Balancing

Good news. Today I've moved into balancing the alpha release. It involves me playing the game a lot (something that's already been happening). As I've said before, it's a pre-alpha. So it's far far far from complete and most things are far from finished or polished. I've been trying to get as many backer events and tiers into the game as possible but I'm planning on including most of those in a big push for the backer content as soon as everyone gets everything back to me as to what they want from their tier. Long story short, I'm trying to make the gameplay better given the level of content that's present. This is my dream project, so it'll constantly be getting tweaked for quite awhile.

Annoying Bugs

I've now spent the better part of a week squashing bugs in the game. Of particular note was a bug that didn't allow the player's marines to shoot at space pirates. This is really aggravating because as I try to work on balancing the gameplay it's hard to do when one of the most deadly aspects of the game can shoot at the player and the player can't return fire. I've also begun to get back to the stretch goal, a separate zombie survival game mode. I'm really hoping to include it in the initial alpha release on the 15th.

Confirmed Kickstarter Alpha Release

As I add in more and more feature I feel confident in my ability to give a release date. Keep in mind that the game is still in early alpha, so there are a lot of features and gameplay that aren't going to be included in this initial release. My plan is to release a new update every month with new features included. So expect to see an e-mail with a link for the initial alpha on September 15th. Starting in October I'll probably move to an end of the month release cycle for all of the updates.

Is this Door Open or Closed?

So one of the current issues is having the option for the player to create doors in the space station while simultaneously being able to open and close them. This allows for a lot of emergent gameplay and is the primary idea behind the game. Being creative with how the vacuum of space can destroy or save your space station is a lot of the fun. The primary issue is determining whether or not every door is open or closed and when the atmosphere within the station can be restored. The current solution I've been working on actually uses wherever a breach has occurred and sets an invisible marker at that spot. Then whenever the player tries to stop the breach, either by closing doors or repairing the wall a calculation is done between any sealed-off area and the breach marker. I use a typical a*algorithm calculation to determine if a clear path exists. This is the same method I use to calculate the paths of units whenever you move one in the game as well. It's all highly experimental right now, and far from perfect, but I'm hoping it'll work well enough. I've also toying with the refugees within the space station putting down their own beds.

Select What You Want

So one of the biggest problems with migrating from GM 8.1 to GM:Studio is the lack of built-in menus. GM 8.1 had a great feature that made drop down menus a piece of cake. Granted, this feature would only work on a Windows computer, so I wouldn't be able to totally rely on it anyway. Well, I've finally included drop down menus into Vacuum. Although they're not terribly complex it's something that I'm not accustomed to having to program. I've tried to implement a simple but attractive system. They're really necessary for in-game events and a few of the feature. Screen shots to come shortly.

A Little Help with the Heavy Lifting

As promised, here's an image from the game. These little mechs are what you'll need if you want to move shipping containers around and hopefully down the road I'll add additional things in the game that'll require the mech. I'm imagining it smashing pirates and holding open doors that would otherwise be closed.

I'm also very optimistic to get a build out to backers before September. It won't have all of the backer requests in it, but I've already incorporated a few of the backer suggestions, etc. into the game.