development quality of life. I started with a bunch of overdue bug fixes that were blocking off areas of the game and freezing our editor on a regular...
Electrochemically charging your week with another space station power plant
Daniel - @Polygonatron Hi everybody! This week I've been able to work more on the Biochemical Plants, it's great fun to get way out there in designing these visuals! Here you can see the electrochemical plant risen from its shell during operation. Dave - @Dave_Astrobase Hey guys, This week I continued on missions, primarily integrating a lot of the detailed designs back into the overview. Also worked on the modules where mission mechanics interact with the Astrobase!
In Dev Feature
Combustion Plants: Powering Your Way To a Cozier Space Station
Daniel - @Polygonatron Hi everybody! This week I've finally gotten back to properly work on more sections or rooms. Specifically I'm working on the Biochemical Plants (power generators, not flowers and such this time). It's very nice to be able to work on something less interconnected than GUI for a while as those things (desk stuff for example) have a lot of dependencies that limit their possibility space as they need to do three things; fit well on the desk with the other components, look good, and perform their tasks in an intuitive and useful manner. Since we are all...
Astrobase Dev Update: Even Indie Sci-Fi Games Need To Invest in Media Analytics
Max - @Max_Shields Hi everyone! I spent the week gathering data to help us shape our social media and marketing plans. As a small indie team, we certainly don't have the budget to hire large marketing firms to give us ready-made cheat sheets. Drawing inspiration from the immortal MacGuyver, I used some duct tape and pop caps to whip up a homemade analysis. Without getting into mind numbing detail, I pored over information from Kickstarter, Twitter, Steamspy and Google Trends to paint a picture of what we have done in the past and how other projects have tackled the problem...
In Dev Feature
Weekly Dev Update – September 30th, 2016
Daniel - @Polygonatron Hi Everybody! This week I've finished up the work on the doors (last week I forgot to add blast doors, whoops) as well as doing some preliminary work on a side project that might turn out great, I'll tell you more when it's further along. Oh! I also made the new rolodex to go with the new rolodex cards from our big refresh of the ingame desk. The new rolodex ingame, The portrait is still missing but it gives you the general idea. Dave - @Dave_Astrobase Hey guys! This week I had a touch of the flu....
Weekly Dev Update – September 23rd, 2016
Adam - @adam_blahuta Hey space-friends! This has been another week of "other business" for me! What free time I've had left has been split between writing some small quality-of-life tech around running code asynchronously to make better use of multi-core processors and putting together a long-term plan for Jellyfish. We've got a lot of interesting ideas and I look forward to sharing some of them with you! Dave - @Dave_Astrobase Hey guys, this week I began designing the Mission state-machine in excel. This will serve as the template for programming/implementation. Basically this is the second to last major step before...
