Weekly Dev Update – September 25th, 2014

This week, we’ve been super excited by how a bunch of the features we’ve been designing and talking about for a while are finally making their way into the game!

Adam

Since I got general assignments and their AI component working last week (specifically for assignments to quarters), this week was about getting assignable jobs in. I started by knocking out all the reactor jobs.

Now, when you assign a crew member to a reactor job, they will activate the reactor, the power output gets spread across the station and the character’s skills then determine how quickly the reactor’s durability goes down and how often accidents can happen.

astrobase_command_reactor_job

 
I’m also wrapping up the generic inventory back-end so I can start storing resources like food, medicine, minerals, items, etc. This will allow me to bang out maintenance and medical jobs next.

Daniel

This week I’ve been working mainly on the remaining sections used in the starter station. This involves figuring out what the respective jobs involve and how to best visualize that within the style of the game.

Clearly working in Mission Control requires some serious multitasking skills, managing up to 5 missions at a time.

Clearly working in Mission Control requires some serious multitasking skills, managing up to 5 missions at a time.

An additional challenge lies in something like the Command Station or the Mission Control as pictured above, where it needs to be both user place-able and needing to work in a situation together with neighboring related sections.

For example, if the person in the Command Station were to sit in his/her own walled off room it would really not feel like Kirk/Picard on the bridge but they would feel like a bureaucrat slaving away with their paperwork.

Dave

Still working on procedural generated narratives, but I’ve integrated the system fully into missions. So in the last few days I’ve been working on missions and procgen story in parallel, because the story needs to describe what’s actually happening in a mission.

There are a lot of subtle details to this! So one I tackled recently was handling all the pronoun cases (he/she/I/we/they/it) for nominative, objective, etc. This is especially relevant because the mission reports are written from the perspective of the mission leader. And part of procedural storygen is GRAMMAR!

I’ve also been expanding the set of “narrative actions” that units can take on an away mission. I started with conversations and moved onto commands last week.

This week I’ve been working on other mission activities, so during downtime on a planet a crewmember might go for a walk, or analyze some data, or even sketch the acid lake looming in the distance! All depending on his personality. And this isn’t narrative fluff, the goal is to tie all things crew do back into the happenings of the mission.

As always, if you’ve got suggestions for topics you’d like to hear more about in the next dev feature, make sure to tell us as much in the forums or on IRC! See you next week, space-friends!

Post your comment

Food For Thought
"oh my God! — it's full of stars!" A Brief Tutorial on Creating Procedural Star Fields Using Substances.
Join our Newsletter!

Please fill in the form and submit to subscribe to the Astrobase Command newsletter to stay informed an up to date on all things Astrobase!