Greetings, Magnates!
Wow, is it February already? Let's see what's been going on with the game the past 2 weeks, shall we?
As I mentioned in the previous devlog, I wanted to spend more time doing small quality of life things and "polish" to the factory building part of the game. And that is indeed what I have been doing, although this first one isn't exactly what I would call a "small" thing:
Day cycle and night mode
I wrote a little something about this over on the subreddit, so go read that if you wish. But the TL;DR is that I added night mode which then evolved into a proper day cycle. I want to emphasize one thing, and that is that even though you play in a made-up solar system with several inhabited planets that in theory should each have their own day cycle, it's just not feasible. There is a key concept of time in the game (e.g. "how many days do I have to complete this contract") and design-wise it could get really messy with multiple time scales. So for simplicity's sake time is always the same everywhere.
Anyway, the day cycle serves a couple of purposes:
- It's a way for you to keep track of time. You'll know that when dawn breaks, it's a new day. Without a day cycle, you can very easily lose track of time, and time is pretty important in this game.
- It breaks up the monotony of always being bright as day. That may sound obvious, and it is. But still a very valid point :)
- It provides an incentive to consider other energy sources than just solar power..
That last point is mainly for myself. I need to work more on the energy aspect of the game. So there's a subject for a future devlog..
Lots of small details
Contextual mouse pointers, tooltips, double-click mass-selecting.. you know, why don't I just show you with a couple of gifs? You can read all the changes in the changelog at the bottom of this post.
New build category: decorational tiles
I played around with this idea the other night and decided to give it a go. I tweeted a gif, asking what people thought of the idea of decorating factory sites. I was unsure. The people were not! The feedback I got was very convincing and thus it's going to stay in the game and I will definitely be adding lots of various tiles to make your factories pretty. The two tiles in this demo below are just to test things, there will be much more!
I know I plug my twitter a lot, but this is a fine example of how you can influence the development of the game simply by interacting with me on twitter. So if you're interested in any of that stuff, make sure to follow me.
Full change list
- Added eyedropper and drag-select mouse cursors
- Enforced rules for when a unit can be built on top of another unit (or be built at all)
- Drag-building and selecting conveyors will display a useful tooltip
- Disabled generic tooltips on unit click because they were more annoying than useful
- Fixed sorter UI staying in selection state after closing the UI
- Fixed sometimes having to click twice on output slots in sorter UI
- Contract detail UI will now reflect properly if the contract offer has expired since clicking on it
- Added day cycle/night mode
- Added helpful tooltip when dragging conveyors
- Clicking a unit will visually indicate it has been selected
- Clicking again on a selected unit (not conveyors) will select all units of the same type
- Clicking again on a selected conveyor unit will select all connected conveyors (a segment of conveyors)
- Pressing the DEL-key will delete all currently selected units
- Added a search filter to the sorter UI
- Added tooltip on item hover in various UI
- Added UI to storage controller; it'll now show you what you have in storage
- Added new build category for decorational tiles
Until next time!
Fey at Rising Tail