Forensic Friday 15: THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE
Hi everyone, it’s understandable if there’s some angst over our lack of communication over the last month or so. As we’ve probably said before, our idea of a summer sprint didn’t pan out. With myself finishing a summer internship just last week, @𝕋 𝔻 𝟛 𝟝 𝟘 was essentially left solely to work on the project until now which wasn’t the most ideal situation. Now that the summer holidays are almost over, it does mean that there isn’t going to be any full-time work on the game right now with university just around the corner. We plan to dedicate a 1 hour paired work session every day around our university schedules. Even an hour every day should allow us to make steady progress compared to the random bursts we’ve done so far. My long-term plan is to take a year off after I graduate to get this project finished, but in reality, planning that far ahead has rarely worked out so I think seeing how these 1-hour sessions work with us will give us more of an idea of a timeframe for getting a playable game out there. We’re both working on a very small side project that shouldn’t take more than a fortnight, and once that finishes, we’ll both be at university ready to start. Now that’s out of the way, onto some of the stuff @𝕋 𝔻 𝟛 𝟝 𝟘 has been working on.
The Progress of Science #
Hey, everyone! I’m sure some of you will be interested to hear what we have been working on. Well for the past few weeks, though a bit inconsistently I must admit, I’ve been working on scientists! There is a long list of features that need to be implemented to get scientists done, which includes whole new systems like research, experimentation and even containing anomalies, though I must note many of these features are going to be barebones and filled out with more functionality later since I don’t want to introduce scope creep and never get scientists done. So what have I implemented so far?
The laboratory #
The game now has a laboratory room region to which scientist NPCs automatically assign themselves during work hours. Right now there is no way to assign specific types of scientists to different laboratories, but I’m working on a right-click contextual menu to allow for easy access to complex actions. Currently the types of scientists you have in a laboratory contribute directly to the “lab bonus”. Scientists love working with peers in the same scientific field, so this promotes building multiple specialised labs rather than just one huge lab.
You can see the scientists flocking to the laboratory during work hours
Scientists can have 4 main scientific fields: physics, biology, chemistry and computer science, with numerous subfields which can affect micro-bonuses. So if you are really hardcore, you could make incredibly specialised micro-laboratories within the same room. Scientists also have the functionality now to gain experience, however, there are currently no sources of experience in the game. Though that is about to change.
Experimentation, Oh the humanity! #
Currently, I’ve been tackling the biggest feature of the game so far, and maybe one of the most important (at least to the gameplay loop), which is experimentation. Experiments exist in the form of proposals which are made by the scientists on your site, or by external third parties affiliated with the corporation. As of late, I have finished all the necessary frameworks to accept proposals and such. With that game a totally new UI screen which we have just been calling the “Deep Menu” or “Advanced Menu”. In short, it’ll contain all the stuff about contracts, anomalies, hiring, and basically all the bureaucratic elements of the game. So what’s next is really making the necessary systems to carry out experiments. This means one of 3 things. Anomalies will need to be implemented, at least in some simple respect. The research system will also need to be implemented, at least simply. Lastly, it’ll take time, but really the longest thing will be figuring out the best game design for all of the different aspects to make the process of experimentation fun and rewarding. Here’s what the deep menu looks like now, there’s a lot of potential here for a lot of deep menus and mechanics!
Case Closed #
Well, thanks for reading the Forensic Friday. We hope you can look forward to the third year of development, we are looking forward to making it the best year yet. Thats all I have to say, I better get cracking on experimentation!
Case closed.
The Team,
Plasmarc Studios