Hello everyone!
I am releasing today another Playtest update! Still no new region, but plenty of visual refinements, interface improvements, and behind-the-scene work for future content. Let's dive immediately into it!
The big change is the building menu rework! I was not satisfied with the old menu. It was taking a lot of space on the screen, and the visualization of adjacent tiles and potential boosting was not so clear. Instead of having a separate representation of the selected building and its adjacent tiles, the new system directly uses the city layout. When selecting a tile, it moves the layout to focus on the tile, and potential boosting effects are showed directly there. Also, no more two panels for the current building description and the candidate construction, it is all merged into one. Overall, the new system is more condensed, more intuitive, and is a lot prettier with the focus animation. Tell me in the comments if you like it!
When placing buildings and leaving the city menu, you can now see a brief animation of the new buildings spawning in the world. This is a tiny change, but it feels much more alive and satisfying suddenly!
Another change that is mostly cosmetic for now: day-night cycle! You will now experience the world with two different lighting atmospheres. A full day lasts 36 cycles: 21 of daylight and 15 of night. I also use this system to keep track of the playtime. The HUD now shows which day you are on. There is still no time pressure at all, I just felt it was a nice way to let players track how much time they have spent in this world. And maybe I will add later some buildings effects that trigger only during the day or the night. This opens up some possibilities for the future.
(Supply routes are now functional! The quest to unlock the system is there too, but it requires to explore another sector so you can't complete it yet. Still, I'm happy with having this feature working. Supply routes were harder to implement than export route because it brings resources from a city directly to your ship, wherever you are. And your ship moves all the time, so the supply ships need to constantly check where you are and adapt their pathfinding! The supply routes will come with their own set of upgrades, and a new tutorial fragment to present them. All of that is ready for once the quest becomes available to be completed!)
(By the way, I had to break the save compatibility again because of the supply routes, the internals were a bit more challenging than I had thought, I'm sorry for that. Saves prior to version 0.4 cannot be loaded and will be lost.)
(Export routes spanning multiple sectors are now functional too! This will be handy when I finally release this new sector I have been promising for a while!)
The rare case of spawning in a closed sea and being trapped is now fixed! Now that I have a pathfinding system for the trade routes, it was a lot easier to check if the spawn position is valid.
Visuals improvements to the map! The fog is no longer made of static black pixels! It is now slightly animated, and the color is tinted with the fog color of the sector.
The 'Save and quit' button shows an overview of the current game stats when hovered. On the title menu, so does the 'Continue' button to see the stats of your current save.
And various other small tweaks and fixes! (I'll make a better job at maintaining a fully detailed changelog when I get to an official demo, this is just a Playtest so I guess you're mostly interested in the big changes for now!)
That's it for today! As always, don't hesitate to share feedback! And now, I'm getting back to work on this new tropical region... See you next time!
-Radiant Sloth