Weekly Dev Update – September 18th, 2014

Hey everyone! Now that we’ve shipped the website, we’re excited to start talking about the game on a regular basis again. We’re trying to commit to at least 2 posts a week. We’ll be doing screenshots/video/general interest posts on Tuesdays and a Weekly Dev Update on Thursdays, where the whole team will talk about what we worked on that week.

If there’s anything specific you’d like to see or would like us to talk about, make sure to pipe up in the forums!

Adam

Last week, I was able to sort through Daniel’s section assets and fixed up the system responsible for putting a module’s content visuals together. I also added the functionality to create a station from code, something that used to only be possible from the normal construction flow.

As a result, I was able to generate our current starter station, which contains all the necessary sections for a struggling civilization to survive, at least for a little while (quarters, dining, power, storage, recruitment, sensors, mission control, etc.).

This is my view of the game from inside Unity
This is my view of the game from inside Unity (Blue sections are ones Daniel hasn’t made yet)

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be focusing on integrating the jobs that the starter station offers, as well as the AI actions those jobs give an assigned character. If you’re interested in how the character AI system works, I’ll do a dev feature post on it sometime soon.

Daniel

Hello! This week I’ve worked mainly on Datapad UI stuff. They are however not ready to be shown off just yet so here’s some different sleeping positions I made this week.

Depending on the character personality and mood they will use different poses when sleeping. I'm thinking the last guy didn't have a good day.
Depending on the character personality and mood they will use different poses when sleeping. I’m thinking the last guy didn’t have a good day.

Oh! I’ve also gotten myself one of those twitter thingies so I spent some time trying to figure that stuff out. You can find me @Polygonatron.

Dave

This week I’ve been working on procedurally generated narrative.

The characters in the game all have personalities, defined by a combination of the existing 274 traits. How people behave towards one another, and the conversations they have, is governed by the interactions between personalities.

Once a scenario is determined, the next step is putting this into words. Officers in charge of an away team write mission reports which sum up all the happenings on the mission. This includes things like combat, but also descriptions of the inter-personal interactions that occurred between the team. Later this can be fed into a friendship matrix.

The goal here is to have readable Logs of these characters, where narratives are unique and compelling — similar in Star Trek how many episodes start by reading a personal narrative written by some character key to the story.

The first iteration, and test-case is done — which is simple descriptive conversation. Now it’s about using that framework and adding all the things that might happen on a mission.

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