When we started looking at how we could improve the behaviour of humans and guests during Early Access, we realised that our employees were still mostly just getting on with their jobs without much of an opportunity to develop their own personalities or abilities.
So, as part of our work towards the 1.0 release, we made a number of changes to give staff more personality, more progression, and more useful things to do.
One of the biggest changes was giving staff a more unique and well-rounded set of traits.
Previously, staff traits were fairly limited in how much they could influence the way your park operated. We wanted to make them more meaningful, so we expanded the system with traits that have a much clearer impact on how individual staff members perform.
And for those staff members who were hired despite a lack of useful traits? They can now be trained up to rival those top tier hires.
Staff training gives you more control over how your staff develop over the course of the game, and another reason to keep hold of employees who might not seem particularly impressive when you first hire them.
We also noticed another problem with our security staff. When everything is going smoothly and your humans are happily staying inside their enclosures, security guards do not have very much to do.
That is generally considered a good thing for security guards, but it is not particularly interesting from a gameplay perspective. So we gave them a new job.
Guests already left their donations in donation boxes around your park, but now you do not actually receive that money until one of your security guards goes around and collects it.
That means your security team now has an important role even when nobody is attempting to escape. Having enough security guards is no longer just about dealing with emergencies — they are an active part of keeping your park profitable.
These changes all came from the same realisation: our staff should feel like an important part of managing a Martian theme park, rather than simply being another system running in the background.
By giving staff more meaningful traits, adding training and giving them more responsibilities, we hope they now feel much more like a team that you are actually managing.
Our 1.0 release is coming soon, and we are looking forward to showing you everything we have been working on.
To join the conversation around Mars Attracts around our 1.0 release and beyond, you can join us over on our Discord. We want to hear all about what you think of our game and see what kind of crazy parks you’ve built!
Love,
Bernard & the Outlier team