This week I will finish up most of the work that has been done over the last 2 months (a continuation of last week's post). I also want to announce the public demo that will be available in a couple of weeks as part of an upcoming Steam Festival, starting January 23rd. The demo will likely go live a few days before that.
Communications Cave
This is a feature that I am excited to share with everyone, as it will be a big component of exploration in the game. The Communications Cave is a new area on the map that has a community of friendly robots inside. They are looking for specific resources and parts to construct various items in their base. The cave contains rooms corresponding to the different areas of the maps which contain tasks for the player to retrieve items, kill enemies, or destroy stuff. Once a task is complete, you will receive special rewards from the bots there. Once all of the tasks for an area are complete, there is a much larger, significant reward given.
You can access the tasks from the terminals in each of the rooms. I won't spoil where the cave is located, but it's not far from Home Base.
Resource Scanner
A lot of players were asking about being able to ping resources due to taking a long time to find certain rock and ore types, so I've implemented a new system that allows you to ping rock nodes:
There is a limited range that can be upgraded from the tech tree. It starts with the ability to ping for Rock Nodes, and anytime a new, undiscovered node is within range, the scanner will gain the ability to ping that new type. This will allow players to go at their own pace and reward players for exploring new areas to find new resources.
New Main Menu
Last week I showed a screenshot of the new main menu, so here is a quick gif of the new menu. This is significant because it not only makes navigating the main menu easier, but it is defining the aesthetics of the menus in-game as well, which was something that had been lacking before. The in-game menus have not been completely updated to fit this yet, but I am happy with the design that will be in place moving forward and think it compliments the feel of the game nicely.
Bridge Builder
While building out the new cave, Hugo has made a bridge builder than makes it extremely easy to place new bridges anywhere in the environment. The tool is an editor tool, but thought it was pretty cool so I wanted to share it:
Player Backpack Robots
Last week I mentioned that I will go into a bit more detail about the player backpack robots. This is a bit of a deep topic, but I'll explain at a high level where this is currently at.
Player Backpacks
I'll start with the overview of the player backpacks. The player will have the opportunity to acquire different backpacks at Home Base. Each backpack has robots that help the player do tasks such as picking up items, repairing buildings, jumping higher, etc. Some of the backpack abilities are specific to a particular backpack, and some are shared across all backpacks like the pickup item bot.
The backpacks will focus on particular aspects of the game. For example, one will be more combat-focused and have robots that attack nearby enemies and shield the player from damage, whereas one might be more focused on mining resources, and one might be more focused on mobility.
These will need a lot of attention to ensure that they are balanced and work well with the game, so I don't want to mention anything specific because they are likely to change a lot.
I feel that once co-op is there, this is sort of a micro-class system and will add to replayability as different roles. I also feel that this might be entirely awful and if it doesn't mesh well with the existing gameplay experience, I will have no problem taking it out. But if you have any ideas for backpack abilities, definitely let me know!
Here are a few of the current backpack robots:
Robot Ranching
Hmm. Something about using the magnet gun to catch wildlife robots and put them in enclosures. More on this in the next DevLog!
Next Devlog
In the following weeks I hope to redesign the automation route creation system so that it is much easier and enjoyable to use, so more on how good (or bad) that is going. I think we are going to move to a node-based visual system that is kind of a drag-and-drop between drop-off and pick-up points.
Confusion From Last Week
Last week there were a few comments about the manual craft bench and how everyone hates the idea. I didn't do a good enough job explaining it exactly, so I'll clear that up now. Manual crafting (holding down a button for the crafted item to complete) is ONLY on the Home Base Craft Bench. This is to encourage you to build machines and buildings for automating the creation of items. A few people mentioned that it would be nice to include a feature where pressing a button like space will hold it down for you, while you are there and have the UI open, which is a good suggestion and I will likely include that.
That is all.
If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg
Take Care,
-Jake