Sprint Report - Hacking and Base Economy

Hey all!

This weekend marks the end of this month's sprint which has been quite successful in my opinion. The focus of the month was gameplay, focusing on two of the main pillars of the game. Hacking gameplay was one, trying to clarify and make interesting opportunities for the player to leverage during combat. Two, was starting to build the foundation of the base management and player upgrades.

So the changes were, in no particular order:

• Basic Management Economy - Foundation of the management system, more info below.
• Flash Shield - Augmentation to the dodge ability, gives the player a temporary damage reduction for a moment or two. Will most likely be split into two different effects, a small reduction while dodging, a larger reduction if used standing still.
• Performance Diagnostics - Figured out some of the larger taxation on performance and either removed or improved.
• Hacking Feedback - Better visual player feedback for hacking with color state changes in all hack-able items.
• Settings and Adjustments - Implemented a simple settings menu bought from the marketplace that allows for adjustment of video and audio settings. Currently the only fully working options are the video resolution options and the various audio sliders, but more gameplay options and other settings will be implemented as the project progresses.
• Menu and Framework - Dynamic menu framework created and implemented for most menus. Allows for better menu functionality and much more easy to maintain on the back end.
• Balancing Improvements - Retooled all enemy blueprints to pull vital statistics from central data table, allowing for easier balancing.
• Munitions Overload - Explosive "barrels" now will trigger a timed detonation after taking a certain amount of damage, or after the player has hacked them to cause the overload.
• Turret Charming - Reworked turrets to accept multiple target types instead of being hard-coded to the player. Hacking turrets now makes them fire on the enemy as expected rather than the previous temporary version of simply blowing up.
• Blueprint Cleanup - Maintenance and cleanup of blueprints to make them easier to work with and accessible should the project ever have more of a team than just myself.

A quick note on the management economy, I really didn't want a complex system at all, only to afford the player opportunity for some engaging and meaningful decisions. As an extension of that, I'm hoping that it will also give a ground for the NPC's to "play" in, adding life and variety to themselves and the base.

Running the base, you have three main concerns:

1. Energy - To run the machines
2. Food - To feed the dwellers working in the base
3. Defense - To protect your base and its denizens from outside forces

Everyday, any dwellers assigned will produce a certain amount of their associated good. Any costs will be subtracted, dwellers working to produce energy will need food, and vice versa for food producers. Excess will be converted into a smaller amount of the shelf stable version, food to supplies, energy to fuel. That way any day that doesn't have enough produce to meet its demands can use the base's stores but is an incentive to plan ahead as it isn't as efficient. Defense simply produces the primary value used to decide what happens in an external event, enemy or otherwise. Fuel and Supply are the primary ingredients in trade and upgrades so the player needs to balance their needs against that of the base.

For the broader economy, fictionally speaking there is no money to speak of on this planet that is meaningful to the main populace, so the only currency is influence. The more goods and services you provide to the local populace, the more they trust and are willing to work with you. With some influence you can ask for help in the form of dwellers, intelligence, other goods, and they will happily provide you with it to a point before your influence degrades. This may be a money with a direct 1 to 1 transaction, or a more organic threshold, I'm not sure yet.

I hope the above breakdown of the economy makes sense and is interesting, I put a lot of thought into it and hope that it will support a lot of nuanced player choice and expression while avoiding unnecessary complexity. Any thoughts or comments are of course welcome!

Over the next few days I will be blocking out work for the upcoming month's sprint. I have a working list of ideas but I think the focus will simply be fleshing out more content in the game, using the systems and gameplay that is already implemented and really putting it to work. Off the top of my head, the highest priority there will be the main wilderness map, trying to push each encounter so they are as engaging as possible. Secondary to that would probably be a working layout of the shoreline map, seeing if the gameplay transitions well to a completely different biome and if there any opportunities to vary the gameplay even more on an environment scale. This could be thick fog that sometimes obscure the enemy, poison water, subterranean enemies that pop out of the sand, who knows!

Thanks very much for your time, if you haven't already tried downloading last week's build please do so and leave me some feedback, and have a great weekend! - CJ

Quick post Valentine's update!

Hey all!

Sorry for missing the Friday update, honestly I was sick and just didn't have the energy to do it. However I'm feeling much better now and made a good amount of progress last week.

Like I mentioned in the sprint summary, I have blocked out all of this month's work in HacknPlan (which I love btw). As part of the gameplay focus of the month I worked on and completed:

• Hacking Readability - Most of the hacking was already working but didn't have very good visual feedback of the state change. All hackable objects now have a visible change, whether it is a glowing orb changing colors or immediately catching fire :)
• Turret hacking - Reworked turret "AI" so it would be flexible enough to support different targets. Hacking the turrets now switch them over to your side, firing on your enemies.
• Munitions overload - The game's version of exploding barrels are munitions containers, which are lightly armored but will catch fire and explode after enough damage. Hacking can bypass that and trigger their fuses immediately. 
• Menu and Upgrade framework - The game now has dynamic menu's which means that as more of the management and base building framework is built and played with, it will update automatically. The map selection screen has updated accordingly.

