First of all, I hope you're all keeping safe at home.
It's been a long holiday weekend here in the UK, so I'm finishing it off by posting a small update on some of the recent progress made to the game.
I set out this weekend with the goal of adding some progression mechanics to the game's Campaign Mode. Making it so that Astronauts perform research to earn money, which you can use to buy more station modules and equipment, which you can use to produce more research, and so on.
I'm happy to say that this feature is now a part of the game, and works rather well to inject a sense of purpose.
Implementing this also led to a whole sequence of features and improvements that needed to be finished in order to make it work. The most significant of which is time control.
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You can't rush science. Unless you're the commander of a space station in Space Station Continuum, in which case just press a button and increase the flow of time by a factor of up to 100! This can really help when you've got your eye on an expensive new station module, and just don't want to wait for your astronauts to generate enough funds in realtime.
However, you'll need to be extra careful when running the game at higher speeds, as with faster research comes faster everything else. Your astronauts will get hungry, sleepy, and need to answer the call of nature much faster than usual. So you'd better make sure that you have adequate facilities on board to fulfill thier needs, or you're going to have a useless and incapacitated crew on your hands much sooner than you might expect.
Adding a feature like time control requires huge overhauls to critical parts of the underlying simulation, including electricity generation and storage - which is now much more sophisticated than before.
I've also made a few other miscellaneous improvements, including Astronauts now losing Muscle Mass much quicker if their needs aren't being met. This means they'll have to return to Earth much sooner if they aren't being looked after properly.
The next step is to integrate all of these resource and money accumulation changes into the save/load system so that the game can keep track of your progress as you build your station over time.
Then it will be time to enable the first version of the system for unlocking new technologies, and at that point we'll have a game on our hands!
Stay safe and stay home, and I'll see you in the next update.
- John