Hello,
We're as busy as ever, trying to get everything ready for the public demo. Currently, we're working on the liquid system and taking care of particles and other VFX, but more on these at a later time. Today, we're talking about cooking and the food system.
Food system
In most colony sim games, cooking is a work type or profession that characters perform. This often ends up with one character preparing meals for a significant amount of time, and we wanted to try something different. Instead of one colonist taking care of cooking for everyone, now everyone will be responsible for it. When mealtime arrives, colonists will check what they can eat, preferring to cook with raw ingredients. They'll go to the fridge, pick up the required items, go to the cooking table, prepare food and then sit down to eat it.
Each food type contains carbohydrates, protein, fat, vitamins and fiber. Colonists try to balance their meals when different ingredients are available, and the wider the variety, the better they manage their nutrition. Meals take varying amounts of time to digest based on their ingredients. The key concern is avoiding deficiencies, which can cause debuffs that get progressively worse, leading to health loss and lowered mood.
Balancing
Making sure colonists make good food choices turned out to be surprisingly complex. The system needs validation over hundreds of days to confirm they maintain proper eating habits and account for both digested and undigested meals. Since running such long simulations isn't practical, I simplified the testing by focusing on a single colonist under different scenarios, including varied eating times and available ingredients. This lets me track macro and micronutrients to ensure that a decent variety of ingredients prevents deficiencies over time.
This approach also helps balance how quickly deficiencies develop when certain nutrients are missing, like protein.
New plants
To support their dietary needs, colonists now have more planting options. The selection includes spinach, bell peppers, potatoes, and quinoa, each offering different macro and micronutrient profiles.
Portraits
One last thing that we've added recently are portraits for colonists. These are only visual elements and have no impact on gameplay, but we're really happy with how they turned out.
That's it from us today. We'll keep working on implementing new features and improving existing ones as we get closer to releasing a demo version everyone can try.