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⭐ Forensic Friday 40: STORYTELLERS! Defences! Prison Showers! Dr Deers???

Summer is truly here, and for the first time since March, we’re here to update you on the technical changes and additions to the gameplay that have happened in the past week. This is a long blog post, so settle down and let’s do this!

Working On Combat Features #

This week we’ve been working on finishing up the combat system, namely static and dynamic defences. That inlcudes turrets, mortars, sandbags and more. （づ￣3￣）づ╭❤～ With that comes a whole slew of exciting new features which you’ll see below. The main 2 things we have been working on are NPC AI groups, Grenades and Mortars. These have been implemented in their most simple form, just so we have a framework for adding content. So any ado, lets get to the good stuff…

NPCs can settle disputes with fights! #

NPCs can now engage in fights. You may ask, couldn’t they do this before? Well no! But now they can. With a few improvements to the combat brain of these NPCs they can engage in firefights, melee fights and even a throwing session of grenades. But images tell a thousand words, so have a look at the videos below

NPCs having a gunfight. (Combat will look better when polished)

NPCs having a brawl. (Combat will look better when polished)

Fortifying defences with Sandbags! #

Another addition to combat, or rather defence, are sandbags! They are items which stack up when hauled to the sandbag region. Alternatively you can use a Haul Region to set up sandbag areas too. Though using the sandbag region would definitely be easier! Sandbags are impenetrable to most small arms, so they are very useful defensive tool!

NPCs hauling sandbags to a sandbag region

Haul Regions #

To facilitate the sandbag mechanic, we implemented haul regions, which is a region that allows you to specify what items get hauled to it. This required extensive reworking of the hauling system (and a ton of bug fixing (っ °Д °;)っ) to get it working. But after all is said and done, I think its pretty neat!

This is the UI you use to flag which items you want to haul to the region. Its so simple a baby could use it, and very useful! Take a look at the video below to see it in action.

Grenades come in with a bang… #

Grenades are another flaming hot addition to the combat system. Take a look below!

Grenades have been implemented in a super expandable way, so we can facilitate multiple grenade effects. The only current two effects we have implemented are explosion and fragmentation. But the final list will look something like this:

• Concussion
• Smoke
• Blinding
• Corrosive
• Sonic
• Incendiary
• etc…

As with all NPC related things, grenade effectiveness is influenced by NPC skills, namely the physical skill. So make sure your NPCs hit the gym!

Mortars Stike from the Sky! #

The last combat related feature I was able to implement was mortars.

Mortars are pretty self explanatory, NPCs can station themselves at mortars and fire upon their enemies. Again the accuracy of mortars are effected my NPC skills. Mortars currently just shoot grenades, but in the future this will likely change to shoot custom shell ammo. Take a look below…

What’s next for combat? #

Phew, that’s all we have surrounding combat news this week, but there will be much more next week thats for certain. The current next and ultimately last few additions pertain to more of polishing the combat and the NPC behaviours. The most notebaly addition will be the Armed Staff Loadouts, which should introduce some new interesting UI 👀

Shelves? Where did they come from? #

Before we can move onto the rest of the blog, we have a suprise feature shelves! What are they, well, we all know what shelves are, but how will they work in Containcorp and why are they needed?

Shelves #

Shelves display the item on top. They trade off size with storage capacity, durability with storage capacity and construction time with storage capacity.

Small Shelf #

Dimensions: 1 x 1
Can hold: 1 items
Max Stack Size: 100
Construction Time/Durability: 5

Medium shelf #

Dimensions: 2 x 1
Can hold: 2 items
Max Stack Size: 50
Construction Time/Durability: 10

Large Shelf #

Dimensions: 3 x 1
Can hold: 3 items
Max Stack Size: 33
Construction Time/Durability: 20

Bulk Shelf #

Dimensions: 2 x 2
Can hold: 4 items
Max Stack Size: 25
Construction Time/Durability: 40

Above are the 4 types of shelves that will be in the game. The main tradeoff with shelves is the storage versatility for the storage capacity. This adds a bit of strategy to making storage rooms and such, which I think will add interesting micro-gameplay, but we shall wait and see. Here’s a pciture of what the small shelf will look like!

