Hey Folks! Still quite a bit of admin work today, though a few bits of coding done.
But maybe Pacot.es heard your cries for more interesting news, as they published their interview with yours truly! In it we go over plans for Ostranauts, changes from NEO Scavenger, my thoughts on open development, and other questions about the business.
Hey Folks! Didn't escape the administrivia yet, unfortunately. Spent most of the day on emails, documentation, and phone calls. Still holding out hope I can sling some more code soon.
I did, however, run another overnight test. This time with the auto-pause disabled. When I arrived at the desk this morning, the game had been running for 9.5 hours. Again, everyone was alive. (Yay!) Some were sleeping. Others awake.
Hey Folks! Unfortunately, today was pretty shot through with business admin tasks. Mostly in the form of project planning.
However, I did run another soak test last night, where I let the game run overnight. When I checked in the morning, all 6 crew members were still alive! And the game appeared to be running pretty smoothly, too. No overheating/frozen rooms or NaN pressures. So that's good!
Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Apart from the spambotpocalypse Discord seemed to suffer, it was fairly low key for me.
Still more admin work this morning, involving banks, company annual reporting, and email. But once that was done, I was able to finally sync with Michael's work. And lucky you, you get a sneak peek!
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! 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!"
Hey Folks! Short update today, as it was another project planning day.
I think I've got the project plan and budget mostly complete now, with correct accounting of pre- and post-Early Access milestones. And in reviewing the docs, I thought of a few more things I missed earlier.
Hey Folks! Just a short update today, as most of the day was spent on budgeting/planning.
Recently, while testing a build to show a friend, I noticed that some of my AI was skipping over important part of interaction chains. Basically, the AI was remembering that the punchline of the jokes had a big payoff, and wasn't bothering with the setup anymore.
Hey Folks! Just a short update today to let you know I was able to cut a video today, and it should be ready to go out tomorrow morning. I'll likely post links on all channels, and send the newsletter then.
Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Nice weather here, and a lot of quality father-daughter time, as mom attended a recertification course and did some painting. Exhausting, but fulfilling!
Back at the office, Michael heard my cries for pathfinding help, and checked-in some code which fixes most of the clumping issues we were seeing. AI preferentially chooses spots which are unoccupied now when walking to a task. And you can see the results in today's screenshot.
