We’re now knee-deep into the work on Alpha 5. Above, some early WIP (bugs visible!) shots of two new additions: a defense turret that can be built inside or outside your base that fires on any hostiles, and a mock-up of a “breaching ship” used by raiders to forcibly enter your base’s interior!
Gosh, it took us this long to post an animated GIF… we’re really gonna have to step it up.
Hi! We apologize for the quiet time since Amnesia Fortnight ended. Rest assured, we’re still working away on Spacebase! Alpha 4c should be out any day now, and contains improvements to demolition tools: we’ve separated the Demolish tool into “Tear Down” and “Vaporize”. The former works much as the current tool does, while the latter destroys everything on the selected tile(s), which should make for much easier strike operations.
Looking further ahead to the next major update, Alpha 5 is due roughly one month from now. It’ll feature lots of new possibilities for hazards - such as raiders breaching your base - as well as ways to keep your citizens in one piece, via doctors and infirmaries. More info soon!
We also now have a clear road map for the next few months of Spacebase development, which we’ll be sharing more about in the coming weeks.
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!)
[END TRANSMISSION]
Video coming tomorrow :]
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!
