v0.4 - The Roguelike Update

First, some bad news: shortly after the last Demo Day, I was laid off from my day job. The good news is that this really freed me up to work on Planets For Sale. I hope that it really shows with this update!

Rogue-like

The game is finally a rogue-like! After promising it would just be the next update several times now, the player now has the ability to pick their buildings. Every run starts with you selecting a combination of Corporation and Starting Building to begin with. Corporations are buildings meant to help dictate a playstyle and offer rewards that encourage playing into that style, like the Bureaucratic Firm's new passive ability giving bonus prestige for completing contracts. Starting Buildings offer powerful abilities not available anywhere else, but you only get one. After each planet you meet Quota on, you'll get the ability to add a new building from a random selection to your ship. This pool consists of every other building made thus far.

Art Pass

As mentioned in the last devlog, making assets has become a priority. There's no way my crappy MSPaint art would fly as a professional product. So a lot of time was spent working in Blender and Godot to make assets and try to achieve the final artstyle. I'm still not happy with some parts, but this gets a lot closer to what is hopefully the final versions.

Unique Events

Random events were added in the last update, but now we're getting to the good stuff. Each planet now has unique events that can occur. You can now deal with cloudrunners on Phenor, extreme water pressure on Tangaroa, or gold smugglers on Dorado. More events will be added to the planets, and the next big jump will be adding unique events based on what buildings you have, or even having certain buildings giving you unique responses to existing events...

Version 0.4.0 Changelog

Major Features

• Art pass:
• Performed an art pass on the user interface during gameplay
• Performed an art pass on some 3D assets in building/planet vistas
• Performed an art pass on resource icons
• The player can now select their starting buildings on a new run
• The player can now add a building after each planet

Minor Features

• Added a backdrop to some cutscenes
• Added ability for buildings to be locked
• Added ability to continue runs via saving/loading in your profile
• Added new Corporation: NeoEden Foundry. Spend minerals and save up for a big bonus!
• Added new Starter Building: Titan Extractors. Spend minerals to get more resources!
• Added new resource: Fish
• Added unique events for each planet
• Bureaucratic Firm now has a passive secondary ability: Gain 1 Prestige for every 4 contracts completed.
• Research Team now has a passive secondary ability: On meeting Quota, produce 2 Data.
• Updated to Godot 4.4

Bug Fixes

• Fixed Atom Smasher having some visual clashing
• Fixed some monetary gains not counting towards Quota
• Fixed some audio bugs

Known Issues

• There can be a long delay after selecting your Corporation/Starting Building and getting to the Planet Selection screen. This is due to Godot preloading all the icon animations. I am not looking forward to figuring this one out.
• Despite the art pass, the vistas for buildings and planets can have jaggies and be pixelated. Fun fact, Godot will cap any subviewports to the screen resolution of the application! So right now they're capped to the 1152x648 resolution I've been using to make sure the game still is legible for potato PCs. A resolution increase is in the future.

What's Next?

More assets, more planets, more buildings. There's definitely more mechanics I'd like to add, but getting the game looking good takes more time.