The Lost Archives #17: Room regions and the start of Jobs! + UI and other stuff

UI Changes #

Hello all! Its exam season for us right now but we have surprisingly have a lot of news about the game. Firstly the UI has been revamped, the style of the UI has changed, looking more refined and clean. The UI can also be dragged around allowing for multiple “clipboards” to be placed on the screen in any way you desire. Here’s a video below! We also have planned out how the schedule assignment system is going to pan out. I may include a mock up that I made below, but in short, the player will be able to make generic schedule, then override the generic schedule with specific schedules for job classes then for people under that job class, forming a sort of hierarchy.

Original UI

Improved UI

Doors! #

I have also managed to finally add doors to the game which took a less effort that initially expected. There’s not much to say here aside from plans to include a multitude of door types and add restriction options to doors to stop certain NPCs from walking through them. Heres an example video below, plus some of the sprites!

Regions and workstations! #

It is possible to now specify regions in the game. Which are areas which NPCs can interact with, such as office rooms, jail cells and medical bays. There are a few bugs to iron out but for the most part they work pretty well. Regions also have requirement functionality such as infirmaries requiring beds. The current list of regions we have are:

• Cell - Requires a bed and a toilet. Where a Cavy spends most of his or her time
• Cafeteria- Requires a table and chair
• Kitchen - Requires a cooker and a sink. This is where cooks cook meals.
• Cooler - Requires a cooler to be placed on the wall connected to the outside via direct exposure to outside (much like rimworld) or via a pipe that carries air from the outside to the appliance. This room stores frozen raw and prepared food items.
• Shower - Requires a shower head and drain, where prisoners or staff shower
• Storage - No Requirements.Where misc items can be stored
• Armoury - Requires armoury rack, where arms are stored.
• Recreation - No Requirements. Where Category C can relax.
• Common room - No Requirements. Where staff can relax
• Infirmary - Requires medical bed and medical monitor
• Laboratory - Requires research table, where scientists reside to research things. Computers can be placed to increase research capacity.
• Containment cell - No Requirements. Where anomalies are contained.
• Janitor room - Where janitor sleeps.
• Dormitories - Requires Bed. Where staff sleep.
• Toilet - Requires Toilet and sink.
• Office - Requires office desk and chair. Any member of staff can be assigned their own staff room, multiple people can, but each person requires one table and chair.
• Mess hall- No Requirements.Where security forces tend to reside, preferred over the common room.
• Administrator room- Requires office desk and chair.
• Panic room - No requirements. In the likely event of a containment breach, non-security staff will make their way to this room.
• Alpha warhead room - Requires alpha warhead. This room holds the alpha warhead which can be researched. When granted to the player it allows them to detonate it if things get rough.
• Outhouse- No special requirements. Where builders reside.

And here’s a screenshot with some of the regions in the game plus a video and screenshot of region requirements!

NPC Job System #

1 of these specific objects within a room act as a “workstation” where NPCs will base their working activities e.g. a cooker is a workstation for a cook. This process takes a while to personalise as there will be unique behaviour for every different type of job, but currently doctors and cooks can do work when asked, which just needs some tweaking to make it less orderly and more seemingly spontaneous. However, for those who are familiar with programming, since every workstation has been created as essentially an abstract class, and contains multiple abstract methods for NPCs doing work etc. development should be pretty easy on this front since the structure of every NPCs script is of the same format, just a bit long but we’ll get there in the end!

Cooking hob!

Other than that thanks again everyone for the patience with the development. In the coming month we both have exams (David’s are very soon and mine are for the next 2 months) but any progress we do make, and plans for the summer will be reported here next month so see you all then!

The Team,
Plasmarc Studios

P.S. here’s the mockup of the scheduling menu (it’s quite rough but gets the basic design down). Blue is for sleep or going home, pink is for rec, gray is for anything, yellow is work. Colours likely won’t be like this in the final game.