Forensic Friday 32: Bad News and Good News. Overhauls all week round.
Hey everyone, this one is going to be a rather short one, and more of a transitionary Forensic Friday than anything else. There is slightly good news, and slightly bad news. I’ll start with the bad….
Slightly Bad News #
The slightly bad, albeit temporary news is that drumroll I am burnt out! As I said, not terrible news, but never pleasant. Over the past weeks I have been devoting all my waking hours to working on the UI Overhaul, which much to my naivety, I thought it was a good idea working overtime. So this burnout has kinda left the UI overhaul 95% finished (not a joke when I say that); but alas 95% finished is not finished! The funny thing about burnout is that the time was there to finish the last stretch, but the motivation wasn’t. Burnout is always on the horizon, but you never really acknowledge its existence until it’s too late.
Regardless! The bad news is also good news in a very contrived way.
Slightly Good News #
The good news! The good news is… that the UI overhaul is close enough to finished that we can move on. Sounds rather forced, but it is in-fact one of your policies concerning features and sticking to the roadmap. the roadmap says the UI overhaul ends with this Forensic Friday, so the best thing we can do is to bury for now, and slowly finish it in the gaps of development. It really boils down to just finishing a single menu and transferring functionality to a few buttons that no longer existed. All of this is a weekend job! So though bad, not very! And the good is that we are moving on to implement money, guards and security personnel, which sounds exciting!
More Overhauls: Health Systems #
As promised in last weeks FF, this is a full dive into our revamped modular damage system. Below shows a partial visual version of how we’re creating modules for NPCs. NPCs are split into areas: head, chest, abdomen, arms, legs, waist, hand and feet. Each of these areas can then contain body parts inside of themselves, in a tree structure much like the photo below. When you are attacked (at least by non anomalous means), one of the external areas will be effected. Depending on the type of attack received, then the underlying internal body parts could also be effected. The real beauty of this solution is that if we decide that we’ve gone too in depth, or not in-depth enough on 1 of the NPCs areas, we can edit this quite easily. Furthermore, this will allow us to implement some of the gameplay features we’ve mentioned in previous Mechanical Mondays. For instance, if you need to wear eye blocking head gear to avoid S-0087, now we can make the eyes be underneath this head gear, limiting the eyes capabilities, and therefore ensuring that protocols are met! Finally, this tree like structure means that if your NPC loses a body part, other body parts are affected as they should be.
Further into our health system, it works extremely similar to before but with a couple tweaks. Each body part when attacked has it’s own health statistic, and own bleeding rate. If the health stat becomes too low, we consider the body part to be unusable. In the case of an organ this means the organ dies. In the case of equipment we’d consider the equipment to be broken. The damage amount is determined on the attack type, and is the same across all body items and parts. This system is open to having specialised values for every body part, but for now, since we don’t have time to tinker and balance these amounts, we’ll be sticking with flat damage values across the board. Bleeding rate is totalled up from all body parts, and contributes to a persons total blood loss. Just as before, if a person loses too much blood they will become unconscious and then pass away. While behind the scenes, the location for all this happening has changed (in our effort to make this modular for not just NPC staff, but all NPCs), the behaviour has stayed exactly the same! Just as David mentioned in his part, the roadmap says that this feature should finish this week. And with that we will be moving on. This may mean some of the body parts in the diagram below don’t make it into the game right now, but the framework is here and that’s the most important thing!
Anomaly of the Week #
This weeks winner is** S-0135 - The Water Wraith** after some alleged vote rigging :eyes: It will randomly teleport throughout the facility and anyone who drinks from it will feel refreshed and rejuvenated, but if anyone at all damages it, it will suck any water in the room, killing anyone in it. This also refills it. If you want to exploit the moral boost you may want to refill it every now and then. We’ll see you on Monday for the final document, and how this fits in gameplay wise!
Case Closed #
That about wraps it up folks. Hope you enjoyed this weeks Forensic Friday. Time to close the case. Tune back in on Monday to catch a glimpse of a new anomaly, and to vote for the next one. We hope you have a lovely Christmas break!
If you hadn’t noticed that was copied and pasted from a previous blogpost! o(￣┰￣*)ゞ
But seriously, case closed! The one wasn’t a long one, but an essential one! Expect a Mechanical Monday this… Monday. Who would have guessed!
Much Love,
The Team,
Plasmarc Studios