A lot new stuff since the last blog entry. First of all, Solar Colony now looks a bit better, because of some new graphics. But I also changed a lot of internal stuff.
Startmenu
One change is the startmenu. Now one does not immediately start in the game, but inside a start menu. There you could create a new game or load a savegame.
The nice starfield is also the background of the game itself.
The three different difficulties will result in a different starting station. The game itself is also a bit easier or harder. On hard, each citizen will consume much more oxygen, food and water.
On easy, a demolished room will give you its full cost back. On hard you will only get half of it back.
UI cleanup and room removal
The UI was a real mess. Now it is a bit better. I added a Scene2D table on the left side and added all buttons to it. Each button now has the same size and they are also a bit bigger now.
One new feature there is the destroy button. Up to now it was not possible to remove a room from the station. Now you can destroy rooms by activating the destroy button and clicking on rooms. But you can only destroy a room if there aren't any people in. If a room is removed. All its content is moved to other storage, and depending on your difficulty, you will get some of its cost back.
I also added some icons. If a citizen is hungry, thirsty, etc. a corresponding icon is shown. If a storage is full or a system is not able to produce something it is also shown by an icon.
Graphics
I have added some new graphics, but as you can see, there are still a lot of graphics missing. The character sprites are ment to be placeholders, but I think I will keep them, because they are not as bad as I thought.
As you can see on the gif animation, I also added moving meteors. They basically just some nice looking feature, without any gameplay mechanic. They are moving from right to left and will be deleted if they are near the Meteor Collector facility. But the collector itself will always produce the same amount of meteors, independent of the colliding meteors.
Cloning
Originally my plan was to let the people reproduce themself by the normal way. But that would involve more AI, rooms for the people, children and so on. But because of a lack of time, I wasn't able to implement all that stuff. So instead, I implemented a cloning facility. To generate new humans, you have to install a single cloning facility. You can then use the "Place Character" button to generate a new human, but only if you have enough water, oxygen and biomass.
Gameplay balancing
I started balancing the game itself and yes, it is really hard to do so. I added more build costs to the rooms and adjusted some converters. At first my people died very early and I had to make more adjustments. Now it looks a bit better, but it is far away from being balanced. I will try to find some time to adjust it, but we will see.