Weekly Update: Jan 27, 2023

As posted last week, this week’s goal was to get a new build up to start collecting player’s feedback on several changes to the (current) mid-game content and a fix to anomaly placement. That build, Draconis, is up now as an opt-in “unstable” beta. Details here.

If there are no major issues uncovered, I hope to make this build the new default build in the next two weeks.

Besides that I spent some time making changes to the crew system’s internal logic. Up until now, anomaly and mission logic could only reference crew by expertise. The reason for this is that while currently the game has a fixed command crew, I want to keep the flexibility to potentially change that in the future, so the anomaly/mission logic needed some way to choose a crew member without hard coding their identity. I can assume that “CREW_BIOMED” remains constant through an anomaly interaction, but not necessarily over longer periods.

I’ve now added crew “tags”, so if I want to create a narrative that extends beyond a single anomaly, the story logic can remember what happened to whom.

I also created some a few new anomalies and fixed a bug where ships spawned in an inactive region could potentially overlap and then destroy each other once their region was activated.

Until next week,

— Kevin