UPDAAATTEE
looks like a lot of my gifs are broken. kind of a bummer. oh well!
in this weeks update (im pretending i have a scheduled update time now fyi) we have:
more water life!
you'll also notice the lamp which kinda...mostly...hovers over the players head in this gif (theres no animation for swimming and holding something yet).
so the swamp's gimmick is 'light' which originally meant your scanner got upgraded to a flashlight which you could use to explore and stuff but i found that kinda....boring? and limiting? so i replaced it with a lamp you can carry around (and throw! which isnt shown in this gif). so now you can use the light to interact with different things!
secondly, something i havent implemented yet but have been thinking about a lot lately: the logs.
from just about the beginning ive known that there has to be some sort of 'log'. at first it was just gonna be a log of all the creatures and plants youve scanned, with some hopefully funny/witty descriptions for everything that kinda showed the personality of the character
in the process of making this though i've kinda come around to a different kind of log...sort of like a daily journal thing, that would correspond with an upgrade. itd go like this: you scan a bunch of creatures, you come back, you upload the data to the ship, if you've uploaded enough for that day, the spaceship opens up, you go inside it, and your done for the day. then the screen would go black, and you'd get to read a short thing that the character has ostensibly 'written' before she went to sleep for the night. and then youd wake up, and you would have a new upgrade.
its important to note: these logs aren't gonna be just like, her accounting what she did for the day. thats not why i wanted these here. i wanted to introduce a different dimension to the game, a sort of story, but not really a story. just mostly the astronaut writing down her thoughts, her history, why she took this (dangerous, deeply lonely) mission, stuff like that. hopefully it'll be interesting and not dumb! i used to be really into writing fiction, but i havent written anything in a long long time, so we'll see :P
thats it! if you've got this far: congrats! that was ramblier than most posts!