Alright, version 0.1.3!
Continued Gameplay Adventure:
After exploring the entire galaxy the last time I played, I decided to dial it back. This time Jonas Starhawk is just a simple man trying to get a big spaceship as fast as possible. In doing so I found a nifty trick. By allowing stamping machines to be bought, I made a little auto-stamp system with four of them. I really like this emergent automation and I think it could make for interesting ship upgrades. I got money rolling quickly and was living the high life in only a few hours.
For fun I decided to try the varying prices mechanic that trading posts have. I found one planet that sold Pineapple Chunks for cheap, and another that bought them for more than double what I paid. You made a joke about someone filling their ship with Bananas for weird reasons. Well laugh it up, because I bought 126 Pineapple Chunks at $51, sold them at $136, and made a cool $10,710 profit.
Was it terribly inefficient? Yes. Can I make more in ¼ of the time by doing freight jobs? Yes. Did I accidentally by 126 Pineapples first, load them up, and then have to scramble to find a buyer? Yes. Do I want this feature to be built up more and improved still? Absolutely.
I think this way of making money ties into an idea you said a few videos back about a character's personality drifting depending on their actions. Helping ships slides you more altruistic, so then maybe normal freight jobs pull you towards apathy. Oniris surveys could move either more altruistic or egoism, depending on how they tie into the story. I think my experimental pineapple delivery could be a new delivery type that skews egoist. Say there’s a building you can buy crates from similar to Oniris. You can drop those crates on items like in the slimes mechanic. Except, now that crate is carrying the item. Make each crate be able to carry ~4 of the same item, increase price differences, and boom, now my method is more profitable than normal freight. The player has more personal choice in which material to specialize in. They live or die by their own actions, a very private egotism choice. Idk, just something I thought of.
Notes on Sleeping and Stamina:
I decided to run a test on if Stamina increases if you stay in the bed. At level 15, it took 1:40 to regenerate to full Stamina while standing around, and only 50 seconds if in bed. Despite that effectiveness, it only took 18 seconds to use all my Stamina cleaning just 4 Air Cyclers, not even accounting for other residues or package delivery. These findings lead me to one of two conclusions. A) Drastically increase the natural Stamina regeneration, add new ways to regenerate Stamina, and decrease the amount of ship breakdowns. Or B) Just get rid of Stamina for a patch or two.
No matter which path is chosen, I think ship degradation and breakdowns should be highly reduced as more content is added. I never felt at peace for more than a few minutes while on my maxed out ship. I’d always be running around fixing the air or residue or coolant. Air Cyclers are the most significant culprit here, as another commenter pointed out. I get there being a lot of breakdowns right now since there’s nothing else to do in the current build. But once new secondary loops get added in my ship needs to stop breaking after one minute of jotting down notes.
I also just realized food was a useful thing this update from a comment. I tried it out, and it is kind of fun to fill a whole landing bay with apples and sprint through eating them. I’ll definitely experiment with this feature more in future updates. I do think it suffers from the same problems plaguing Stamina overall, mainly diminishing returns. I needed to fill that landing bay up twice with food to regen my full Stamina at level 15. The cost was negligible but I don’t think rapid overeating is the tone this game is going for.
Bugs/visual glitches:
- *BIG GLITCH* Random storage containers will be at ports I’ve never visited before or taken a quest to pick up from. They can also appear after revisiting already discovered planets. The ghost boxes luckily only messed up one of my missions, because new storage crates for the quest didn’t replace the ghost boxes and didn’t show up when new landing space was available.
- Contacting Galactic Freight from your ship's computer crashes the game.
- The repainting menu still doesn’t fit with every room added. You can also open the menu and scroll up to get what I could best call a “phantom” tab. Nothing is selected and pushing enter doesn’t do anything, but it doesn’t sync up like all the other menus.
- Still some lag on Uncivilized planets, can’t tell if that’s on my end or not.
- More than my last run through I had the issue of my character colliding with an item I’d just put down. This resulted in countless times where I would be halfway in a crate and couldn’t walk up or down to get out. Maybe placing items could “bounce” you to the tile where you were placing from so this collision wouldn’t happen
- If you stop holding space while buying the hull repainting, the card stays and doesn’t reset like other repainting stations.
- I’m glad Fuel Injectors and Warp Rings are getting dirty, they both now have the issue of never getting fully aligned. Injectors can only sometimes get to 100% and Rings still can be a very small (yet infuriating) amount of pixels off.
- Freight Jobs still have no description in the Menu.
Gameplay Ideas:
After playing through basically the same delivery and job board missions a dozen times, I’d like to throw some ideas into the ring.
- Pet Delivery: pick up cages, put them on your landing dock. Once back on your ship the animal escapes and has similar AI to the slimes, except faster. To deliver them you need to recapture them in a cage. Maybe get rid of doors crushing them, maybe not.
- Heating and Cooling: Highly specialized delivery missions where you have to keep packages around a heating/cooling device.
- Being able to rotate the crate stamper with the wrench for more customization.
- I had the idea of getting a push cart/dolly after a few freight deliveries. It could hold two crates and go faster than walking speed. Transporting full docks of cargo can get tedious and that could really move it along.
I’m liking these new features and I’m excited to see how NPC’s will interact with them. Good demo as always!