Third blog is here! Today we'll be talking a bit more about the rover as well as the mech.
We're glad to announce that the rover has finally been implemented in the game! Last time, we talked about some of issues we were facing by introducing vehicles in the game. So how did we solve them?
Well first, we now have hydrazine as an all around fuel. Until now, it's been used for the Tempest so it was an end game kind of item. But now, it's more easily craftable so that it can be used even when starting a new game. The rover will be a craftable item not requiring any type of decoding and it will only need basic, early game resources to build. As such, it's not a very strong vehicle so after about a dozen collisions, it will have a hard time accelerating and you'll need to repair it. It also uses lots of hydrazine. Currently, using a full stack of hydrazine will get you about 750m of driving. But that's okay because hydrazine doesn't require globosa and chilli to craft anymore. It needs only 2 corn, 1 bubble root and 1 glowtube to craft a full stack of hydrazine. Be careful though, hydrazine is used even when the vehicle is not moving, albeit at a slower rate. That's because the engine turns on as soon as you enter it, but once you exit, it will stop using it. In theory, we could have a button to turn on or off the engine, but there are many key bindings already and we don't want to overcomplicate things, at least not at this stage.
In the last blog, we also said we'll need some UI to represent 'vehicle stats' without specifying what those are exactly. We decided not to do that anymore and only implement a new meter representing the vehicle's health. It's best not to clog the screen with UI stuff, as the player stats already take a lot of real estate. A little bit off topic, but we'll also need to find a better solution to show the player stats at some point in the future as the UI box takes up way too much space.
Serialization and every other technical aspect has been implemented as well.
Now, since we have this fast vehicle in game, we decided to change a few aspects. The player's speed has been lowered from 0.8 to 0.7 units because Amanda was like an olympic runner before to be honest. Travelling 130m in the rover takes 11 seconds while running on foot takes 18 seconds, so it's almost twice as fast as running. I think we'll need to increase the speed of the rover to make it at least twice as fast as running on foot. But for now we'll see how it works with these values.
Many resources have also been changed. A lot of them are now a bit rarer and some are much farther from the spawn point than before. For example, the Ancient Assembler pieces spawn in a 800m radius around the player, but after this patch, it will spawn in a 4'000m radius from the spawn point. Gold, diamond and other resources are also similarly affected.
So that's about it for the rover. In no way are all these numbers finalized, we'll have to see how you guys react and adjust based on your feedback!
Now for the Mech. We said in the first dev blog that we'd need 2 or 3 weeks to get it working so there's not much to say about it now. It's still very early to show off anything, except for one thing!
There we have a beautiful looking Ancient mech shooting a laser from the right hand and flames from his left hand. Next dev blog will go into detail about what the mech is, or should be. Right now, we're still not sure about how the mech should look like, if it should be part of the Ancient tech you can discover across the map or if it should be something that you can decode. We're strongly leaning towards the Ancient tech path right now.
Happy gaming and enjoy the summer sale!