It’s one thing to design a crafting system and correctly balance the resource requirements. It’s one thing to design an aesthetic that is creatively gratifying. It’s even a thing to design a UI system that is both useful and easy to use. It is an entirely different beast, however, to design a base building system. This is an all-hands-on-deck task; it needs to function, it needs to make sense, it needs to be fun, it needs to look good, and it needs to be visually consistent with the rest of the game. It’s a lot of work, but we’re tackling it now.
One of the trickiest things about an entire team working remotely is describing something visual to everyone involved. This came up while figuring out how base rooms could link together. Fortunately, one of our artists figured out what was being suggested and quickly put together a series of mock-ups to demonstrate the concept; that’s where this week’s Featured Image comes from. The professional in me wants to analyze it for you, but honestly… isn’t it just so cool?
It looks great, but I’m of the mindset that most things look great in a texture-less state, so I might be biased. And obviously, it’s just a proof of concept for something that (in hindsight) should have been easier to understand, but look how it works! Every section of the base is clearly self-contained, but every section can be moved around during construction! In fact, the only real limitation of this design is that each room has specific walls available for connecting to the other rooms. Rest assured though, you’ll still be able to make this your base and lay it out in the way you want. It’ll just take a little ingenuity.
We’re excited about this, but it’s important to remember that it’s still a long way off. We might have a surprise or two in the upcoming alpha release, but this won’t be there. It’s important to us that, though it is only an alpha, we put out something that does justice to the mechanics included. There’s still a ton of design work to be done, both in terms of the gameplay and the visuals, before we can feel comfortable releasing it to the wild.
Which is why we’re starting on it now. We have some internal goals for when it’ll be out, but rest assured that we know how much you want this mechanic. Alpha 2 takes the highest priority right now, but this is close behind. So be sure to stick around! That’s the end of this week’s Dev Update, but we’ll be back with more regular updates next week, so follow us on Twitter and Facebook to see those as soon as they’re available! Thank you so much for reading! We all hope you have a wonderful rest of your week.
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