Hey everyone,
A lot of fun stuff happened this week! Starting with a new base building mode.
Base Building
The previous base building implementation was rather basic and inflexible. The player would use concrete to craft individual pieces like foundations or ramps. These were separate items in your inventory and took up valuable space on your hotbar. This is maybe ok for 2 or 3 pieces but if I wanted to have lots of pieces like walls, pillars, beams, stairs, doors, walkways, ladders, etc. I had to come up with another solution.
This led to the new implementation where concrete is used as a building material and you select the building piece from a radial wheel selector. Then when you dismantle a floor or wall for example you get back concrete and not separate items. I think this works very well and I took some inspiration from valheim in how snapping works. You can cycle between snapping points on each piece to get it to align where you want it. I still want to add an automatic mode that tries to pick the best one to help speed up placement but for now it's good enough if you ask me.
miniaturization
Most buildings & machines have been shrunk by about 30%. During my playtesting buildings always felt kind of too big. Now with better base building I wanted to be able to fit factories inside structures without having to place down thousands of floors and walls. So I decided to make the machines smaller so they fit in the world better. Games never have a realistic scale either so it's fun to experiment and that's what I did here. This also meant I needed to shrink the size of items so they fit on the belts and a few other random tweaks to make the sizes feel right. It's still a work in progress so more changes and tweaks will come.
Improved Tool Tips
I spent some time improving the details provided when hovering over items and recipes.
Release Notes v0.0.13
Proper base building. Concrete is now used to build floors, walls, ramps, etc.
Most buildings are about 30% smaller.
Updated item and recipe tool tips.
Add ability to mass dismantle up to 50 buildings.
Updated escape pod crash visuals.
Added underwater visual effects.
As always, thanks for reading and head over to the discord to learn more https://discord.gg/xmmPeZHj4T