dcfedor's blog

Short update today, as the screenshot mostly speaks for itself. An example of the career event stuff I mentioned yesterday is nearly done!

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. I was actually at work yesterday, but basically on voice chat with devs most of the day. Hence no news post. (And not much visible stuff to show anyway.)

Today, however, we have a bit more to talk about.

In our current sprint, we're trying to make the crew management aspects as compelling as the salvage loop. And after a bit of work towards that goal, we realized we'd end up with a social loop that was maybe fun, but kind of irrelevant to the rest of the game. Like it existed on some island detached from the rest.

Hey Folks! Still plugging away at social UI changes. A lot of today focused on getting the social UI to tell us more useful info, and cleaning-up the social actions to be more logical. Also, Chris has merged his camera tweaks into mainline, so we have smoother camera action!

For now, the social UI will reveal all stats on the participants, so we can see what we're doing. As you can see with Benjamin, above, that can get a bit overwhelming. But we can at least see if our actions have any affect on him.

Hey Folks! Another skipped news day, and you're probably familiar with the drill. Later afternoon work/dev chats sometimes squeeze out my usual news time. So I'm trying to sneak news in earlier today :)

Hey Folks! Hope everyone enjoyed the weekend. And my apologies for the missed news yesterday. I actually had most of a normal work day until mid-afternoon, when Rochelle started feeling ill. So I quit early to help out.

Back at the office, progress continues on drama room prototyping. We reached a point where the drama room roughly felt interactive and responsive, and had a long chat about whether to continue adding options, or if it revealed enough about our next steps to return to the main branch.

Hey Folks! Once again, sorry for the lapse in news yesterday. My conference calls with the contract devs in the other hemisphere basically means my afternoons sometimes run late.

However, we're having some really productive discussions!

Our first attempt at the drama room experiment started strong, but we quickly realized it was a dead end. It was fun watching the crew respond to our input, but there weren't many options for strategy or gameplay.

Hey Folks! As mentioned yesterday, we'll be looking into crew drama and management next. Basically, doing a hack job prototype to get some ideas up and running, and to hopefully figure out the best way of making this feature a viable game mechanic.

Our first test is a simple drama scene:

Hey Folks! First off, sorry for yesterday's missing news post. I was on a dev conference call that was pretty productive, and that ran long (into dinner).

That said, we have made some decent progress in the past few days. Front and center is Michael's latest feature: custom key bindings!

Hey Folks! Bit of a mixed bag today, as I tackled a variety of unrelated things to both unblock others and make things run smoother.

Hey Folks! My apologies for the missed news yesterday. We devs had a conference call at the end of the day, and it ran a bit long.

However, it was a productive chat! We all fired-up the game, and talked about how the salvage game loop felt. Each of us started in the same save file, in a salvage pod docked with a derelict. No starting tools, so first step was to board the derelict in search of useful tools.