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Forensic Friday 10: Many Small Improvements go a Long Way

Hello all, we were slightly late with this one. It is in fact Saturday! Nevertheless we actually have some progress with the game. So straight onto the updates:

Strength In numbers #

This is not a huge one but it is now possible to select multiple NPCs and tell them to pathfind to a position. They try to not overlap positions, however there are a few bugs to iron out here as sometimes they all path to the same position regardless.

NPCs Pathing

Get that snow outta here #

Rooms no longer burdened with snow! Rooms no longer fill up with snow, and are left beautifully clean!

Snow

Containment Zones, oooo #

Containment zones are also in the game now, currently they don’t interact with NPCs as we are yet to implement all the different NPC classes, but they are able to be created and can even be toggled on and off so aren’t always visible. The different Zones are planned as follows:

  • **Entrance zone **- All staff have free roam here
  • **Prison zone **- Prisoners are limited to this zone
  • **Light containment zone **- Staff movement is limited, guards have free movement.
  • **Heavy containment zone **- Only guards are allowed here and scientists if undergoing a test.

Containment Zone

While i was implementing these zones, I decided to fix the lag that came with Regions and zones in general, and now large zones/regions and be created and deleted with almost no overhead! (This gif is slightly old, the bug with text not updating when the region has been delete has been fixed)

regionszones

Smarter minds, better builds: Builder Improvements #

Builders have been completely rewritten, and now use a proper state machine to dictate all their actions. This allows for more complex behaviour to arise, which now means builders can queue up multiple construction jobs, collect resources for those jobs and do all the construction jobs at once.

builders

A snowy burder lifted: Snow slighty less laggy #

Snow now gets around 30fps on max time warp, but still is quite slow. Further optimisations may be done in the future but there isn’t much incentive to do so currently

snow

Case closed #

Those are all the major changes that I had to cover, activity has ramped up a bit since the Christmas holidays began, and with it expect more interesting updates! We are getting to a point where all the core NPC classes will need to be implemented, and the core gameplay loop can be implemented as well, which is exciting. The only few hurdles left are:

  • Multi-floor structural integrity
  • Fluid flow algorithm in pipes
  • Fully finishing NPC Scheduler
  • Implementing **Core **NPC classes such as:
    • Cooks
    • Prisoners (Big one)
    • Guards/Security, including arming NPCs with weapons and all logic behind weapons
  • Implementing anomalies and figuring out best design choices regarding them
  • Scientists and Research tree
  • Experimentation system
  • Finishing off non-core NPCs such as janitors etc.
  • Early raid system
  • Making “finalised” menus for it all i.e. Government Grant/financial/contract menu, Hiring menu, Inmate menu, Anomaly menu, Research Menu, General Facility menu containing things such as
    • Policies and staff restriction configuration, Lunchtime menus etc
  • Saving and loading everything(granted this is likely to be done alongside coding all the features above)
  • Creating core gameplay loop for government grants and receiving anomalies, receiving Category C inmates
  • MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT ACHIEVED
  • Facility raid system and adding basic defences aside from existing NPC guards, such as sand bags, mortars, bunkers etc.
  • Adding one or two anti-corporation groups, with custom “uniforms” and unique methods of attacking
  • Adding some losing conditions
  • Making world generation more interesting and adding biomes
  • Adding 20 or so anomalies, and a handful more anti-corporation groups to raid the players facility
  • Possibly finishing world map and integrating it into the game
  • Polishing game and releasing as Alpha/Early Access
  • ALPHA ACHIEVED

Everything post alpha would be additional content/updates, but the game would be in a playable state from then on. Right now the focus is getting to the minimum viable stage which is perhaps not as far off as it seems. If this roadmap makes you excited, that’s great; it sure does make us excited. Hopefully the addition of new developers helps speed up this process, and the summer sprint is a truly productive one. None of these steps will necessarily occur in specifically this order, but will likely roughly follow this roadmap. Anyways that’s all I have to say for this Forensic Friday, case closed.

Merry Christmas!🤶
The Team,
Plasmarc Studios