dcfedor's blog

Hey Folks! My work doesn't have much to show today, so lucky you, you get a sneak peek into one of the latest concept art pieces! Can you guess what we're looking at?

Most of my morning was spent on admin stuff, unfortunately. But I did get a little more work done on social UI revealing hidden conditions.

Hey Folks! A lot of activity today, though not a lot to show for it just yet. I spent a good half day or more working on stat reveals, while Chris and Bjørn talked next steps.

Also, big news on the publisher front: we signed!

Even though we announced our partnership a while back, we were still finalizing contract stuff over the past few. But we officially signed the paperwork this morning, and we can now move on to great things together.

Hey Folks! More work refining the social combat UI today. I got the foundations of a hidden condition system setup, and made a series of other tweaks to improve the UI as I worked.

The big change here was to upgrade the conditions on characters so that they are hidden/revealed a bit more like NEO Scavenger. Each condition now has params to define how it should display by default, depending on whether the observer is the self or another.

Hey Folks! More work on the social combat UI today. This time, getting it to respond to user input and start closing the loop.

As you can see in today's screenshot, it's now listing all available interactions in the lower left, and selecting one updates the preview area. Right now, I've got it setup like a radio button. Choosing one deselects all others, so we only click one at a time.

In NEO Scavenger, it was setup such that you could add zero or more items before confirming. And sometimes, choosing more than one input changed the outcome.

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. We had a ton of rain here, which happens less than you'd think in Seattle during the summer. And rarer still, we even got quite a light show! We miss thunderstorms.

Back at work, I mostly shirked my admin duties today to focus on dev work. And I'm happy to report that I got a lot done!

Hey Folks! Didn't get a ton of time to produce anything today. Mostly admin work, feedback for folks, and testing a few things.

I did, however, get started on my next task: social combat UI.

Michael already prototyped this system a while back, and it's possible to social combat any NPC in the game once you hire them to your crew. And within it, you can interact with them, get their responses, and do a couple example exchanges.

Good news, everyone! Hauling works now!

I ended up figuring out where the tile's ship info was getting mixed-up, and now AI can haul loot from a derelict back to their own ship. It turns out the way I was looking for destinations to drop the loot was using the wrong ship as a search basis, and I had to attach some ship ID info to each zone so it could look in the right place.

In the process, I also found and fixed a number of other related and/or smaller bugs.

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Yesterday was Labor Day here in the US, so it was a long weekend. Friends, nice weather, good food...a nice mini vacation!

Back at the office, it was mostly catch-up today. Emails, contracts, planning, phone calls...I had just enough time in-engine today to snap the screenshot you see above. And to verify that the thing I need to resume working on tomorrow is mismatched tile IDs and zones after docking.

Despite the lack of work, other exciting stuff is still happening!

Hey Folks! Managed to get hauling to limp along today, though it still has some flaws to overcome.

A lot of the early work today involved fixing the haul job filtering so it only targeted appropriate items (and drop zones). But once that was done, I was able to paint haul tasks on items around the ship, and then designate a zone to haul them to, and have the AI ferry things over!

Hey Folks! A little bit of progress today between admin stuff. Focusing on the hauling task.

My initial attempts to solve hauling involved writing code to search for storage zones, and do special handling whether there was a matching item to stack on, or empty space in the zone. It involved generating special interactions to fetch the haul item and direct it to the destination stack, or else creating a placeholder and pretending it would be installed in an empty space.