Weekly Dev Update – October 9th, 2014

Dave

This week I worked on more mission logic, and mission AI. This involves the Mission Leader sending out either solo characters or smaller groups of characters to perform tasks and complete objectives in different areas of a zone.

Does he split up his team and have characters complete objectives simultaneously, or does he find safety in numbers and is willing to have a longer (but presumably safer) mission? Does he avoid the crashed alien ship he discovered that wasn’t detected by long-range scanners, or does send in the marines?

His AI and personality has to determine all these things, and the tasked units need to follow orders given their own personality and how much they respect the mission leader.

Max

This week has been an iconic one. Or at least, it’s been about making resource icons.

Since crafting is going to be a big part of the player experience, we’ve come up with a list of 17 mundane and exotic resources to work with.

Resource Dev Update_Low

I want to build immersion by designing icons that look like they’d be found on a control panel in a real space station, rather than those that are commonly found in games. This can make things interesting, because many of our resources don’t have solid real-life references to draw from.

It does give plenty of room for the imagination to wander. After all, degenerate matter isn’t what Astrobase Crews make when they get some shore leave.

Daniel

Hello! Still working on portraits and nothing is available that is good enough to show to the public. I did however put together this gif that cycles through the 64 visual variations of blunt(ish) melee weapons. Of course allowing for color variations will give many many many more visual variations.

weapon_melee_mace_variations_02

Adam

Hey everybody! This week was another big one for crew jobs and station life in general. I’ll stick to the things you care about.

First off, I integrated the social pillar of station life (basic pillars are eating, sleeping, working and socializing) by integrating a Bar. So, when people have time off, they’ll go hang out there and mingle with other crew members.

Next, since Dave added genders to characters for the purposes of using the right words when formulating mission reports, I used the opportunity to go from 1 to 4 character models for characters. So, for our 2 current genders, there are crewmen and officer uniforms, which reflect their current rank.

Finally, I added skill gains to characters when performing jobs. There are two types of gains: a basic time-based increase when they work their shifts and job-specific action gains, like when you accept a new recruit your recruiter sent you.

We’re likely going to be moving our Dev Update posts to Fridays in the future to give us more breathing room between this and the Dev Feature.

As always, come visit us in the forums if you have requests for Dev Features in the future?

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