The Spatials was released on Steam on March 30 2015, and we want to celebrate this special date with a weeklong deal of 50% off the regular price. The galaxy awaits you!
Work continues on V3. The new gameplay engine is enabling new features every week. It's still a few months off, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel now. Take a look at some of the development notes from the past months.
carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2015-11-09.html
A minimal planet surface editor has been implemented, V2 civilizations will be fleshed out as full factions in V3, and new artwork has been created for them.
carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2015-11-16.html
In V2 planet surfaces featured enemy or NPC camps, procedurally generated. The algorithm that guided this generator was simple and limited. For V3 we are instead designing the camps by hand. Max has continued this week to create new designs with the graphics he finished last week.
carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2015-11-23.html
Last week the surface generator implemented the ability to spawn civ camps and was tested with a few human camps. Now the initial work for the all the civ camps is done and they have been added to the planet surface generator.
carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2015-12-07.html
New sprites for enemies, NPCs, small objects and other dynamic entities; new gizmo tool in the planet editor for placing dynamic entities in the pre-made camps.
carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2015-12-14.html
A major milestone has been reached in V3 development! Combat is now again part of the game. As a first effort AI-controlled combat has been prototyped, making use of the new tools available in the V3 engine. Here's a video showing a fight between officers and pirates, using a simple test weapon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0Uol5JuynA
carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-01-11.html
A new tileset and camp set has been implemented for planets that are not colonized by a NPC civilization. For now there's no gameplay associated to them, but we want to flesh them out better in the future.
carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-01-18.html
Another major piece of the V3 design is now in place. In V2 travel was instantaneous. For V3 we are introducing spaceships, which will need to be crewed and given orders in order to explore and visit planets. These travel orders will take time to complete, as the spaceship moves in the galaxy. And to not make your officers go into some kind of limbo while traveling, V3 also introduces a ship bridge mini-sim.
carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-01-25.html
Sectors have been removed from the galaxy. Now the galaxy screen displays all the stars in the galaxy, and when clicking on them, the star system is displayed. This will make it much easier to support other galaxy shapes and densities and to do more complex things with the galaxy generation. Gone is the hardcoded limit of 30 stars or the rigid grid of sectors.
carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-02-01.html
It was time to go back to the central part of V3, the station sim. After a months-long focus on other areas of the game (planets, galaxy and spaceships) to get them up to speed early to make sure we didn't forget about them later on, we are back to station basics. We are first tackling a new V3 feature, station combat. Here's the result of mixing some officers with some attackers in a single room:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czEaea4_LJc
carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-02-08.html
The V3 station is going to be much more complex than in V2. Your officers will be able to take on more than a dozen different jobs and tasks. At some point some of these tasks will become too menial for your high ranking staff, so it may be cost effective to delegate them on robots. Here's a first preview of the art for dedicated station robots:
The sneak system makes use of a proxy, invisible entity controlled by the infiltration system (in the video the entity is given a placeholder icon to be able to see its path in the station). This entity is effectively ignored by every security measure, including officers, since it's not an enemy entity (it lacks any combination of components that make it either a target or a threat.) Once it arrives at its target area, it runs a proc, which spawns the real enemy entity and destroys the proxy. Only the security camera is capable of forcing this proc to be executed earlier, as seen in the video. Additionally the camera tries to alert nearby officers in a wide radius, to emulate the effect of an alarm going off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scmlM3SkFmU
carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-02-15.html
A stapple of good sim games which involve construction is allowing some degree of customization. The Spatials is a bit more rigid in this regard, with the art for constructed tiles being very defined in their purpose. But for V3 we've implemented a new twist: most constructed tiles now have a "colorizable" layer, which will be able to pick up a color from a palette.
carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-02-29.html
We've made available a version of some of the station tilesets encountered while exploring alien planets as rooms in the station. There's now 35 different room designs in the station.
carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-03-07.html
The result of combining the new hunger and sleep vitals with the existing cooking test job is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqLlJWIV-fk
carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-03-14.html
Max has drawn two new big, boss-like monsters. Provisionally called "worm" and "octopus", they will be part of the station events, and will have unique AI and attacks to make them more challenging.
carloscarrasco.com/the-spatials-v3-devblog-2016-03-21.html
Hurting entities which have been authorized to receive medical care (by adding them a medicine-allowed-component) can now seek an hospital bed and lay on it. This makes them start healing back, albeit very slowly. It also makes a job available near the bed, the Medicine job. If an officer is flagged for this job, and meds are available, they will perform the job in front of the bed and make the rate of healing go much faster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmp8xqmS_aA