Hey gang!
It has been a while since I've posted anything regarding the game's development and I thought I'd take a moment to do that.
The next update 0.10.0.0 Sacred Scrolls is quite big. One thing that I really wanted to focus on for this update was progression. For a lot of the game's development, I've focused on systems to broaden the game's possibilities, and quality of life improvements to help user experience. I've largely neglected adding too much content because it's harder to add new systems if you have to make sure all the previous content isn't broken as a result. So, when I say progression, I mean two things namely: content (more blueprints, items, props) and tuning.
Alongside this progression work, I've also changed and improved how combat and taming works. Combat behaviour has totally been re-written as it was super frustrating and buggy. i.e., warriors not going to targets. Taming now works in a completely different way as players were getting confused by its mechanics. I'll detail that more below.
Here are the three biggest additions/changes:
Research Tree
As I'm sure you're aware, the current progression works where you start out with all the rooms and you unlock blueprints as you find the correct ingredients. This has two main issues. First, there's no clear progression for rooms. The starting rooms available are just too overwhelming and it's unclear what you need when. Second, because players don't know the possible blueprints out there, they don't know what to look for and end up skipping progression steps or never experiencing them altogether. The research tree solves these issues by providing clear paths to unlock rooms, professions, blueprints, and mechanics.
Here's how it works:
Players will receive Knowledge Points as they complete jobs around the settlement. As well, they can use Scholars to study at the Library room (unlocked from the research tree) to obtain this resource at a faster rate. (The Library will have more benefits but I won't get into that now.) Players can then spend the research on unlocking nodes within the research tree. Some nodes will have dependencies on previous nodes and some just require the previous column to have one node unlocked. Players will retain ALL research they unlock as long as they continue one game. This means things like migration won't reset the tree. However, starting a brand new game will. Additionally, each race will have their own special nodes on this tree that are unique. Later, when I introduce mixed race settlements, you'll be able to get them all unlocked if you had one of every race in the town.
Taming/Capturing
Taming has now been changed mechanically to 'capture' entities. This is to support the following update where I will implement the Ardyn race which utilizes capturing a lot.
Here's how it works:
Players can build cages out of various materials. The material will determine the likeliness the cage will break or capture the entity. Cages come in three sizes (for now) and entities will only be captured by the correct size cage. i.e., chickens only captured by the small cage, Humans captured by the medium cage, etc. Animals can be lured with bait to go towards cages. Animals will only be lured to the cage by bait which matches their diet. Once an entity has successfully been put into a cage, the player can then apply a few jobs. They can butcher the entity, capture it, or free it. Capturing an entity will either make the animal tamed (if it's something like a cow or chicken) or make the animal a prisoner (if it's, say, a Human). Prisoners will do all the things you would expect from a normal settler. The catch (ha) is that they will do things at a lower proficiency, may try to escape (low chance), or may become hostile (also low chance) and start attacking your settlers. I'm thinking of adding some items later to deter prisoners from escaping/becoming hostile at the cost of other attributes. i.e., handcuffs which keep them from using hand items but totally keep them from escaping. Prisoners will also require their own Prison Cell where they will sleep and eat. I will also add more status effects for prisoners based on how well they are treated. i.e., becoming sick from poor cell conditions. This will come with the later update where I add alchemy. As well, we've conceptualized the idea of bringing prisoners into the settlement for good, but that's still very much in planning and will, again, be a later addition.
Diets
Ok, I had to add this new feature because, a) baiting animals needs specialized diets, and, b) I can no longer abide chickens eating chicken meat without repercussions.
Here's how it works:
Essentially, the diet window is quite similar to how uniforms get created. Each race that you've discovered will appear in the race/diet list. From here, you can assign diets to each race. (Later down the road I might make it so you can get more specific and apply diets to sub-groups within the race.) Each race has a default diet which is quite broad. Players can create their own diets and then overwrite that default diet if they choose to. The diets have 3 layers of priority within them: preferred, neutral, and undesired. Settlers will get a nice bump to various attributes and happiness if they are eating from the preferred diet set and they'll try to eat these first. Neutral has no positive/negative long-term affects. Undesired will have negative long term affects on attributes and happiness.
I know I could go into a lot more detail about all these main points but I would be here writing for hours and I want to go back to work haha. Hope that's a nice teaser for what's to come. Also, there were a lot of complaints about contrast and hard to read text. I've gone through every UI element and darkened all the backgrounds as well as brightened all the text elements. Hopefully this helps those players out a bit. :)
Thanks for being such an amazing and patient community. Really happy to get to chat with you all each day and get your feedback and warm messages.
Have a great weekend!
Waylon