Hey everybody! We’re continuing to hammer away at the first pre-alpha build. We know you’re really looking forward to getting your hands on something playable and we’ll try to get that to you real soon! In the meantime, here are our weekly updates!
Dave
Recently I just finished coding all the different pieces of procedurally generated subplots and storyarcs, which can happen to characters on a mission, much like in [INSERT YOUR FAVOURITE SCI-FI SHOW]. And then testing it with our first basic example. It works! Yes, that took the whole week.
Left to do is integrating the code into the existing mission code, and doing the rewards. And text cleanup. And some corner case stuff like narrative perspectives (whether the mission leader is also the main character of a storyarc, or not).
Daniel
Hello! this week I’ve worked on face bits. In order to allow for a greater diversity in facial features we obviously need a wider range of facial features to select from. It turns out that while painting a single nose, eye, mouth etc is not that much work the amount of work does not only increase by the amount of features that need to be painted but it also means that you have to work at maintaining consistency across them all.
Of course, another thing that pops up when you introduce more options into a system such as this is that certain combinations of features show that some part of the previous work has some technical or artistic issues that need to be addressed, this as you might imagine leads to a lot of back and forth in fixing everything so it’s combined appearance is not a broken one.
Adam
This week, I wrapped up some remaining tasks related to module destruction and plugging the AI behavior into construction. Previously, when you picked what you wanted to put in a module and the build team to assign, it would just kind of appear out of nowhere.
Now, it gets placed but the members of the build crew walk into the module and “work” (read “using the animation that makes them stand around”). Also, when it comes to module destruction, it turns out it wasn’t a trivial matter to disconnect modules from their neighbors.
The rest of my week was spent working on mission control. So, now we can target a planet we have in sensor data, assign a mission controller, plan a route of known locations on the planet and then assign a team and send them out.
There’s only one piece of the puzzle still missing: mission reports and completion. Once we have those, all of the core features will be represented in the game in some (probably broken, ugly and hard to use) form. Then, it’ll just be a matter of getting people’s hands on it, taking in the feedback and improving it until we’re happy we have something ready for Early Access!
