This past week I started work on a new Story that helps connect some of the existing elements. (A “Story” in the game’s technical design is not necessarily what you might think of as a story, rather it’s more of an organization namespace to group related content.) As I was working on this Story I found it useful to implement some functionality that’s been on the backburner for a while.
As such, it might take me longer than usual to pull everything together into the next playable build.
One thing I implemented yesterday was a QoL feature for Early Access. I’ve talked previously about the an automated test system that pseudo-simulates playing through the various missions. I added a mechanism by which this system could create a “presave”. This takes the end state of the first two tests, replaces the ship and commander name with the player’s most recent and creates a save game. This will allow returning players to skip the first ~20 minutes of the game which is largely tutorial and has remained mostly the same.
Other things done in the past week (excluding spoilers):
- Five new anomalies
- New faction, missions
- Refactored Item data structures for greater flexibility
As always, changes discussed in these updates won’t be available until the next opt-in beta and may change.
Until next week,
Kevin