Spacebase DF-9 Alpha 4b released
- Fixed: Various pathfinding issues. Some of these fixes greatly improve technician efficiency.
- Fixed: Modified Oxygen Recyclers don’t affect the capacity display.
- Fixed: Various crashes related to Spaceface logs.
Spacebase DF-9 Alpha 4: “The Terrible Secrets of Space”, has been released! See the patch notes for a detailed list of changes.
This video comes on the eve of Amnesia Fortnight 2014, a game jam-like event we do here at Double Fine in which you, our players, vote on which prototypes we make and then watch us livestream the process of making them. Jeremy, Matt, and myself are all on different teams for the two weeks, but rest assured once the amnesia clears we’ll be back to work on Spacebase!
Alpha 4’s marquee feature is the new Research system, which allows you to build Research Lab zones where Scientists can research new things to build and improve your base with. There’s also some cool visual enhancements, work on citizen personalities, and the usual huge raft of bug fixes and minor improvements.
(Apologies for the video being a few days late, we ran into some technical difficulties getting it recorded on Friday!)
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Spacebase DF-9 Alpha 4a released
- Fixed: Several crashes loading old save data.
- Fixed: Builders get trapped in rooms.
- Fixed: Mouse panning doesn’t work when window is resized.
- Fixed: Some Spaceface log text gets cut off.
Spacebase DF-9 Alpha 4: "The Terrible Secrets of Space" released
Video coming tomorrow :]
- Research Lab zones can be constructed. Citizens assigned to Scientist duty research new projects here. Discoveries can result in new things to build and new equipment for workers, including but not limited to: level 2 oxygen recyclers, heavily armored doors, more efficient demolition beams, better armor for Security personnel.
- Datacubes containing research data can be discovered aboard derelict and docking ships. These can be marked for collection by Scientists, who will carry them back to a Research Lab to redeem for research progress.
- Starfield backdrop now uses multiple layers to create a parallax effect of stars, nebulae, and procedurally generated planets. Each new base that’s created gets a different composition. See our earlier blog post for more info.
- Citizen morale is now apparent from their walk animation. Several citizen animations have been improved.
- Citizens now choose Spaceface logs appropriate to their personality traits. Added and expanded several personality traits that are now shown in the “Psych Profile” inspector tab. See our earlier blog post for more info on this.
- Replaced accordion-style tab interface with horizontal tabs. Makes better use of limited vertical screen real estate and provides access to more functionality within same.
- Hovering/clicking on a room’s walls now hovers/selects that room, making it much easier to select rooms. Likewise for plants and hydroponics cultures.
- Disabled “center on room” room selection behavior. If anyone misses this behavior we can re-add it as a user option later.
- Citizens can now mention randomly generated creatures on Spaceface. Examples include: “Venusian Fuzzy Mollusk”, “Land Bird”, “Venomous Beefalo”, “Tralfamadorian Hen”.
- Spaceface logs are now added to a queue and citizens post the highest priority one(s) within an update period that varies a bit based on their “chatty/quiet” personality trait.
- Added several new types of Spaceface logs, and reintroduced some of the generic logs from the Amnesia Fortnight 2012 prototype.
- Citizen inspector now shows the date a citizen became a citizen of your base.
- Citizens get morale bonuses or penalties based off a rolling average of recent room satisfaction. At the moment, dead bodies are the only thing that negatively affect a room’s morale score. Citizens comment on nice surroundings in Spaceface logs.
- Plant “healthy” and “sickly” states now match up with their visuals.
- Citizens no longer display in their own friends and enemies lists. “Self esteem” is shown in the new Psych Profile tab.
- Healthy garden plants now produce a small amount of oxygen, roughly equal to 1/5th of a level 1 Recycler’s output.
- Revamped various inspector UI button layouts: door controls, room controls.
- Demolish button in object inspector now shows amount of Matter that will be reclaimed.
- Door inspector now shows door state: whether it is open or closed, broken, vacuum-locked, etc.
- Added a mode for players with red-green colorblindness, available in options menu.
- Rebound “back” in all menus from X to ESC, and backspace to “cancel” in the construct menu. Game can no longer be paused from non-top level menus, eg construct, roster, etc.
- Derelicts and docking ship layouts are more interesting and better-decorated. Dead bodies now appear on some.
- When a depressed citizen has a positive interaction with a happy citizen, they become happier and post to Spaceface about it.
- Cutaway mode now works on asteroids.
