dcfedor's blog

Hey Folks! Sorry for the late news today. Had a school function to attend with the family.

Most of the work today was administrivia anyway. But I did manage to rework the mouse controls to try an experiment with streamlining the user experience.

Previously, you could open the context menu by right clicking and holding over an item. And right clicking a tile would walk to it. Now, right clicking opens a context menu. No need to hold. And if the tile under the cursor is walkable, a "Walk To" context option appears.

Hey Folks! Good news, today. A lot more gamedev progress made!

But the day didn't squeak by without a bunch more admin work. End of Q2 is here, which means time to do the books, pay state taxes, pay myself, pay federal taxes, then tell the fed that I paid them. Still don't understand that last bit, but whatever.

Hey Folks! Some new admin tasks hit my desk this morning, so only a little dev to show off. However, it's at least visual!

After letting a few users test out the game unguided, one of the more consistent points of feedback is that the ship layout legibility needs work. A number of users had to put too much effort into understanding what is what, visually. And in particular with the floor and walls, that's not good.

Hey Folks! Another mixed bag today, as I juggled both admin tasks and some development.

The main thrust of today's dev work was finishing my clean-up of tooltips. I didn't expect to have a lot of time to deep dive into the NaN pressure/temp bug during fast forwarding, so I tackled the smaller task of tooltip legibility.

Previously, the tooltip was littered with debug info, weird names, redundant info, etc. When I let a friend test drive the game, they said they completely ignored it as a debug tooltip.

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. We had a good time junk shopping, eating, and visiting the aquarium for father's day. And it was a nice break from the computer!

Back at the office, I had quite a bit of catch-up to do on business-y things. Quite a few emails had come in over the weekend, and I'm nearly done with those now.

Hey Folks! Wrapped-up the rad sickness ailments today, and continued with adding ailments and debuffs to the remaining conditions.

Getting the symptoms added to rad sickness wasn't too hard. But one of the trickier things was getting the mortality to behave. Most rad sicknesses still take at least a day or so to kill a healthy patient, but my tests on new characters were killing them in less than an hour. To be fair, they were hardly robust subjects, usually hailing from micro-g childhoods, and having some amount of discomforts already.

Hey Folks! Most of today was spent researching, designing, and implementing the effects of radiation exposure.

After some brief work getting the pain thresholds modeled, it was time to setup radiation exposure. And apart from some minor effects in NEO Scavenger, this was mostly new territory.

So far, there are 5 levels of exposure for crew: normal, elevated, dangerous, life-threatening, lethal, and catastrophic.

Hey Folks! Still working on discomfort thresholds and effects. And spent pretty much the whole day looking at a screen like you see above.

So far, that includes adding effects for the various thresholds of:

Hey Folks! Decided to make today a dev day, after all the emailing yesterday. And I managed to get a few interesting bits done!

The first is something that's been long overdue since the control scheme changes: door controls. Used to be one could just click on a door to open or close it. No crew required. Then, when we changed the controls to always assume the captain is selected, one couldn't click on items like doors anymore. AI could still open them, though, so most of our testing was unhindered.

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Beautiful weather here, and visiting friends pretty much all weekend. So a nice change of pace! I welcome the summer.

Unfortunately, a lot more administrivia for me to do today, as I answered emails, did more project planning, and generally try to course correct for the long term. However, Michael saves the day with a last-minute check-in of his recent work on "social combat!"