Organisers, Cartographers, and Spark Painters,
Welcome to the June Devlog. This one won't be too long, because we’re very busy currently finalising the small update for July!
We don’t have a specific date yet for the update and we’ll talk more about what’s in it when it’s out. However, here’s three things from the changelist that we can spoil for you: We're adding a Trash Slot, there'll be New Inventory Shortcuts, and even though Pride Month will be over, we’re also squeezing in a little Rainbow Flag Pattern for your poncho. After all, we’re a diverse team with queer team members, and we’d like to let people express themselves in the game.
In general, we think that expression is a pretty important aspect of Oddsparks. And to us, organisation is a type of expression! How one person build and organise their base is completely different to how a different person would tackle the same generated world. For our big August update, (you can check out our roadmap if you haven't seen it yet) we wanted to provide multiple different tools that allow players to express themselves and can help them organise their bases. We’re already planning to add a lot of decorative buildings in the August update for this reason!
A bonus sneak peek at some of our upcoming decorative buildings!
By having these kinds of tools, you can better map out your workshops, identify where you are with various landmarks you’ve placed yourself, and generally, make the world look really nice. But decorative buildings while nice, can be hard to fit in. They take up valuable space and that’s where our main topic comes in! Let’s talk about the Colouring Spark (name not final)!
Paint By Spark
The Colouring Spark is a spark with a special interaction. It can be thrown into a new building, the Paint Bucket (again, name not final). If there’s Paint in the Paint Bucket, then the thrown Colouring Spark will pick it up…
And now your Spark Bar has expanded with a new category, just like with the Puffy Spark.
You can swap between the empty colouring sparks and the “full” colouring sparks to pick one of the full colouring sparks and throw it at a building with a roof tile. Now, the roof tiles will be changed to that colour, and it also changes how it looks on the map!
With this, you have another way to mark which Sawbench is doing what, which Shed has what items, and of course, this can also be used for paths and logic wires!
Painting Charges
Just like the Puffy, a Colouring Spark will have one “charge” and when thrown onto something that can take that colour, they’ll use it up. They also lose that “charge” if you unequip them.
And because it's fun, they make a small mess when you go up and down places. You don’t use up the paint by doing this.
Colour Palette
You’ll have a palette of 8 colours in total - Red, Blue, Yellow, Black, White, Green, Orange and Purple. You’ll also have Turpentine in case you want to remove any colour you've placed.
The primary colours will be made in the Chopper, breaking down common resources like Bark and Quartz to turn into paint. You’ll later be able to mix the primary colours to get the secondary colours in the Stone Workshop. The idea is to have something pretty simple that you also need to automate. We can imagine a few of you dedicating a little side space to make all the colours you need to not just organise but really draw on the map!
That's all for now. If you're looking for more WIP stuff, you can join us in our Discord! We've already shown off a little glimpse at the decorations there a few weeks ago. We hope to talk again very soon about the small July update and show off the stuff we have there.