Hey everyone! As you've probably seen already, Valve has updated their Steam announcement system. It is now much more complex, at least on the dev side. There are now 11 types of announcements, or events, whereas before you just had to choose between a game update checkmark or a 'classic blog style announcement' checkmark. Then when actually posting the announcement, you have to upload headers, artwork, choose between different options and so on depending on the announcement type. This is the first time I'm posting one since the update, which is still in Beta by the way, so bare with me if I get anything wrong! I'm trying to learn this whole new UI as well. Oh yeah, the new Steam library will be launching in less than 2 weeks in open Beta, so let's look forward to that as well! Anyway...
Along with this update came some new documentation, which you can find here in case you want to read what Valve has to say to its devs. There is one subsection in the 'Best practices' section that caught my eye while reading it. Here's the copy pasta:
'
Don't over-communicate
When announcements are used properly, players anticipate hearing about your product. Part of this anticipation is created by having an exciting product, but communicating selectively also plays an important role.
It may be tempting to post a lot of announcements and be involved in every discussion. Instead, take a step back and listen. If you don't have a reason to post an announcement, don't post one. Constant communication just to fill a blog will quickly cause players to lose interest.
'
Now this is a little weird. It sounds like Valve is discouraging blog keeping on store pages now. I like writing these very much. Not only that, but I also think it's essential that people can track an Early Access title's progression right? Isn't that what Early Access is all about? Getting involved in the development process, letting people know the game's not abandoned and so on? At the same time, I don't want people to lose interest in Gaia over time while reading my blogs. So what do you guys think I should do? I was thinking of posting a blog entry every 2 or 3 weeks instead of weekly, or maybe never again since apparently it goes against Valve's new "Best practices". Please let me know, I'd appreciate the input very much!
Now onto what's been accomplished this week. Well, lots of things have been accomplished. Most of the quality of life stuff promised for Alpha 5 has been implemented. Honestly, there are many small positive changes, so I'll keep those for the patch notes when the update eventually goes live. These are the biggest points though:
* Improved tutorial. Random events are now disabled while the tutorial is active, descriptions are more detailed and some goals will be visible with the help of a beacon to guide new players towards them.
* Compass a la Subnautica in terms of UI.
* Can now choose your respawn point on a non Ironman game.
* Trade stealing revamp. In the current version of the game, if you steal 1 copper ore or 10'000'000 copper ore, the punishment is the same. In Alpha 5, the punishment will scale up depending on the amount of stuff stolen. For every 1'000 onyx you steal, 10 minutes of punishments are added to a timer. Every 10 minutes, you'll be attacked either by pirate air raids or orbital strikes and that's quite intense. The idea is to allow people to steal small amounts of stuff that they desperately need if they wish to do so, but at the same time to prevent abuse of the system. Don't worry, there will be a warning telling you how bad the punishment would be if you were to dishonor the deal BEFORE you actually accept it.
* Firefighting mechanics (still in the works)
You can now build a fire station. I started working on this part yesterday so I don't have any pics to show you guys sadly. Each station can have 4 flying drones, with each drone being able to put out 3 fires before having to fly back to the station and replenish its water reserves. So far so good, it seems to be working nicely. Once a fire has been detected, a drone leaves the station, flies over the fire, decelerates in literally 1 frame, waits 5 seconds above the fire with no animation or water particles while the fire simply disappears and moves on to the next fire. So yes, like I said, there's still a bit of work left for this. This works perfectly for outdoor fires, but not so well for indoor fires. Indoor fires should never occur but you never know, someone might decide to just light up their own base for no reason. That plus in a future update you'll be able to build inside caves and mountains. So I'll have to design a second type of fire station that can deal with indoor fires.
Lastly, I had to drop some points from the Quality of Life list I showed you guys in a previous dev blog. I said I'd put different types of defensive walls in the game, but I won't anymore, at least not for Alpha 5. Partly because I lack 3D models and I don't want to use any more low quality stuff that you can buy from the Unity asset store but also because with Alpha 5, structure orientation will be kept from building to building so you don't have to rotate every single wall to make a nice perimeter. Another thing I did was to take out 'Empty bottles' entirely out of the game. Instead, when you drink something, the item will go poof just like with other food pieces. I also decided against making cabinets stack up on one another because I personally think it doesn't make sense to do so, plus it's just extra work that doesn't really bring anything to the game. The last thing I decided to let go from the QoL list is UI scaling. That is a lot of work because I have to go through every single UI element to reposition, rescale, test out different scaling. Then there's localization that has to be taken into account to. So yeah, UI scaling isn't going to happen, at least not for Alpha 5. What I might do instead is to increase the font size of some of the current texts in game where it makes sense.
After I'm done with the firefighting stuff, I can move on to the last point on the QoL list: multiple stories! I hope to be done with this by next week so I can then move on to fix every single bug ever reported.
Okay that's it. So again guys, please let me know if you'd like me to continue these blogs or not, and how often you'd like to see one pop up!