Good day, fellow Meeps,
I considered carefully whether I should mention this here, and finally decided I should. I recently took a 4-week "working holiday" with my wife and kids - we camped in tents for 3 nights driving down to stay with good friends for a couple of weeks before heading back. Towards the end of the trip my mother unexpectedly passed away...
So, I've had a couple of weeks largely away from work/developing. My mom was my biggest fan and she had always been extremely excited that I'd grabbed the opportunity to do something I loved - creating World Turtles. If my kids one day think half as highly of me as my mom did, I will deem my life successful...
I have now started developing in all earnest again and am still loving it! I have a long list of things to tie down before the huge UI (and more) update, which we are planning for early-to-mid November. The biggest updates since the last post here are:
Objectives and Messages
Objectives (with dynamic text updating with the game state) are now displayed with messages, and the player can choose to hide/display either/both categories. Clicking on an objective/message also takes you to relevant location or opens up the relevant UI. You can also minimize the messages, which displays only the icons, while restoring the one you hover over.
New Functionality / Gameplay
The most important new functionality centers around Space and the Turtle. Feed Bales are now available from the start of the game. These can be delivered to the Turtle via Helicopter, and you can steer the Turtle around in space (with some new elements, detailed below) from the start.
The Space Minimap has been greatly enhanced! It shows you the range and sensitivity it's able to display, and how to increase that (using Lookout Towers). It also supplies a Climate forecast (the span of the forecast increases as your visibility increases), which will also be used to indicate suitability of crops for the immediate future. On the right you will find information on Feed Bales and Catapults, with progress indicators and tooltips, while the steering happens in the center of the space map. Finally, you will also notice some new "icons" on the space map indicating naturally occurring food and crystals in space. These will be the targets you aim for while steering the Turtle.
Implementing the functionality for allowing a "climate map", a static overlay (for aiming) centered on the Turtle and a dynamic overlay (for special regions) moving with space, while also allowing the player to interact with all of these and the game to know when the Turtle finds itself in which conditions, was quite technical, but it all seems to be working very well now.
Short Cutscenes
Certain achievements now have short cutscenes (skippable) as a reward. For example, the first time you feed the Turtle with a feed bale and helicopter, or the first time a fault erupts, a cinematic camera will follow the action. The game also starts with a quick zoom-in-from-high up (and runs in reverse when you exit), and the title screen has an interesting zoom-in from time to time.
Let me jump right back into working on the UI - I can't wait for the next update to go live!
De Chelonian Mobile
Gideon