- Starting citizen duty proficiencies are now determined by a “skill point” system, so most citizens are now more likely to be skilled in at least one duty, and few citizens are likely to be highly skilled at everything.
- Stoves can be placed anywhere in a Pub now, no longer just against walls.
- Fixed: Friends and Enemies lists in citizen inspector overflow. Lists are now capped at 5 entries.
- Fixed: Various bad scrollbar behaviors.
- Fixed: Alarm Panel uses Fire Extinguisher icons in UI.
- Fixed: Monitors and signage on right-facing walls appear to hover.
- Fixed: Many docking ship attempts fail due to broken module data.
- Fixed: Since Alpha 3(?) citizens don’t post Spaceface logs about eating meals in pubs, or get the morale bonus for eating a cooked meal.
- Fixed: Camera location isn’t written to save game data.
While Matt finishes some UI code work necessary to make our Research system happen, I’ve been improving the Spaceface log system. The end result is that citizens now have rudimentary personalities!
In Alpha 3 and earlier builds, the process by which citizens would post to Spaceface was simple: when a given type of event happens - getting tired (rest need crossing a threshold), eating a meal at a pub, gossiping with someone - they’d refer to a list of lines written for that particular event and pick one randomly. The first screenshot above shows the selection of lines for “duty need reached a critical level” in the Dialog Database tool we’ve used for every Double Fine game since Brutal Legend. (Aside: this tool also provides a framework for translating the game into different languages, which we absolutely want to do at some point! See our Frequently Asked Questions list for more on this.)
The deficiency of this purely random approach is that citizens in the same circumstances all tend to sound the same. We might write a range of lines, each expressing different quirks and viewpoints, but citizens would appear to flit randomly between these voices, losing out on any real sense of characterization.
Before we even launched Alpha 1 I had a plan for how to improve on this, and only just recently had the time to make it happen. Now, citizens have a table of personality variables (debug text in the second screenshot above) which the log system cross-references with tag data we’ve added to lines (right-most column in the first screenshot) in order to rank the available lines and determine which one best fits their unique psych profile. They’ll also refer to other status attributes such as their morale, current duty, and needs levels. It’s very easy to add new tags, and now that we have a range of personality traits we can, in future updates, have these traits influence the decision-making process.
So now we can, for example, write a log about a miner doing their duty while thinking about delicious sandwiches, and next time a miner is mining and wants to log about it, the system will pick that one if their hunger level also happens to be high. The strength of the system is that we don’t have to write lines for every possible permutation, just tag ones that jump out as being appropriate for a specific voice.
I also added queue functionality for new logs, so that if a citizen tries to post lots of logs within a certain interval the system will only post the most important or appropriate ones.
This system is entirely compatible with the writing we’ve already done, and the only extra work now needed when writing new lines is to just tag them appropriately. The flavor and uniqueness of the Spaceface logs now has the ability to scale with our resources for writing new lines.
What sort of things would you like to see citizens posting to Spaceface about? What kind of personality quirks do you think would make for interesting writing? Let us know in the Spacebase forums!
Progress on Alpha 4 continues. Above, some of the art Jeremy’s been working on: an upgraded version of the Oxygen Recycler, and upgrades for the armor and weapons that Security personnel can equip. These and several other things will be available only once you’ve had Scientists research them in a Research Lab zone.
We’re shooting for the second week of February for the release of Alpha 4. This follows our roughly once-a-month schedule for major updates, offset a bit due to last month’s holidays. In addition to the research system and backdrop planets, there’s already a lot of improvements in the build. The most difficult task still lies ahead, however: coming up with a pun on “She Blinded Me With Science” for the update’s title!
Hello space-people! I am Jeremy, lead artist on Team Spacebase. Here’s a peek at a little something I’ve been working on! First off - the space backgrounds in the game are now 3D - meaning they now use a 3D camera and the nebula/dust layers have a bit of a parallax effect. You can’t tell in screenshots, but it definitely puts the ‘space’ in ‘Spacebase’. I actually started work on this feature back before we launched Alpha 1, but it wasn’t ready. It took a back seat to more important work, but now is finally the time!
Also, you might notice those large spherical objects in the background. 3d spinning planets! Randomly generated for your viewing pleasure! When choosing a starting location for your base, you’ll have a chance of starting near a planet. As of right now there are no simulation implications tied to this - No, you can’t land your base on the planet and explore it. If I could do that with shaders alone we’d be having a different conversation right now - but for the moment they are purely visual flavor. Sorry!
