While designing a game, you have lots of ideas for how to make it more fun, but you can never really be sure if an idea is good until you prototype it and try it out.

That’s what we’ve been doing these last 4 weeks.

Here are the ideas that we liked, and will (probably) keep. The UI and visuals for everything is placeholder.

Video

Here’s a video, where I ramble about the new changes, because reading is for nerds

Purge

It’s possible to disastrously mess up your station in a way that makes the game unplayable. Like if there were a pile of corpses right outside the Biotank that instantly drove every new colonist to insanity.

This doesn’t feel too good, so we added a system where you can “purge” your station.

If all of your colonists die, you’ll be presented with an an option to send out your Buildbots and they’ll clean up all the corpses and blood splats. This is completely optional. If you grow another colonist, the option will disappear.

Phoenix Protocol

You’re now given exactly 6 colonists (the number will probably change) that can be grown over and over.

The colonist’s memory is reset, so they lose all memories, skills, and relationships. You have to clean up the corpse before they can be regrown.

This makes your playthrough completely unique, and makes it more fun when you start a new game. It allows us to have much more complicated colonist interactions and perks too.

You’ll get to know your colonists, like a little family that you accidentally kill over and over. You’ll figure out that Ted makes a really good engineer, and that you should keep Bob away from everyone, because he tends to go on murdering sprees.

As your station improves, your little family will die less and less frequently.

By the way, when a colonist is reborn, they lose all of their relationships, but the living colonists remember everything. This is particularly hilarious to me, because a jerk colonist will wake up to a station where everyone hates him, and he’ll have no idea why.

Soon-ish, we’re going to add some sort of “Memory Scanner” object that will allow you to back-up your colonists so that they can keep their skills after they’re reborn. This will be somewhat expensive.

Credits

Every item in the game can now be sold, and every object costs credits.

You sell items directly at your core, like the drop-off bin in Stardew Valley.

You unlock new objects by purchasing them with credits (although we might add some sort of “research points” currency).

You‘ll be able to buy and sell almost anything

More Resources

The credit focus makes it so much easier to add new item types.

In the old system, the only purpose of an item was either build cost or reagent (for another build cost).

This made it difficult to add new items, because any new item would require either a new object or modifying the build cost of an existing object. What happens if the player doesn’t want to build that object? How easy should it be to obtain that item? What does the player do if they actively want to build an object, but can’t find that resource?

When anything can earn credits, no resource is useless. We can add as many resources as we reasonably want to now. A rare resource feels rewarding to find, because it might be worth lots of credits.

Always Progressing

No matter what do in the game, you’re always progressing.

The only difference between a bad player and a good player is that a good player can earn money faster, but all players can access 95% of the content.

You can play any way that you want to now. If you just want to focus on growing crops, you can do that. If you like mining asteroids and converting them into metal, you can do that too.

Previously, the choice between an asteroid with ice versus one with ore was meaningless. Ice is required for growing crops, but if you don’t grow crops, or if you have enough water, it doesn’t matter to you. Similarly, if you didn’t want to build anything, ore was pointless.

Now, you can make a decision between an asteroid with 10 ice versus an asteroid with 5 ore. 10 raw ice might sell for more, but if you convert the ore, it’s worth more. But you might already have a bunch of excess ore, so the ice can be converted into immediate money.

Item Conversion

Item conversion is much more meaningful now.

Look at ore. You acquire ore by mining asteroids. Ore can be sold for 50 credits. You can convert ore into metal if you have an Ore Refinery. Metal sells for 150 credits. If you have a Workbench, you can convert that metal into a wrench (this specific item will change to something more interesting). Wrenches sell for 300 credits.

In order to craft wrenches, you need to purchase a Workbench and have an Engineer with a high enough skill level.

With that approach, we’ve added a few new objects.

Egg Incubator

Mysterious eggs can be found in asteroids (something like a 10% chance). These eggs are worthless until you put them into an Incubator.

The Incubator requires a botanist. The higher that botanist’s level, the less likely that the incubation will fail. Incubation failure will destroy the egg, and potentially causes damage, insanity (in the form of a disease that turns the Botanist’s skin green), and morale loss.

If you succeed, you’re rewarded with nectar, highly addicting and excellent for morale. These sell for a lot, so they’re worth the risk.

In the future, we’d like to add little critters or aliens that can pop out of the eggs and wreak havoc on your station.

Chemistry Station

The chef is now a full-blown chemist. You can convert biomass into fertilizer, or ore and fuel into space rock.

In the future, there’ll be more things that the chef can cook up: medicines, stimulants, and reagents for other crafting.

Soon, you’ll also be able to convert nectar (or maybe the mysterious eggs) into xeno jerkey, because it’s funny to me that you risk killing your entire station for some xeno jerkey.

Production Order

The player can now order their colonists to produce items at various objects. This is much more hands-on for the player.

You can order either endless production or a specified amount. You might want your Engineer to convert all metal into wrenches. Or you might want exactly 1 nectar, so you order your Botanist to convert exactly 1 mysterious egg.

This allows you to sell, store, or convert any of your items.

Injection Booth

An issue we’ve always had is figuring out how the player can mechanically give their colonists medicine, cures, and whatever else you end up crafting.

If you have to order a colonist to take medicine, for example, what happens if the colonist is sleeping? Do they just die? Or what about a deranged colonist?

So we added the Injection Booth. If a colonist walks through it, they’ll be force fed whatever you place inside.

If it can be stored on a shelf, it can be placed into the Injection Booth.

You could force feed your colonists food, fuel (for science), or space rock (improves morale and increases walking speed).

Up to 3 items can be slotted into the booth, but only 1 item can be force fed each time a colonist walks through. The player chooses which items to store (you can choose 3 of the same items), and which item to force feed.

You could force feed space rock to a depressed colonist. This would instantly improve their morale and possibly cure their depression.

It’s also funny if you accidentally feed your space rock to your doctor and they start tripping out.

Fuel Extractor

Fuel is now created by converting biomass in an extractor. The nice thing here is that you’ll never run out of fuel again.

If you attach the extractor to a fuel tank, it will automatically be transported. Any excess will remain at the extractor, and can be sold.

What I like about this is that the extractor can always remain operational, as a passive source of income.

Cannibalism

If a colonist’s hunger reaches 0, they’ll acquire the Starving perk.

While starving, the colonist will actively kill anyone they see, and eat their corpse. They’ll also eat corpses that they find. Once they eat, they lose the Starving perk

Unless they eat a corpse, in which case they permanently gain the Cannibal perk. Cannibals will always consider corpses to be edible, but they’ll only attack their fellow colonists if their hunger gets low (otherwise, they’re nice guys).

Eating a corpse also has a 5% chance to cause Madness, but don’t worry about that.

On the positive side, cannibals automatically clean up corpses for you.

Mining Perks

I added two new perks that can be acquired from failing a mining mission, Space Madness, and Spacephobia.

A colonist with Space Madness will only eat fuel and ore, and they speak gibberish. They’re completely harmless, though (besides eating your valuable ore). You could force-feed regular food to this colonist.

Spacephobia prevents a colonist from ever doing missions again.

That’s All

That’s all for now. On a personal note, my wife is once again pregnant, and the due date is February 8th. So if I’m absent for a bit, that’s why.

On a more personal note, I was recently sick with the stomach flu, and my 14 month old son puked on me.

This has nothing to do with Starmancer, but someone had to know that it happened.

-Tyler

Capitalism and Sustainability