Hello and welcome to the 10th devlog for Red Dust Colony.
Since I last wrote, we've been as busy as ever, working on new features, polishing up existing ones and doing balancing work. We've made progress on the liquid system and made many improvements based on feedback. We've also completely reworked the tutorial system.
Polishing up the game
When laying out the buildings, it wasn't always clear how much they would cost so now the UI makes it easier to understand
It wasn't always easy to keep an eye on the colonists, so now there's a list in the UI that allows for easy selection and some quick information. We've also added hand drawn portraits for all colonists.
The information in the selection window was purely text before, so we've updated it for everything that can be selected. This is how it looks for storage containers
We've added graphics for all items in the game as we were previously using just some textured cubes. Also, now some of the items are considered large and can no longer fit in the storage containers. There's a new stockpile building for this that needs to be constructed outside
We've moved smelters outside and updated the graphics for a lot of the existing content.
New Tutorial
From the feedback received, we've started seeing a pattern where the hull expansion doesn't work as everyone expects. The hull in our game has a specific behaviour where it needs to be built over all cells and it self configures the walls. This is important in order to preserve the atmosphere inside the base. In order to better get this across, we've built a new tutorial page, with videos explaining how this works. In order to make this all fit, the window has been redesigned and all the previous content has been recreated.
The liquid system is still in development. When this system is ready, I'll write a dedicated dev log for this topic as it's been a surprisingly complex topic.
We're continuing to release new demo versions as we iterate on the game, and improve it. As things are going I think we're approaching a point where we can make the demo public so stay tuned if you're interested. For anyone more impatient, join our Discord server and ask for a key.
Until the next time!