Crucible XVIII 18/04/2014

Another week of work gone by- faster than I would have liked. Managed to be pretty productive too. I wanted to take some time to nail down at least a tiny portion of the UI... and I did! I can now consider the design of the system summary popup done, and made a lot of changes to the general behaviour of a lot of the UI so it looks more pretty. Also continued on the changes to heroes.

State of the Game (Build 1.03):

• Broke through the 100th build barrier! Woo.
• Finished up the system overlay design. Now the information is conveyed much more visually (rather than the ugly box before). The overlay itself is displayed based on camera distance to system (so that they don't clutter the screen when you are zoomed out). However I have just noticed that the central orange ring (which shows the number of planets colonised in the system) is a little hard to distinguish- so I may need to make a minor alteration to make it larger.

New system overlay. System borders disappeared due to zoom level.

• Decided that my previous super-complex and non-functional method of drawing the empire borders consumed far too much time, and didn't even look that good. So I have gone for something a bit simpler (actual texture is WIP)...

Actual racial colours not working (for some reason). Notice secondary resources in Infobar.

• Added hero improvement functionality. Each hero has different bonuses that can be improved. There is no limit to the number of resources that can be spent in any given stat (other than the number of resources you actually possess).

WIP Hero improvement screen for Soldier type.

• Slight change to secondary resource mechanics. If a system produces Antimatter (for example) it receives a bonus to Ownership growth based on the amount of Antimatter your empire owns. This means that systems containing planets that produce Secondary Resources gain a bonus according to the resource in question, and the amount of that resource your empire possesses. The reasoning behind this is that not spending resources on heroes improves the systems that produce those resources, but has a negative impact on your hero quality. If the resources are spent on improving the hero, the systems producing the resources suffer. (It's a trade-off, see?).
• Some mild changes to AI- nothing of note. General fixes, particularly in relation to 3 player games (for some reason it were broke). Some slight changes to balance (why am I doing that now?), and also to the way that resources etc. are calculated.

Hope you like how it's coming together! That's it for this week, see you next time.

Crucible XVII 11/04/2014

First of all, there was no update last week because I had a severe case of man-flu (a real thing!). Secondly, like I said a couple of weeks ago, most of my work at the moment has been on stuff you can't actually see. Saying that I do have some juicy images for you. You may have noticed I have redesigned the Crucible logo (again). This reflects the art direction I am set on- I know, I can't believe it too, I actually managed to decide on something. I've also done some new designs for the in-game symbols, and changed a lot of the in-game information to align it with the Science-Fantasy theme I'm going with. I know I said this last time, but I really cannot see these designs changing a great deal from now on.

From left to right; Wealth (Capital), Knowledge (Science), Power (Industry), Amber.

Also introduced are new resource types. These act as secondary resources that aid your development, but are not necessary (unlike the 3 main resources). These are tentatively called; 'Antimatter', 'Blue Carbon', 'Radioisotopes', and 'Liquid Hydrogen'. Each resource is produced by a certain planet category- Giant (formerly gas), Terran, Hot, and Cold respectively. However there is only a small chance that a deposit of these resources will be found on the appropriate planet- so there is no guarantee that your empire will have access to all secondary resource types.

These new resources will be used in varying ways. Systems that have producing planets within them will gain a bonus according to which resources are being produced. For example, a system containing a planet that has an Antimatter deposit on it will gain a boost to ownership gain. Another use is to improve heroes (see next paragraph).

Heroes have significantly changed. I felt that the hero specialisations were still too limited, so I have made them even easier to use. When you hire a hero, you simply select between Infiltrator, Soldier, and Diplomat. After your choice has been made, the hero instantly has access to all the abilities of that class. This means that Diplomats (for example) now have access to the old Ambassador and Merchant abilities (trade routes, embargoes, and promoting). However, heroes are now more customisable. Heroes can be improved using the new secondary resources. In the heroes information window, it will be possible to spend resources in order to improve a certain statistic of the hero. For example, if you spend 4 antimatter on the hero, it will increase the heroes damage by 4%. This will allow for heroes to fulfil many roles- you could increase the Defence of a Diplomat to increase its survivability, or increase your Soldier's offence to make it an Ultimate-Badass war machine.

Other than this (which I hope you found interesting!), I have made some significant improvements to the enemy AI. Enemies are now able to purchase heroes, and can move them around the map (though this behaviour is currently quite basic), and are also able to purchase improvements for their Systems. This is based on an algorithm that calculates the potential value of each improvement to the system- this means that improvements will be prioritised differently according to the system (and eventually according to the needs of the entire empire). This did require an extensive rewrite of my tech tree, but it works fairly well (ignoring balance). 

That's all for this week, once again I can only apologise for lack of images (apart from the one below), but I hope you liked reading it, and I'll be back next week.