http://7drl.org/2014/03/15/rogue-station-day-6/The final day is upon us, but here is the last report before the final success/fail posting!
Started the day fixing a lot of small issues with the new Transport ability, it now feels pretty tight! Started on the game event system, that will make things go horribly wrong at random turns throughout the game (not entirely random, so let’s call it procedurally). For now there’s only hull breaching, but I hope to get rescue/invade parties in too (but that will be a stretch at this point). Adding the hull breaching shed light on some issues in my propagation algorithm and the oxygen visualization was clearly not informative enough. I started interpolating a gradient map for visualizing oxygen values instead of just doing an alpha 0-1, and the improvements made to the propagation algorithm truly boosted that mechanic over the board!
It quickly became apparent though that with hull breaching in, I would have to add the space suit. The space suit will spend station power to generate oxygen. Since station power is the most precious resource (well, beyond oxygen of course) in the game, hopefully we can manage to balance this gear so that you only want to wear it when you go to repair a hull breach. I also did another pass on doors to make sure oxygen, or lack there of, wouldn’t propagate through closed doors.
Further, I properly integrated the repair mechanics for the hull breach, so that oxygen absorption stops and the hull breach effect disappears when you’ve fixed the breach.
Another thing I spent an hour or two on today was adding details/decoration to the different room types, to strengthen the room themes and to tell them apart more easily, which is very handy when the “Hull breached in the Living Quarters!” message starts flashing on your screen. I added search mechanics to the different decorational pieces, so you can search them for repair kits and other loot. I also added a blaster rifle, but it doesn’t give you the shoot ability just yet.
The last thing I started before the clock entered the final 24 hours of this entry, was to add an Invader event (similar to the hull breach event in mechanics), that spawns a group of invaders. They can kill you if they bump into you, and you can kill them if you bump into them, but their drunken walk is awful at best. We’ll see if I can find more time to add the blaster rifle’s shoot ability so that you can shoot these green invaders! The idea is also that they will degrade the condition of station equipment if they bump into those… we’ll see what I can find time for, because I really need to spend some serious time on the game’s multiple numbers to make the game feel a bit more complete… at this point there are some interesting mechanics in here I think, but the numbers needs to be tweaked right for it to come out strongly. Crossing fingers 24 hours with sleep, food and family life in between will be enough!
