⭐ Forensic Friday 4: Fashioncorp
Hello all, it feels like its been an age since the last “Forensic Friday”; and in a way it has. We’ve taken 2 weeks to bring you this update but there is definitely lots to show and talk about. Before I continue I just want to mention we have a new part-time addition to the Dev team. Her name is Sharon! We have high hopes for her and what she can bring to the game, and more is always merrier. Now moving onto the additions:
Fashioncorp - NPC’s and their new hands #
NPC’s have hands now. They have various animations which most concern walking. There is not much to comment on here due to it mostly being a graphical change, though soon enough there will be animations for NPC’s holding and firing weapons and punching and all sorts of cool stuff, which should hopefully make NPC’s seem more grounded in reality and overall more interesting to look at whilst they suffer horrible, anomaly induced, deaths!
The Scheduler Menu : God-like powers, at your fingertips #
Containcorp now has a scheduler menu. Where you can force your employees to bow knees and follow all your commands. Who needs free will? Well Containcorp doesn’t. In all seriousness, the scheduler menu allows you to set a daily schedule for your NPCs. This schedule dictates whether NPC’s work, eat, go home, take a break in the recreational room or have free reign in their activities. The menu includes various tools such as a painting feature which allows players to easily set up schedules. Schedules can either globally affect employees with certain job types or specific employees under said job type. All of this is pretty much summed up in the image below:
Beauty System: NPCs are blind no more! #
Containcorp now features a beauty system, where every tile on each floor has a number which dictates how appealing it is to look at. For example blood would have a negative rating and a varnished floor would have a positive rating. The amount a single rating on a tile can be changed ranges from -20 to 20, but the actual resulting rating on the tile in unrestricted; so if a pool of blood collects on one single tile, it could bring the rating of that tile to -400 as an example. NPCs also check all the tiles around them every second and from all the numbers they inspect, they sum to a total rating number, which is effectively the beauty of their surroundings. If they are subjected to ugly surroundings for too long then they will get a mental debuff. Which smoothly transitions into the next addition (pictures of beauty system and neat inspector for it below):
Mental System - Making the mundane insane #
Alongside NPCs no longer having free will and being blind, our NPCs are no longer empty, emotionless shells of humans. Introducing the mental system! Anything and everything an NPC interacts with will affect their mental well-being, and the mental system manages this new psyche. Whether it is something as trivial as being hungry, being insulted/complimented by a co-worker or simply cold, or alternatively something as serious as unintentionally killing your best friend or being attacked, all these actions now have consequences.
The consequences being that if an NPC can’t take the mental torment any longer, their behaviour is unpredictable – such as going on a rampage, hurting anyone they can get their hands on or cutting themselves off from the outside world. It is still a work in progress implementing this since we want more variety in the unpredictable behaviour, and so that any event (e.g. the weather) contributes towards every NPCs mental psyche (when there’s bad weather, there is a negative effect on the mental system, vice versa). Also it doesn’t make a lot of sense for people to have opposite emotions at the same time, such as happy and sad, so whilst an easy fix is just a few of the issues that have arose whilst creating this system.
Planets and all things round #
I have been spending some of my time working on the world map which will finally give players a way to choose the location of their facility. Currently the world supports up to approximately 500k hexes with each hex representing a plot of land in the world. Ideally we want the world to support upwards of 12 million hexes so that we can have a planet that keeps to the dimensions of the real earth. Though this may not be entirely possible/gameplay friendly. So for now 500k tiles is more than enough to play with. It may turn out that even this may be too many tiles but my best guess is that we could/should push it higher.
We are planning to have the earth host many cities from our current era plus relevant changes which reflect the divergence between the Containcorp universe and our own. In the future we may model partially or completely the whole solar system, allowing players to perhaps build facilities on other planets or interact/ capture anomalies in space. However that’s currently far from out focus now. Planets are already teetering on the edge of are focus which is why is currently just a thing on the side. Here’s a clip and a picture of the progress so far on the Earth of 2109 in the Containcorp universe.
Case Closed #
The final thing of note is the beginning of our Reddit page, which you can find at HERE. We hope to eventually see some cool and inspiring posts, as well as suggestions and discussions once it starts to grow!
Other than that, there’s not a lot more to say. As always, thanks for reading and see you all in 2 weeks!
The Team,
Plasmarc Studios