Last week was Thanksgiving week, and we sort of took some time off, so this post is short.
Balance Changes
As mentioned previously, we’re currently making the game more balanced, polished, and accessible. On the surface, this isn’t very exciting—we’re not adding anything worth talking about, but we are making the game more fun. Golden morale, for example, is now acquired 3 times faster and drains 50% faster.
Tutorial
I changed the order of and consolidated some steps. I also moved some of the text to the objectives.
The dialogue window will no longer pause the game.
Tooltip Changes
The tooltips have a more pronounced look now.
Our intent is for the tooltips to have a more consistent relationship between the UI element being described and the position of the text.
Colonist Free-Time
Colonists now gain 10 freedom morale whenever they start a free-time state. This bonus has a cooldown of 10 seconds.
Colonist also lose 15 freedom morale whenever they start any job. This penalty also has a 10 second cooldown.
The intent of this is to provide the player with a simple way of making a colonist happy—just unassign some jobs (and a penalty for overworking your colonists).
Object Unlock UI
There is now a little window that pops up when a new object is unlocked through research.
We feel pretty good about how unlocking feels, but we’re still fine-tuning unlock order, research speed, and that sort of thing.
We’re planning on adding object unlocks as quest rewards too.
Golden Morale
We added a visual effect when your colonists are in the golden morale state. This should make it more clear to the player that something positive is affecting their colonist.
Unity Bug
(this only affects Alpha testers)
There’s a bug with Unity and prefab variants. Occasionally, the prefab variants will use the same internal identifiers as their prefab base, and then some values get overwritten when we rebuild the Unity library.
An example Prefab Base is Menu Button and the variants are Quit Menu Button, Save Menu Button, and Load Menu Button. All of the prefabs are largely the exact same, but each have different text and perform a different action when clicked. We can make changes to the base Menu Button and it will be applied to all of the variants.
In general, this is a huge timesaver.
This specific bug, however, causes the variants to occasionally revert to the values that are in the base.
We fixed most of the issues, but you’ll probably find a few weird things (the Ore Refinery recipe variants, for example, were all reverted so that they would each produce 1 ore and 1 fuel).
That’s It
That’s everything for now.
Thanks for reading!
-Tyler
