Hi everyone,
As always, thank you very much for all of your feedback! I have been a little out of touch with our social media last week, as I have finally taken a few days off at the start of the week (the last few months have been pretty crazy), but I trust that John was on top of things in my stead. Luckily, having some time off has really helped me to focus on coding, and I think we made pretty good progress as a result!
The new settings menu (including key bindings) is finished, we finally have a button to return to the menu from the game, and John has created fencing/ropes around each building model. The last part is completely new (the final changes were made today), so I haven’t had a chance to implement this new system yet - I will work on it this weekend and upload all of the changes as soon as I finish it.
The new ropes are primarily to address peoples’ feedback telling us that it was difficult to know when you had selected blueprints (to add materials to the construction site or check on progress). When you place a building from now on, you should see the construction area fenced off with the ropes, and selecting the construction site will bring up the blueprint as usual. Once the construction is completely finished, the ropes will disappear (also addressing some older feedback that it was difficult to know when the buildings were completely built). Please let us know what you think of this new system, and if it makes selecting construction sites a little more intuitive than it used to be. If people like the system, we will upgrade the look of the ropes and construction site, potentially adding some crates and boxes to show how much of the construction materials are already on site.
As I mentioned last week, I will be turning back to gameplay improvements after uploading the next update, especially pirates/combat. Even though it isn’t particularly apparent at this point, the game actually has a lot of mechanics for stealth and more interesting jungle combat in place already:
Being close to trees/shrubbery gives players and soldiers a stealth bonus, making them more difficult to be detected; shooting a gun reduces any stealth bonus a player has; soldiers and pirates have 2 stages of awareness of each other/the player (one of being aware that someone is close, and one of actually having seen the opponent), etc. Unfortunately, using these systems to their full potential required more dynamic pirates and soldiers (who go to check when they “hear” an opponent in the jungle, then potentially lose track of the player and return to their position, etc.), and we had some issues with this when we first implemented it. Considering we had a lot on our plate at the time, we decided to keep pirates as a static challenge (aside from the pirate waves), and to add more important systems first. At this stage of the development, however, John and I both feel that improving the pirates is the right priority, and I will start working on them again as of this weekend!
Until next week!