It’s silly, but I’m almost giddy at how good it feels to have a skeleton menu in place! It makes it start to feel real.
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Ship unlocking functionality now implemented. This bit of meta-progression means you’ll now be able to choose which ships to unlock and in what order. They will each have different stats, and possibly unique abilities as well. I hope we’ll be able to design different scenarios such that different ships suit different missions.
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Hi everyone. Looking for some feedback on a potential mechanic. I have three options (but welcome other suggestions if you have them). I would love to hear which one of the three you prefer.
Introduction
Officers are characters visible in the HUD of the game. They will replace the single captain character that has been a part of the game so far. The primary purpose of the officers is to provide a human connection in the game. They react to and provide commentary about the events in the game. They also visually display the progression of mutations in the crew, by gradually gaining appearance quirks. There will be representatives from different parts of the ship: Helm, engineering, medbay, etc.
This is an outline of a few options of mechanics that could be associated with these characters.
1 - No mechanics
There is no need for the officers to have a mechanical impact on the game. Their narrative contribution in the form of a “live” HUD and situational commentary is sufficient.
2 - Basic stat boosts
This variant focuses on simplicity. When an officer ages and dies, the player is presented with the opportunity to promote a new one. Each proposed officer will have a randomly selected skill related to their role on the ship. For example, an engineer might be able to improve fuel efficiency. A medical officer might reduce mutation or trauma rate. The skills the officer provides are active while they are alive.
This variant could either require the player to keep one of each type of officer, or promote freely (e.g. forego a medical officer and have two engineers instead). The latter option provides more opportunity for strategising, but is less realistic.
Ships could have a different number of officer slots (1 to 4).
3 - Promotions
This variant uses 2 - Basic stat boosts as a starting point. On top of this, it introduces the concept of rank or promotions. Destinations in the game will be tagged with types corresponding to the roles of the officers on the ship. For example, a medical facility would be tagged as a medbay type destination. These destinations could intermittently spawn promotion opportunities with an in-game symbol over the destination (in the same way as Discovery Caches or Upgrade Opportunities). If the player chooses to travel to that destination, their officers of that type will receive a promotion. This will have the effect of either unlocking new skills, or simply upgrading the stats of the regular skills.
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This would feel like a missed opportunity to be honest. I think you should start with a simple version of option 2 to get a feel for it.
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TIME FOR SOME GRAPHICS! 
I know we moved towards a semi-transparent minimal overlay, and this is a return towards a more UI-focused setup. Don’t worry - my wife approves. The reason we’re going back to focusing more on the UI is because the game is shaping up to being more similar to Papers, Please and Mind Scanners, but with resource management / upgrades at the core instead of time based minigames. Both of the games linked are effectively all UI, and we think it fits for this game as well.
The ship console will of course be alive, with lots of movement and lights etc. It will react to the state of the ship, with sparks flying when hull is low and other things like that.
It also helps that this is created by someone with an actual eye for design, rather than my haphazard programmer art.
Anyway, without further ado, here is a WIP piece of how the game will look! (Zoom in to get a better look.)
What do you think?
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Love it!
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Now that we’ve firmed up the officer mechanic, I’m working on implementing a base set of skills. Almost done!
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Looking really cool, Alex!
Are you still streaming?
edit: if so do you mind sharing it again? I lost my twitch acc.
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Thank you very much!
I haven’t been streaming for some time, as most of my days are taken up by caring for my little demon! (…daughter)
Anyway, I might pick it up again in the future, so here’s the link: Twitch
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Been working a bit on the localisation system. Please ignore the presumably terrible translation, it’s just a test from Google Translate. All I wanted to do was see how easy it is to switch fonts when the language changes!
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very nice work you done again Alex!!!
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Hi Elpidoforos, thanks for the kind words. Nice to see you again.
Some actual graphics for the officers! I am really liking the Papers, Please vibes here. The officers will be made up of modular components (face, hair, eyes, etc). As you can tell, we currently only have a handful of components so the characters look very similar to each other.
Age is highlighted by greying hair.
We will also be displaying mutations in the officer appearance.
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You can drag the cryo drift lever up and down! This is a small detail to make the HUD feel more tactile and immsersive. Will need to do some testing to see if it works intuitively (it will trigger if dragged >0.5 of the range, or if the mouse button is released while hovered over any part of it).
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Things are still visually very messy as we slowly work on transitioning from placeholder graphics to actuals. However, it’s still very pleasing to see some of the first destination icons prepared. We only have a handful ready so far, so I’ve matched them as closely as possible to the existing destinations.
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