⭐ Forensic Friday 33: UI, UI, UI, TOO MUCH UI!
Welcome to Forensic Friday 33! This week has been a very visual one, as you may have gathered from some of the sneak peaks I posted in the media channel. This Friday we present to you: Good tidings with the UI Overhaul, Bringing money and reputation into the game, E-commerce site inside the game??! and news about the body part health system Overhaul. Where last week was a week of transition, this week is very much a week of interesting progress. Let me remind you that only one week remains, and then Prisoners and Gunplay will start being worked on. Very exciting times! Any ado, time to open up the case file….
UI overhaul 99% complete #
Good news about the UI Overhaul, it its 99% done! In the beginning of the week I spent some extra our of work hours finishing up the UI overhaul. The major menu that needed to be completed was the proposals menu. The heart of all things science and experimental. Images speak a thousand works so it is easier to just show the UI in all its slick glory. I’ve included the original UI for comparison.
OLD UI
NEW UI
I do have some post-complete thoughts on the UI. Even though it is a lot better in terms of layout and flow, the lose of diegetic design is sad to see. There is something satisfying about the texture of paper and chalk being present. Hopefully in the future we find ways to add these elements back! But we are function over form around here.
Money Money Money #
One new feature we were working on this week were the financial aspects of the game. With this comes an actual header bar that displays not only your financial information, but other things like reputation, and personnel counts. You can see below what the header displays:
Current Day | Weather Info Icon + Temp | Main Account Funds | Daily Money Intake | Reputation | Number of Anomalies | Number of Personnel
Header Bar UI In-game
With this system comes a lot of interesting mechanics, namely of which is accounts. In Containcorp, we want the player to be able to manage multiple financial accounts. One being a main account and the rest being saving accounts. The player can create as many saving accounts as they want, and transfer between them freely. The main account is the active spending account, and is the main pool of money used for purchases. This brings in another mechanic. Debt.
In Containcorp, when you run into debt (which will likely be easier than you think), you can request a bailout. You can’t do this anytime however, instead, every month you receive a financial report. If you are in the negative when you receive the report, you can either ask for a bailout, or continue in debt. You get to choose your bailout amount, and how much of the debt you want to pay off, however the bigger the bailout, the more reputation you lose! And in Containcorp, if your reputation gets low enough its game over! What if you don’t bailout? Well, if you are in the negative for 3 reports in a row then its game over again! So manage your finances!
Some of these values will vary with difficulty, and losing from debt will be able to be disabled completely. Anyways, all of these mechanics have been implemented, there currently just isn’t any UI to express the mechanics (aside from the header bar).
Delving Into Deliveries #
Another major, very necessary, and quite interesting feature we have also been working on this week is Deliveries. More specifically, the Delivery Browser. What is that you ask? Well, like any real facility, things need things delivered to your site. How? Through the Delivery browser! The Corporations very own e-commerce site, accessibly to all Facility Overseers. From this menu, you can browse, order items, set up repeat orders, and have them at your site in no time. We’ll make sure most of the most used stuff are next day delivery, and we’ll have convenient ways to automatically order things you request builders to build. Currently all the UI styling is done, just of matter of getting the functionality in! There are a multitude of categories, but not all of them will be in the final game, so expect them to change, but it should give you a good idea of what type of things you’ll be able to order. Take a look below to see what it’ll look like:
Health on the completion horizon #
We have also been working on the finishing touches for the health system this week. Lots of boring code stuff, so I won’t be going into that. A lot of the things we could say about the system have already been said in the last Forensic Friday. So instead lets just show off more UI! We have been working on a visual health display to not only make parsing the health condition of NPCs easier on glance, but also be able to actually communicate the deepness of the system in an easy to understand way. You can see some images below:
| Health Character | Health Character Bandaged up |
|---|---|
 |  |
Health Character In Game
The UI is almost complete, there’s just a few pieces of functionality left to add. The main feature is filtering through the tissue types, and having those internal organs show on the health character, another is having the injury types actually correlate properly with the injuries listed. (They currently do, but there’s a few things left to add)
Anomaly of the week #
Before I forget! We have an anomaly of the week. The poll winner is….. S-0032 - “Parasitic Head Swapper” winning by a total landslide, you guys were very enthusiastic for this one! Expect a fresh anomaly document come Mechanical Monday. Here’s a summary if your memory has failed!
**S-0032 - “Parasitic Head Swapper” **- It completely destroys the host’s head, shapeshifting to replicate the host’s head. It is able to summon blade-like appendages from the head. It is also able to jump to another host’s head if the current host becomes unsuitable or damaged beyond repair. After a successful meal, it will often go dormant for months, without any food or water. If it exhibits any aggravated behaviour during this period it is vital that no healthy human under the age of 30 comes within 10 m of it, as this will initiate it’s hunting period.
Case closed #
We hope you enjoyed reading this case file. All I can say is case closed. Another week left of introducing these financial systems, including the all new grant system! At this point, each week definitely feels a lot closer to the end goal than the last. Finally having nice UI is really making the game feel like an actual game. Considering most of the games mechanics are presented through UI, its starting to really bring out our complex ideas and systems that we have been working so hard on. By the time gunplay is finished, not many systems will be left, and we can start working on giving the game life!
That’s all this Forensic Friday, have a good weekend and see you on Monday… Archiving the File now.
The Team,
Plasmarc Studios