Forensic Friday 16: Experiments and Deliveries
Hello, everyone! We have come crashing back from a period of highly spontaneous update blogs to (hopefully) weekly update blogs. Forensic Friday will now in-fact be on Fridays, every week! This means 2 things, very frequent updates and very small updates. The matter of fact is weekly updates tend to be smaller than monthly ones but in the end it doesn’t matter how big the updates are as long as they are consistent! Every week aside from developmental updates, we will try to release updates on other aspects of the game such as lore, web development side of things etc (barring this one…I had the flu :/). This blog will purely be some developmental work we did this week, but expect more varied content each week! There will always be a chance that a Forensic Friday will have to be cancelled, but that would only happen in exception circumstances! Anyways onto what we’ve been working on!
Progress on Experimentation #
Over the past week I’ve been slowly etching towards finished the main gameplay loop of experimentation! Above you can see how we think the layout for containment cells will look, at least for low security ones. We have 2 new rooms, staging rooms and observation rooms. Staging rooms act as literal staging for operations in and out of the containment cell such as inspections, maintenance and experiments. We imagine players will create airlocks that double up staging rooms, for the best protection and utility! Whilst working on experiments, a few new features have been implemented such as:
Deliveries
Finally that road has been given a use. The art is pretty much production ready! (JOKE) I am legally required to mention that was a joke… When you build a delivery region by the road, delivery vans will automatically stop there to deliver items you request on to your site. We have tried to leave the code for vehicles as expandable as possible so perhaps you could expect a tank delivering some much needed ordinance during a maybe not too great containment breach!
Anomalous Holding Zone
Another new region, not to be confused with zones which are a totally separate mechanic…but anyhow, Anomalous holding zones! What are they? Not a zone! What is it used for? To store anomalies before they are transported to their containment cell. But how can an anomaly be transported to a containment cell, if the containment cell is the only thing that can contain it? Well…it’s a sort of chicken and egg problem, and our solution to that is by stuffing the chicken into a unbreakable box that unfortunately does break after 48 hours or so. Introducing… the “anomaly transport vessel” (Not the small placeholder at the corner of the region in the image above). A vessel that is pretty much a perfect containment cell for any anomaly but only for a short period of time, after which it explodes, releasing the anomaly contained within. So you might want to make sure this thing is in a containment cell before it goes off, but don’t fret you’ll get plenty of warning!
You can see here how NPCs will haul the transport vessel from the delivery van and take it to a containment cell when it is assigned one!
Assigning Scientists and Convicts To Experiments
The Proposal Menu has been getting some love and attention! It’s now possible to assign specific scientists to observe the experiment and Category C’s to …well hopefully not die in the experiment! Please note that the UI is technically all placeholder! We intend to completely redo the UI using a completely different UI framework because frankly how it’s done currently is quite painful to expand/easily change/over all work on!
Early Music preview #
Something that coincidentally also came up in suggestions this week was music. If anyone wasn’t aware, we have @bastard man working on composing a soundtrack to complement the game. We will be releasing small extracts in the coming days/weeks and any praise and criticism is welcome. We hope you like the direction this is taking, and do say hi to @bastard man in chat!
Let there be power #
After finishing summer work, I’ve been back to work on the game since last week, and formally spending an hour or 2 every day since Monday. The first thing we did back together was an expedition to finally refactor the last part of the code base from our ugly singleton based past, to the new event-based style. After 3-4 hours this was finally achieved and besides the inevitable bugs that came off doing this, they’ve mostly been ironed out.
A copy of dev notes on this are as follows:
- Fixed switches which uncovered that most things to do with connecting power stuff together was in some shape or form broken which is also fixed.
- Fixed bugs with infinite power which is nice.
- Fixed a long-time visual quirk with transformers. When connecting, the power lines wouldn’t go to the correct part on the sprite - now it does. The higher power type always connects to the green part of the sprite, and lower power type always connects to the red part. This is also shown by the ghost preview lines when trying to connect and disconnect a line using a wire manually, by having one centralised place to get the coordinates rather than going by closest Euclidean distance and guessing how the line would look
Case Closed #
If that rambling was entertaining (or probably a bit sad) then at least one thing I’ll look forward to is spending time on making a specification for our Category Cs (Prisoners) using our new pipeline of development before starting implementation! We hope to keep this continued effort up every week from now on!
Have a good week everyone!
The Team,
Plasmarc Studios