Patch 0.8 Highlights
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Hey everyone, Stephen here with a progress update!
Starting from Scratch
So. We redid the entire beginning of the game...
In August, we released in Early Access. Our intention with the early access release was to put it out in "the wild" and see how people liked it.... and we felt the game needed to be changed in a major way.
Why?
We discovered some fundamental flaws with the game.... namely around the major goal of the game - to upgrade the Heartbox.
We observed that users felt like they were just mindlessly following instructions, with little understanding of what the game was really about - surviving as a very disposable android by automating everything. A big part of this was that the fuel depot required constant manually harvesting, which goes against what we were trying to do. They were also frustrated with the random deaths, and absolutely hated the random pushback spawns.
The tough decision
Starting from scratch would put us back months (6 months, as it turns out). We knew it would slow development, negatively impact the publics perception of the game, and dig into our savings.
However, we felt very strongly that this was the right decision.
At the end of the day, we want the best for Atrio and its players. We took the plunge and what you're seeing today is the result of 6 months of blood, sweat and tears - a brand new beginning.
Changing the gameplay loop
I've covered this in a previous post, so I'll keep this brief. A new gameplay loop meant going back and ripping apart all of our old systems from the ground up. The issue with doing this is....
You can't release it in parts
All of the pieces need to be changed, or the whole experience wouldn't be cohesive. This forced us to put our heads down and just get it done. I admittedly should have been posting a lot more on steam (my bad!) and I am committed to doing better at posting more frequent updates.
New Fuel Depot
We refocused the gameplay loop to focus on providing the fuel depot a constant supply of fuel. The more fuel you supply, the more lightbulbs you'll be able to support. As you continue to upgrade your base, you'll unlock new fuel types. More fuel, means more light, letting you build bigger bases, and more complex factories.
A new UI
The old UI had to be scrapped entirely, as you can no longer deposit items manually. This UI focuses on showing your rolling average of fuel/min.
Fuel Types
The fuel depot only fully supports 2 types of fuel. As we progress further in development, we'll add the last two fuel types. We want to make it so that in order to acquire each of these fuel types, you need to do something completely unique, or build a new type of factory, so we ask for your patience as we build those pieces.
Dispense Chest
We observed that refilling the old fuel depot manually was very unfun on the long term. However, the players also needed a way to control how fast items went into the fuel depot, since the depot was based on an average fuel input/min.
Our solution - the dispense chest.
You can control how fast or slow it dispenses, and serves for a great early game tool before you set up your pickerpals.
The PickerPal
Manually gathering plants sucks
Players got tired of gathering plants by hand really quickly, and if we were going to force them to consistently fill the fuel depot, we needed to add a way to automate it.
The pickerpal is a large, lumbering creature that automatically harvests plants and drops them back off at their stations. You can select from a variety of plants to pick from and you can even chain their stations together to save space. Once you have them set up, they'll run on their own and provide a constant supply of fuel. They're certainly not the brightest, and overcrowding is sure to cause confusion but they're hard workers and will get the job done.
Factory Redesign
We've revamped the factory, the smelter, the mini deer, and the electronics factory so players can see behind them to make them more useful.
With a 3x3 footprint, the factory is larger, but it also pulls items off the assembly line for you. This reduces complexity and makes it easier to scale up your designs.
Factory Redesign
The mini deer now shows what recipe you've selected, and we've updated his animations to.. actually have animations
Exploration Changes
Torches
We've removed the makeshift torches. Players can now research the rechargeable torch - a permanent upgrade automatically turns on when you step into the dark. If you run out of battery, running back into the light will recharge it. We didn't want players abusing exploration and instead reward them for producing lightbulbs.
Pickerpals in the wild
Until we add the battle update, pickerpals are scattered around the dark for you to find. Expect for this to change, as we intend for the player to have to go and capture creatures.
Freeplay Mode Revamped
We felt like Freeplay and Story mode were too similar. We want to incentivize players to mess around in Freeplay even after they've played the Story mode, so we've added a new biome and a new objective.
