State of The Game

In the last devlog we talked about how most of the feedback we got was about the game being hard to read. We have spent the past couple of week tweaking some sprites to add more contrast to the game.

Constrast

I dont think it dose anyone any good to just keep talking about these visual changes. So why dont I just show you some new picture taken from in game with the update art.

We are still working on these changes to the colors so the buildings and other player placed object and structures may be made brighter in the future, This is just what it looks like right now.

Rocks and Stone

the game felt a little lacking with just the one resource. we already had rocks so why not make some stone. While we were at it a lot of entities like the rocks needed shadows so we took the time to add those in just to make sure everthing that need a shadow had one.

New Structures

The world as it stands still needs a little work to make it stand out and feel full. To help with this we have added in two new sets of structures the stalagmights and the camp. To further help with this in the future we are lookint at making some more biomes. And futher improving the readablility of the sprites in the game.

Changes to the Code

Since the last devlog the code has gone through a few changes. A large part of these changes where alterations to the biome generation and power network system.

The biome generation change was relativly straightforward. The old system used to have seperate noise for every biome this not only made it hard to control where biomes spawned but also cause performance problems. The new system has a set number of seeds that help to define witch biomes spawn where with and upper an lower bound. This helps to control both where biomes spawn in relation to one another and allows for some more interesting shapes to generate.

The power network change was little bit of an overhaul, The old system used to store network ids on each entitiy that needed to connect to the power system. This however has 2 problems 1. the border cells where hard to control and 2. the wave generators didnt really work with this system since they dont have a power network piece. The new system instead creates a grid under power network pices 1/3 the size of the normal grid with each cell containing a network id. This way the wired cells are easier to control and allow for use to do things like change the color of the wave gens ouput without a power network piece present.

The Demo

while we initally wanted to release the demo at the start of next fest so we can get feedback and improve the game the current build we have is too buggy and unstable to release publicly. I have been working to fix the bugs in the demo in an attempt to get it ready but there are still many bugs that ruin the experince of the game resulting in lost save data, and section of a build haveing to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch jut to get them working right. Most of the general mechanics "work" but but can break down when the game runs for an extended period of time.

As soon as the bugs currently in the game causing it to be as unstable as it is are fixed we are going to hold off on releasing the demo. We are hopping that these bugs can be fixed at the end of the week so we can release the demo as soon as possible.