Hello! For this update I was mainly focused on fixing and refining the central gameplay loops and removing some frustrating aspects. In my opinion it is a noticeable improvement over the last build, especially now that insta-death is no longer really a thing for labs.
Culture maintenance felt too punishing so I've flipped it, and now there is a reward for keeping your populations low. You are meant to be able to afford high population maintenance for a time, but I want the focus to be on playing with the sandbox tools to keep populations low while driving interesting evolutionary outcomes. The Colony count in the HUD is sort of like a golf score, its how far below the "par" population count you are.
I also removed a lot of the unnecessary (and annoying) Biomark costs. Biomarks are basically just your score, so I've tried to simplify it a lot. Costs purely come from the upkeep cost of your population size, and income comes from growing valuable cells, either via selling them individually or completing contracts. There are no more start up costs beyond the costs of your cells, and particles and crystals are free.
With that, I've also changed how the economy works. Previously, there were clusters of similar genes that had demands which would drive cell values. I tried it this way because I thought it would be more interesting to have cell value be a function of gene synergies, but it turns out that it just made things pointlessly confusing. I got rid of the whole clusters thing so now the Biomarket is driven by direct demand for individual genes. I want to make the genes more obvious because there are a lot of them under the hood, so I'm also going to start working on a direct cell + gene editor soon. The value of cells is now tied more cleanly to how extreme it's genes are, rather than being a blackbox.
I want to emphasize the sandbox nature of the game more, and I really appreciate everyone's suggestions so far around that. I don't want the challenge mode to get in the way of the sandbox either, but I feel like the goal of maintaining a small but interesting population of cells complements it really well so I am excited to keep working in this direction. I didn't get to it this update, but the crystals are overdue for an overhaul, and I have some plans ready for updating new culture creation to have more freedom and control.
I am looking forward to showing the demo at Steam Next Fest coming up June 15th!
Thanks for playtesting :) Changelog - v0.3.4:
* Keeping populations below a certain size (5 * dish diameter) now results in a stipend reward, which increases the closer your population is to 1.
* Renamed Maintenance -> Upkeep. HUD now displays total income (stipend - maintenance)
* Replaced per-cluster-of-genes demand with per-gene demand on the Biomarket for the sake of clarity
* When lab funds reach 0, cultures gradually freeze rather than instantly dying, and recovery is now possible
* Cultures can be directly sold from the escape menu. Selling a culture can bail a lab out if the lab has a negative balance
* Reduced unlock requirements for culture presets, now all options are available immediately on tutorial completion.
* Fixed Cryobank so it properly stores and cultures specimens
* G now scraps all selected cells (box or strain selection)
* Bulk selling culture values reduced
* Added time controls to HUD
* Fixed HUD so panels no longer get stuck off screen
* All tutorial steps now pause the simulation until dismissed
* Text legibility improvements
* Implemented fix for immortal cells and cells that won't respond to mitosis commands, monitoring results
* Gene splicing removed as I'm working on a better cell/gene editor. Selecting a specimen on the new culture screen now opens strain info instead
* Minor performance improvements