Posted February 13, 2021 by void room
#build
The very first thing that I've done for this update was the music system. But there's no music in the game, right? Yes. But it will be easier for the composer to work with the game when it is possible to hear the music pieces in the game.
The next thing that I've done was the voiceover system. And again, there are no voiceovers. One reason is that I started with synthesised speech and it didn't sound well. The other, more important is that I kept on rewriting, modifying, altering, adding stuff. I actually started by cutting half of the dialogues, then decided to drop dialogues and stick to AI Companion speaking to the player.
Instead of just solely speaking, the AIC reacts to what the player does. I plan to keep all scenes like this, whenever it makes sense or is possible. I will be starting with tutorials, explanations of basic gameplay systems. The thing with the game reacting to the player's actions is that those tutorials are not mandatory and might be skipped. And not by a button press but by ignoring what AIC says.
There are right now just two scenes. One tells about upgrade machines, how it works (doesn't tell what happens if you try to install an upgrade to an already occupied slot, this will be a part of a different tutorial/scene) and the other about the map. The latter should help to navigate the world.
There's another big thing that hasn't been cut. Support for haptic vests. Currently, the game supports OWO vest and bhaptics (only on Quest, Windows support coming). If you're unfamiliar with those, check them out. Both work differently, provide sensations by other means and it might be up to each person to choose the haptic device on their own.
A minor system has been added while working on haptics. I added a system to tell whether you're outside or not, what sound should accompany you and if there should be a sensation triggered then. It's now quite windy at God Emperor's place.
And now even bigger change. Support for savegames/checkpoints. While the game is created as a roguelite, I still want to allow people to use more standard checkpoint system to play the game as a more traditional singleplayer experience. There is now no way to choose which one you prefer and to be honest, I still haven't decided when this should happen. Via profile? When a new profile/gameslot is created?
Currently, there are a few savegames created. Every few minutes or when you quit is "the last moment". When a safe place is reached there's another one. There's also an extra one "at least 50% of health" whenever something else is being saved and you've got enough health.
But even for the roguelite mode, this feature is going to be useful. If you want to call it a day, if your Quest has an almost flat battery, you'd like to take a break. Now if you exit the game, you will be prompted with information that you may continue later. The only downside is that you will always start in a safe place - upgrade machine room (blue) or workshop (orange). This, of course, might be used as a mean of fast travel to go back to your last location but I guess, that it's up to the people how they play and enjoy the game. I'm here to give tools.
One of the suggestions I've seen was that there should be tutorials explaining how devices work (these will be coming) and what the symbols mean. I am an explorer type of gamer. I do love exploring worlds and game mechanics. And I've thought that instead of explaining what symbols mean right upfront, maybe I should obfuscate the symbols, requiring players to explore them on their own. Right now, when you get the map, you have it filled with some weird signs (different every time you start a new game). You learn what symbol means what when using the associated device. Then, the symbol is changed to something easier to remember. With upcoming tutorials, this should be the best way to learn what symbols mean.
I also managed to fix lots of bugs. Some were making the game unplayable - crashes right after you start or blocked corridors. Some would be only happening when you moved far away from the start point. And there were some bugs that prevented the fault logs on Quest 2 to be sent to me.
In the next build, I plan to introduce objectives and more tutorials. This means that I should be getting closer to a proper demo.