Citizens,
Just in time for the holidays, we're happy to present you with our latest Early Access build - The Overseer Update. This update focuses on one of the most requested changes since launch - pausing the game and giving you time to think, plan and re-organize.
Making this change was not easy. The way the game was designed, with a character-centered perspective, made it hard to implement and balance something that may seem trivial for simulation/management games.
Read on below about some of the larger changes in this update and for insight on what went on behind these changes and decisions.. You can find the full list of changes on our patch notes page.
Note: the new overseer tools are disabled in the hardest difficulty levels (which you can customize of course), so the more stressed - no time to think - experience still exists for those who enjoy it.
Overseer tools - active pause
One of the things we wanted to touch in this update was the constant, non-stop feeling of urgency. There was not much time to stop and think, and even when you did, there was often a feeling that you are wasting time and should be doing stuff. Re-organizing your base felt like an inefficient waste of time.
We've brainstormed and researched many options to tackle this. One of them was a "stealth mode" in which your city would stop producing, but you could spend time building and re-organizing without having the threat level increase. Another was to have time-off and manage your city while flying from one destination to another. All these and more ended up feeling like they would add more complexity to an already complicated game, and so I decided to go with a more straight-forward and well known solution - Active Pause. The active pause lets you play the game as usual while the game is paused, so time will not advance, but you can still build, craft, change production recipes, move buildings, and so on.
Even this, however, was not as straightforward as I'd have liked, due to the fact that in Dream Engines you interact with the world through Tiny - your steam-bot avatar. When the game is paused, Tiny can't move, so you can't move around the city and interact with the different elements. We had to add another tool for the overseer - the free camera.
Overseer tools - free camera
It didn't make sense to let Tiny move while the rest of time was frozen, so we had to let you move around and manage the city without moving Tiny by introducing the free camera toggle.
When enabled, the free camera will disconnect the view from Tiny, and you can move the view around the map as you build, manage or destroy stuff. A few other changes had to be made when taking this new mode into account - for example, you can now only transfer items to/from buildings if Tiny is near them, whereas before if you could open the building's window you could transfer items.
Other than supporting the active-pause feature, this new tool changes some of the flow of the game. You no longer have to abandon your exploration and move Tiny back to the city every time you want to build a new house. You can now do so remotely, as a real overseer would.
Overseer tools - speedup
The last overseer tool I'd like to discuss is the speed-up button. Previously, the game's pacing was designed so that the time it takes to explore, fight, build, and make use of everything the map has to offer - was more or less in line with the amount of time it would take to exhaust the resources or have the threat level increase to levels you'd be unable to handle.
With the addition of active pause and free camera, a lot of the actions that previously "wasted" time can now happen in an instant, while the game is frozen or without having to walk back and forth. And so, the amount of time that would pass within the game is now a little shorter, when doing the same actions.
For that reason, we wanted to add an option to speed-up time when waiting for stuff to happen, such as waiting for research to be complete, or for resources being harvested. So, there's now a speed-up button that will cause time to pass faster.
The original thought was for adding more robust speed control buttons (so you can play the whole game at x2 speed, for example), but since the game was not designed for that, it caused several issues, technical and gameplay. For example, fighting with Tiny at x2 speed looked bad and was unmanageable. Then, after further analysis, we realized that the whole point of higher speeds is for those periods of time in which you wanted to wait for something to happen. A simple "push to skip time" button did the trick, and there was no need for more robust speed controls. You play at normal speed most of the time, but if you want to skip ahead until that harvester is depleted - no problem, press and hold the speed-up button.
We'll have to keep an eye on how this works and tweak it as necessary, please do let us know what you think.
New tribe - the Teslacrats
You can now unlock The Teslacrats tribe and then select them when starting a new game. These energy freaks have a unique technology that they can research, which allows them to duplicate resources using the power of Tesla. Their ability makes it easier to get some resources, but it's not unlimited. Every time you duplicate resources, the machines become less efficient, and subsequent duplications will cost more energy - unless you give them time to cool down and recharge.
Teslacrats also produce power at a higher rate than others, but being the elitists of the energy producing community, "cheap" power generation methods (those that require no resources) are beneath them, and they do so very inefficiently.
Better automation - the sorter
The sorter is a new building that can be placed on rails that has one input slot and 3 output slots. You can then configure which items would be sent to each one of the output slots, allowing you to sort items out of a rail route into separate routes depending on the item.
This allows for more automation and combining several routes for long transportation and then splitting them back up. As with many other features, we thank our early access players for suggesting this.
More open desert & ashfall maps
We tried to make the different biome maps a bit more unique and not just visually. Desert and Ashfall (lava) biomes are now more open, with less crowded mazes and more building area.
Switching weapon sets
Different weapons may be beneficial for different situations. We've added the ability to set up two sets of weapons for Tiny, and switch between them with a press of a button.
Saves from previous builds
Saves from previous builds are supported and should work fine for the most part, but there may be balancing issues and some of the changes will only take effect when you switch maps. The new overseer tools will be disabled in old saves that had the "Pause in Menus" option disabled.
Future Plans
This update implements some of the features in our roadmap, but also added some major, unplanned features. During the months since the release, we've been constantly thinking about the roadmap, what is missing, and if there is anything that can or should be removed from the roadmap. As such, here is the updated roadmap. This may change even further later down the road as we progress and the situation changes.
Know that we are always listening to all feedback channels, and that your feedback is very much appreciated. We invite you to hop onto our discord server and chat with us directly, leave your feedback in the Steam discussion forums, or in-game feedback form.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on all these changes.
The Suncrash team