⭐ Forensic Friday 30: Visual Eye Candy
Hi everyone, we’re fashionably late as usual, and we bring the 30th edition of Forensic Friday. This week there’s a lot of visual eye candy, so grab a drink and snack and join us as we bring you through the new UI! (～￣▽￣)～
New UI #
There is good news and good news! These few weeks (til 27th of January) we are completely focused on the UI aspects of the game! We luckily found the perfect package that allows us to write our UI with the awesome power, utility and ease of web technologies! You can check out the new UI in the video above. Or look at some of the images below (keep in mind, the video is the most up to date version).
The UI was inspired by a post I saw on the r/Rimworld subreddit. I loved the aesthetic and flow of the UI, so with given permission, I emulated it somewhat, and I can’t thank the original concept artist enough. It was a solid concept and translated well, though I probably butchered it slightly in my heavily modified design!
The greatest artist steal, and this is what I stole! (I didn’t steal it, my boss requires me to say that <( ￣^￣)...)
Heres the Link!
| Pattern selection and such | Facility menu? What’s that? (None of the sub menus exist yet though ( ￣︿￣)) |
|---|---|
 |  |
NPC inspector, overview tab
NPC’s Bio!
NPC Skills!
NPC Relationships
| NPC Mental System Things! Lots of buffs and debuffs | Event Notifications! |
|---|---|
 |  |
Event Pop-ups!
The Menus To Come #
We have been thinking about some of the UIs that the game will have by early access, so here are the list of menus you will encounter in the game! Subject to change of course, but gets you thinking about some of the cool stuff we want you guys to be able to do with your facilities!
There is no need to talk about the architect menu since that’s self explanatory, but you may have noticed the “Facility” menu. This is quite a deep one, so here are some of the submenus you will see inside that Staff - Allows you to view staff shortages and hire new staff
Anomalies - **Allows you do view anomalies on site and their files, and add containment procedures to them
**Finances - Allows you to view your finances, data plots, how much Debt you have accrued etc.
Grants - Allows you to accept grants from Corporation
Category C - **Allows you to view category C intake, currently active gangs (this may be delegated to future “interrogation” mechanic)
**Researchers - **Allows you to view researchers on site, filter for things and view their bios
**Programs - ** Allows you to automate high level actions concerning all aspects of your facility
**Ethics - Allows you to view ethic ratings of your site and view monthly goals set by the ethics committee. You receive reputation bonuses for hitting monthly goals. Every month you also receive log of ethic violations which you can view here. (If you have too many violations, an inspector may come to site)
Security - Allows you to enforce site wide policies, manage id card access levels and restriction zones
Needs - Lets you view anonymous complaints from staff, and complaints from category C, so you may improve your facility’s amenities\
You may have also seen there is a “Service” menu. So what’s is that all about? The Service menu allows you to request external services from the Corporation, or deliver things to your site. This menu is all about external services outside your facility, that you can influence your facility with, hence the name.
Deliveries (& Browser) - **Allows you to browse an amazon-like store and order items to your facility. These items may be exotic, strange and serendipitous, but may be needed to contain anomalous with strange requirements, or just equip NPCs with certain things. Weapons would ordered from here too. **Deployment - ** Allows you to deploy OSTF to either your site, also allows you to deploy firefighters. **Ordnance - Allows you to order weapon strikes for certain price (or for free if on special program)
There you go, there are clearly some menus I missed out on. The Scheduler is quite self explanatory and research is too! Lenses is just the old views condense into a neat menu, so we have more space on the screen (See below). The world tab will show the world, which is also quite self explanatory, however the mechanics with the world are quite out of scope stuff, so this menu will likely not receive much love, for at least a good while! But we do have the hardest stuff out of the way concerning planets (rendering the planet), that was done almost a year and a bit ago! Talk about scope creep.
o(≧口≦)o 
It’s still here and working somewhat!! Wonder what sort of crazy stuff you could do on this screen
Anomaly Poll Winner #
The winner for this week was S-0087 - “Fear is only Skin Deep” by a landslide (well 2 votes). This will be our first properly chaotic anomaly so we’re really looking forward to sinking our teeth into this over the weekend in time for Monday! Thanks to everyone that voted, and be sure to keep you eyes peeled our Mechanical Mondays Blog for the deep dive into this, as well as the next vote!
Case closed #
That’s all for this case. We hope that you like the look of the new sleek UI. It’s much more enjoyable to work on than the previous Unity solution and is very scalable to new features which just makes the game feel that little more polished at the same time. A double win for us this time around!
Thanks for taking the time to read, as always, and we’ll see you on Monday for Mechanical Monday!
All the Best,
The Team,
Plasmarc Studios