Tag: colony building

DevSlog

Improvements to core features

Produno

With the initial test build released on Itch.io i have spent a bit of time making improvements to some of the core features of the game to improve usability.

When multi selecting an item it will now only select up to 200 items of that type, this should help performance if you have too many objects that are the same. I also removed the ability to multi select hull pieces as there are always quite a few of these for each ship. There should also not be any reason for you wanting to multi select all hull.
To further improve performance, I added a VisibilityNotifier to each Entity in the game, this is a node provided by the Godot engine and allows us to check which items are being shown on the screen, or what the player can actually see. Using this we can now make sure only those on the actual screen will be selected.

Multi Select

I further improved the multi build tool adding new sounds to let the player know when the multi build has started. Unfortunately you cannot hear those sounds in the gif below. I now need to allow multi build for removing build objects and blueprints.

Multi Build

Skin and Hair Colours

I have moved skin and hair colours into a separate JSON file. This allows modders to easily change what colours they want in the game and for which race to assign them to. As you can see below, the pawn data file accepts an array of colour categories, this means you can create separate categories of skin tones and add as many as you want to each race.

The Skin Colours data file.
The Skin Colours data file.
The Pawn/Human data file
The Human data file.

This also means you could have different coloured skin tones for humans too if you really wanted.

Green Human
DevSlog

Building, objects and materials

Produno

My main goal for any game mechanics associated with building and the building objects themselves should be flexibility, extensibility and ease of use. Not only for those that want to modify the files but also for the players playing the game.

In other words the menus should be intuitive and easy to read, whilst giving all the information required to quickly build any of the objects available. Anyone wanting to modify the files should be able to do so easily and with the least amount of friction possible.

I also wanted materials to change the appearance of the item whilst also changing its composition, from how it reacts in the world to how much health it has etc.

A lot of time was spent iterating upon the UI and adjusting the mechanics of the game associated with building and materials to fit the criteria set out above. Below you can see the menu I finally settled upon, though be aware that like most other things in this game, it is still a work in progress and could be subject to change.

Build Menu
Build Menu

You can see from the above image we have a primary material and a secondary material. Not every object will require two different material types to build and this can be modified in the JSON files if required. Below you can see this item requires 3 of either Titanium or Gold plus 2 Silicon. These materials can be further modified via another JSON file.

"material_types": {
        	"primary_mats": ["Titanium", "Gold"],
        	"primary_mats_amount": 3,
        	"secondary_mats": ["Silicon"],
        	"secondary_mats_amount": 2,
        },

Below you can see the effects of the different primary material types (Secondary material types will not change the colour of the objects). This is achieved by using a shader and a mask material which can be input into the JSON file.

The effect of different primary materials.

Adding new objects should be as easy as copying and pasting a similar object, changing parts of its data and pointing it to your texture file in your module folder.

As usual, if you have any questions then feel free to head on over to our forums where I will be happy to reply.