I've also been working on the paper version of the management and though I'm getting to be pretty happy with some of the higher level concepts, they need a touch more time to stew before they are prototyped. Hopefully they will make it in soon as they are the last real large chunk of framework missing from the game.

Have a great week all! - CJ

Build Release and Sprint summaries

Hey all!

There is a new build available for download and though not wildly different from the last one in terms of content it should be much more solid and stable. This last week marked the end of the game’s first real sprint and I have to say I’m quite happy with way it turned out. The sprints highlights were:

• Complete greyblock meshes made for both Base and Wilderness maps. (A rough estimate of about 60-80 meshes)
• Shoreline map proxied in for multidestination travel and future gameplay testing.
• Complete refactoring of character resources and other attributes to make the data more accessible and less prone to loss.
• Loose optimization pass to maintain reasonable playability
• UI and other player experience work.

So moving forward I will try to maintain this kind of month long sprint schedule to keep pushing development forward as aggressively as possible and keep myself accountable for the work I have allotted. For this upcoming sprint I will be focusing almost entirely on gameplay and other design systems, either planning them on paper or implementing prototype versions to test directly in game. The main thrust of the work will be focused on improving implementation of the game’s “hacking” as it is a central pillar, and fleshing out the design of the base management.

I’ve already blocked out all the work so we will see how I do against my timing estimates. I’m also hoping to squeeze some less glamorous but still desired work like implementing game options and video settings to continue to make the game more and more accessible by all.

So as always, please play the build and leave me feedback, and have a fantastic weekend! - CJ

Friday Wrapup! Sprint finish Edition

Hey all!

Its been quite a successful month of progress on the game, lots of work has been added and exciting progress made (at least for me.) The dev diaries have also been going quite well and I've enjoyed making them. Especially as work progresses I will most likely dive into specifics on some, doing tutorials or other content to break things up to keep things fun and interesting.
This week marks the end of the sprint as I mentioned. I tried to get any larger changes done early in the week so I can focus on play testing and fixing any problems with the build to get a nice solid release ready for next week. Work this week included:

• More complete decoration pass on Wilderness map
• Rebuilt resource gathering blueprint functionality to work based on game instance, allows for better persistence and access (previously based in character).
• Initial work on getting controller support for UMG menus (currently only works on main menu, will expand to others once I can better package it up and make it easy to maintain)
• Main map UI and workbench accurately track resources
• Started testing of dynamic menus

The testing of dynamic menus ties into my goals for the next sprint. My high level goals are to focus on the gameplay by A. creating a paper test of the design layer of the game and B. developing the UI framework needed to support the design layer. By focusing on these goals I should be able to get a more complete representation of the intended game as a whole and be able to develop it much more evenly.

Have a great weekend!  - CJ

Start of more "high desert" areas.

Small lighting and decorative revisions

Friday Wrapup! Sweet Cactus Edition

Happy Friday!

I uploaded a new build to IndieDB earlier today and just finished uploading one to Mega (links in "The Game" tab). I'm thinking that I may simply switch over to posting one just on IndieDB as uploading two sets each release is pretty cumbersome. Alternatively I may switch from Mega to another platform that IndieDB supports transfers from, alleviating the uploading that way.

Dev Diary #2 is online and linked below, take a look and leave comments. I'm always open to suggestions and would love to hear about if there is anything particular you all would like to see in these moving forward.

This week was a little on the slow side due to moving but I'm still pretty happy with the progress I've made. Doing well working towards the monthly goals I've set so I'm feeling good about the sprint tasks I've set.

What I did manage to get done this week was some player feedback loop improvements and quick optimizations. For the player feedback I implemented some more UI checks so whether you are interacting with consoles in the base or heading out on missions, you know what is going to happen when you press the button instead of blind triggers.

Optimization is never a glorious thing to talk about but is definitely necessary and can be quite satisfying. I learned a bit about some of the lighting and post process systems, pulling both back pretty significantly which helped performance quite a bit. I probably won't focus on this for a while, just picking where I can but have a few ideas I haven't tried yet that should speed things up significantly. As a related question, do you prefer 32-bit or 64-bit builds? I've been distributing 32-bit as not to alienate anyone but 64-bit would definitely be better for performance. Let me know what you think about that in the comments.

I'll leave you to your weekends with this small model addition, inspired by very cool cactus trees. Thanks! - CJ

Friday Wrapup! Moving Edition

Hey all!

Keeping things short today as I am in the middle of moving. This week was a good one as it started with the release of the playable build and was followed shortly by the associated inaugural dev diary. I'm making good progress on this month's sprint tasks which mainly comprised are mainly comprised of getting quick functional models into both the Base and Wilderness maps. Hopefully I will have more finished and a few gameplay improvements for next week.

Thanks! - CJ

Dev Diary #1

Hey All!

First dev diary is up on youtube! It a little rough around the edges and I need to remove "um" from my vocabulary but is at least a decent start. As always feel free to leave comments or suggestions.

Enjoy! - CJ