The main thing I’ve worked on in the past week has been refactoring the mid-game content to have more of the regions discoverable through normal exploration, rather than explicitly unlocked through mission from Celaeno. This is something that I started with Cassiopeia and will continue incorporating in future updates. The goal is to find the right balance of stuff players can find on their own without too much hand-holding, but at the same time avoiding players feeling lost. There’s an additional challenge of ensuring no missions break if encountered outside of the expected order.
This involves a lot of testing on my end, so I’ve also invested a chunk of time into creating tools/scripts that speed up testing. Many of these are cases where I spend an hour automating something that would take me 2-3 minutes, but if it’s something I do every time I test some portion of the game, it doesn’t take a lot of repetitions to repay the investment.
Speaking of testing, during testing I discovered a fairly significant bug in the selection of random planet anomalies. Basically, players have been getting short changed in the number of anomalies they encounter in a playthrough once they save and reload.
I’m going to try to get a new build ready in the next week so I can start getting feedback on the changes and see whether there are any balance implications from the anomaly bug. This will have some new content, although not as much as Cassiopeia.
Until next, week!
— Kevin