(Shelves won’t actually be able to be placed next to each other like that)

Introducing… the storytellers #

Over the week we have also been thinking of storytellers. If you didn’t know Containcorp will be having storytellers as we identified that the reason games like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress can be played, and are played for years, with a continuous thriving community, is all due to the stories that can be told. Stories are timeless, and hopefully, we can cultivate timeless stories through these 5…

Raging Ragnar for Strategy Enthusiasts #

Machiavellian Morgan for Narrative Seekers #

Serene Sophia for Creative Architects #

Arcane Aurelia for Roleplayers #

Lunatic Lucius for Thrill Seekers #

We chose their personalities to cater to the 5 types of players which we imagine would play and enjoy our game. Exciting! Through the power of Midjourney we were able to create a really neat concepts for the storyteller character designs. We have actually started to create the final storyteller assets. I should stress we only used the AI art as a conceptual tool! Take a look at the final art asset of Serene Sophia (my personal favourite!)

Fun Fact: This took 9 hours to make!

Check out the Worflow!

She represents the classic style of playing the game. Shes about balance above all things. She’s also a synthetic human, which I’m sure most of you forgot was in our game. In a way she is the face of the game, adorning the Corporations Insignia. But alas, we have a difference quite literal face of the game, via the steam page. Check out the next section!

Steam Status Update #

We have a new art asset, which was commissioned, unlike Serene Sophia, who was drawn by us! Dr Deers, created by @Dr Kliene Evengald, a member of our Discord Server, well he has now be imortalised into the game. We commissioned him so theres no turning back!

If you want to get an idea of what it will look like on the final steam page, take a look below:

If was created by an amazing artist, and @TD350’s girlfriend! You can find her socials below, or google search lola.holliday

• Instagram
• Youtube
• Tiktok
• ArtStation

Go show her some love! Follow all her accounts and leave a comment under every post, and we are obliged to add your name to the game, and an anomaly garuanteed! About the steam page, we have sorted out the brunt of the boring legal stuff, so expect it within the week!

Prisoners Are Now Actually Prisoners #

Category Cs have had it far too easy so far if you ask us. This week, further functionality has been added to prisoners, and NPCs in general. New mental inflictions have been added for all NPCs, taking into account statistics such as time since last slept, or time since last eaten, which in turn gives the according mental inflictions (in the case of sleeping this is being tired, or for eating this is hungry).

For Category Cs, there have been extra fixes for schedules, whereby prisoners actually now stick to their assigned schedule and cells, and don’t wander off. Furthermore, for Category Cs specifically, there are extra mental inflictions for hygiene. Installing showers is a must if you don’t want prisoners having a dirty debuff. Showers can be placed either in a prisoner’s cell - for a private shower - or inside a prison zone for a public shower. During recreation, Category Cs will attempt to take a shower if they haven’t done so in 23 hours, but there are extra measures that need to be sorted out…

Using the Fluid System #

This is where our fluid system finally gets its first use. Dating back to Forensic Friday 23, we introduced a new fluid system that made use of cellular automata to simulate fluid flowing through pipes (which is no longer a blacklisted word :P). However, a small oversight was that we never created a way for a device to take fluids out of pipes for general use, and showers presented the perfect opportunity to fix this.

For a quick refresher, any holders of fluid such as pipes, storage containers, and now showers, have lots of small “cells” inside of them, each of which contains the type of fluid that is present inside the fluid holder, or nothing. For every cell, if one of it’s random neighbours is empty, and itself has a fluid type, then these values swap. If specific cells contain a fluid type, then they can transfer their content to an adjacent fluid holder.

We wanted to keep this probabilistic method to fluid simulation, so new functions have been created to allow anything to extract fluid from a fluid holder. This is done by requesting a certain volume of fluid from a fluid holder, and the fluid holder returns an according number of cells, that are chosen randomly from every cell. Therefore, if you have a “half full” shower, then there is a 50% chance that the shower will output water when requested every second.

To ensure that a shower is always as full as possible, so that Category Cs are as clean as possible, previously implemented pumps can be used to direct fluids to where they need to go, and to keep hygiene satifactory you had better hope that there’s only water in your shower! We’re no experts but washing in dirty sewage probably is not a good idea.

Case Closed #

That may be the longest blog we’ve ever done. If you did read through all of that, do let us know on our discord server (AND THE COMMENTS BELOW!!!) - it really does more for our motivation than you could imagine. In the mean time, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday for the return of MECHANICAL MONDAY, woooo!

Case Closed.
The Team
Plasmarc Studios