Freeplay includes a new cutscene, and some hidden secrets in the dark.
The plains
We wanted to add a little more variety to our color pallet, so we added a bright yellow biome.
This is our first version of the plains, and will likely continue to update it with more plants and variety as time goes on.
The plains comes with two new harvestable plants - The Red shroom, the blood flower. As of right now, they are only used in a couple of recipes.... but we have big plans for them :)
The BulbMan
In Freeplay mode, your goal is to restore power to the giant BulbMan by crafting and connecting a variety of SuperBulbsfrom the fuel depot, to the BulbMan .
SuperBulbs
We've added 6 new special lightbulbs intended to power the bulb man. They require a huge number of resources to craft, and indicate progression through Freeplay mode.
We hope that Freeplay gives you a great way to experiment with all of the automation pieces while finish the main story mode.
Tilemap System
Before tackling the Freeplay mode, we stumbled across Unity's Tilemap System. The level of flexibility it provided when it comes to creating unique environments was very appealing to us and we decided to swap our environment system over. As with any feature, you typically pay the price in the beginning, and reap the rewards later in development.
With this new system, creating tiles, paths, and adding new environments is quite fast, but the real benefit is when we need to go back and make tweaks to our existing environments.
In our old version, I would hand build each environment in illustrator, export or it, set up colliders, and manually add plants. With the tilemap system, we can move biomes around with little friction, as much of the process is automated. It was a fair amount of work to set up, but we anticipate that this will pay off big as we head towards 1.0.
I was so excited about this, I made a vlog about it.
UI Updates
Accents
we've updated the UI to consistently use yellow accents. This makes it a lot easier to see what's highlighted, and is a first step to adding controller support.
Cancel Crafting
A highly requested feature, you can cancel items in your crafting queue. So for those of you who go a little trigger happy with crafting, we got you covered.
Quality of life changes
A better death timer
Hooo boy did we mess up with the death timer. Nearly ALL of our negative reviews on steam are related to the unavoidable battery death.
We have tweaked it to be less frustrating - The first time you die is relatively the same, but all subsequent deaths have been tweaked:
- Deaths happen every 30 minutes instead of every 15min.
- The battery indicator above the player appears for 15 seconds instead of 1 min
- Fixed a bug where the player wouldn't die when the player's battery hit 0%
A bit of a spoiler, but roughly 2 hours into the game, you unlock the ability to craft circuit juice, and you no longer involuntarily die. We have seen many playthroughs, and have set it so that the player will only die approx. 3-4 times before getting to this.
In Freeplay mode, you start with the ability to craft circuit juice, so the unavoidable death timer won't affect you.
Why keep it in? Why not just remove it?
The entire premise of the story is based around the unavoidable death timer..... which makes it awfully hard to remove. We hope that this is a good compromise.
Random pushback spawns
With our next focus being on a better battle system, we've removed the random pushbacks.
In addition, our changes to the factories makes the pushbacks less important. You no longer need them in order to build a successful base.
All is not lost for the pushbacks - We are planning on reworking how the pushbacks work to make the more useful in future patches. Stay tuned.
Saves
There's no easy way to put this, so i'll just give it to you straight. With such enormous changes to both the map, and how you play the game, your old saves won't work. We've added a migration tool so you can still view your creations, but they are assuredly going to be buggy and the game won't be properly playable.
As we progress to 1.0 (and the fundamental pieces of the game start to solidify), your saves will start to carry over properly from patch to patch. We plan for it to be an incremental process (with early saves being buggy, and saves after 1.0 being carried over with no bugs), and will continue to work on it.
What's next?
Let me tell you folks, having this patch done is a huge weight off of our shoulders. Going back and changing the beginning was very daunting, but I personally find the game to be much more cohesive, and fun (we hope you agree).
Our big focus is on controller support, and experimenting with a new battle system.
Thanks for your patience and happy automating,
Stephen + The Isto Inc Team.