Hey guys,
Let's talk about last month's progress.
Rooms, Rocks and Visuals
As we're nearing our release date, we want to get some more promotional material out. We've been picking up the pieces since our publisher's bankruptcy and while we don't have the resources to do a full-blown PR campaign we do want to put out at least one or two brief videos showcasing gameplay before July.
While our publisher's marketing made heavy use of mockups based on future plans and what the game is meant to look like someday, we believe it is important that we give you guys an honest presentation of the game and what Early Access is going to look like. That's why last month we put some effort into polishing up the game's visuals. Before we rework store page screenshots, press kits and videos we want to get the game looking more or less how it will on release, so when we show off new features you'll know what you see is what you get.
Among various minor graphical improvements and fixes, we implemented a tile blending system similar to what we had on our Unity version so terrain no longer looks like a checkerboard. We updated our cliff edges so edge tiles have natural-looking edges instead of being perfectly cut squares. The terrain generation was also updated to distribute rocks of various sizes across the map. These not only add to the visual variety, but can also be used as cover in combat or broken up to use as a building material.
On the subject of building materials, we also expanded the selection of resources in the game. As we are finishing up the remaining mechanics we want for Early Access, this month we dedicated to fleshing out the existing mechanics with content. We added various new resources like leather, steel, components, etc. to expand on the variety of buildings and crafting recipes the player has access to. Some of these new resources can be found on your home map, others you will need to send out expeditions to gather.
Another new addition is the wall cutaway effect. It was tedious having to turn the camera around to see inside rooms all the time, so now you can toggle between a set of different fade effects, allowing for walls to be cut down in size to reveal what's behind them. This effect uses a newly implemented room grid which will form the basis for other gameplay features in the future such as room ownership and environmental beauty.
Parcels, Roofs and Deconstruction
Our expedition system starts with the player choosing a particular destination, like a hunting lodge in the woods, an abandoned quarry, or a small town pharmacy. Once a destination is chosen, we generate a map and spread appropriate buildings around. While procedural placement of structures is fairly easy, actually generating random structures that don't look like a tangled, illogical mess can be difficult. That's why we're opting for a hybrid approach where we use a library of hand-authored "parcels" that get distributed across the map. This month we finished the parcel editor we'll be using to create these parcels.
In order to make buildings that actually look the part we also implemented some basic roofing options. These currently use something of a placeholder implementation, being based on the floor system. Our long-term plan is to expand this into proper slanted roofs, but that would require a lot of fairly complex logic to make it look good and we'd rather spend the time on other features for now.
Finally, we added a deconstruct work type, allowing the player to remove previous construction, reclaiming some of the resources and freeing the space up for new things.
What's next
A few more graphical improvements are still in the works and not quite done yet. We want to improve the outline system by porting over the custom algorithm we were using under Unity. While Godot's built-in outline effect is serviceable it has some major issues around hard edges and we want to fix that before release. Walls will also receive some attention to improve both their appearance and performance.
With the parcel editor done, we're now working on integrating our parcels into the map generation process, and work on the combat system continues as well. We're hoping to have both done by the end of the month, followed by some miscellaneous features before moving into pre-release QA mid-June.
That’s it for today. Until next time, stay safe and keep surviving!