The next addition to the environment system will be the addition of various space-features, based on the properties of your starting location. For example, if your area is high in asteroids you’ll see lots of space dust and floating asteroid chunks in the background. It’s important to me for each ‘new base’ location to feel unique.
IT IS THE YEAR 2014.
Yeah, mostly our phones are just a little fancier. But hey, we’re cranking away on Spacebase DF-9 Alpha 4!
Above is a video from Lead Programmer Matt Franklin showing a sweet recent bug fix: citizens now path around hull breaches with quite reasonable intelligence, thus they’ll often be able to avoid getting sucked out into space. The red lines are a debug tool we have for visualizing vacuum forces. Like other debug tools, we’d like to eventually expose this kind of information to players in a readable, useful way.
As for what new features Alpha 4 will entail, plans are coming together. We had four choices that were each attractive for different reasons:
- "Stuff": Citizens have small, personally meaningful knick-knacks. Citizens claim living space and decorate it with these. Each object has different qualities like color, material, and planet of origin that make it more or less desirable to different citizens, and they trade with one another to get things they like more. Some objects get lost or discarded, which along with things like replicator food wrappers creates litter that Janitors are responsible for cleaning up.
- Tech Tree: Players can build research lab zones where scientists can discover new things to build, such as more efficient oxygen recyclers, better equipment for builders, etc. Players can discover blueprints aboard derelicts that unlock new things to research.
- Power + Base Defense Turrets: Power reactors generate power for rooms. Rooms without power go dark, and objects within them don’t function. Different objects draw different amounts of power. Players can build defense turrets both inside and outside their base, which fire on hostiles. The high power cost of the turrets makes it difficult to build an impregnable base.
- Room assignment, Doctors, Infirmaries: As mentioned previously, players can assign citizens to different rooms so they’ll focus their work there: security will patrol there, technicians will maintain objects there, bartenders will tend bar there. Citizens can be assigned to Doctor duty, and assigned to an Infirmary zone where sick and injured citizens will go to be healed. Doctors not assigned to any infirmary will will patrol the base looking for hurt or sick citizens.
When we decide what to work on next, we have a few different viewpoints for thinking about what a new feature offers: what does it do to increase the depth of the game’s systems? Does it add depth to base building, the citizen life sim, or both? What does it do to give players a sense of greater possibilities within the game? How does it help players tell more interesting stories with their bases?
"Stuff trading" was attractive because it adds some much-needed depth to citizen behavior and personalities and gives us a good basis for future expansion, but we felt like it didn’t give players enough interesting decisions to make. The power system would definitely add depth to base building, but also runs the risk of making Spacebase feel too much like pure base building, or even a sort of tower defense game, and right now we’d rather distinguish the game with unique features. Room assignment gives players more control over what people are doing but doesn’t expand the game’s sense of scope, making it ideal for a later update.
Ultimately we’ve settled on adding the tech tree, because it opens new possibilities for players and gives them some good decisions to make in the later game, ie once they’ve got a self-sustaining base up and running.
To be very clear, all of the features above are still in the near-term plan for future updates, but the order in which we do them is an interesting puzzle that changes how it takes shape, and what makes the game compelling for new and existing players.
We’ll share some progress on the tech tree stuff once we’ve got it running in-game. Next week Jeremy will have something really cool-looking to show off!
Spacebase DF-9 Alpha 3b released
Another minor update for Alpha 3, fixing a new feature:
- Fixed: Hostile immigrants, aka raiders that deploy from shuttles, don’t show up.
Spacebase DF-9 Alpha 3a released
Our first minor update for Alpha 3 has been released. Details:
- Fixed: Builders sometimes get permanently stuck trying to build a prop.
- Fixed: Bartenders get stuck idling if you save and reload while they’re serving a cooked meal.
- Fixed: Pathfinding-related crash.
- Fixed: All plants bear only candy canes.
- Fixed: All plants yield only one food item on harvest.
- Fixed: Low-condition items that don’t decay are unrepairable.
- Fixed: Some plants are ignored by botanists.
- Fixed: “Ghost helmet” visual glitch on raiders.
- Fixed: Broken oxygen situation in “donut” style derelicts.
- Fixed: Interiors of unexplored derelicts are exposed in cutaway view mode.
- Fixed: Infinite loop during chat with bad save data.