Hello everyone! This is the fourth development update. I've been working on finalizing a fully playable first part of the game. The next update will have a gameplay video.
An integral part of the game is running the Outpost: Meeting shipment deadlines, making sure you have enough oxygen and food to survive, managing the power generator, building and expanding the facilities, maintaining the space elevator, hooking up new lakes to the mining operation, etc. etc.
You will also need to sleep. If you're awake for too long, your character get a fatigue debuff. After a few of these, depending on the physical stat, you have a chance of randomly falling a sleep for fifteen minutes. This could kill you. Not eating will also debuff the character, and not eating for a couple of weeks (depending again on your physical stat) will kill you as well. These debuffs stack and have negative synergy, so if your physical stat is debuffed by fatigue, you'll die sooner from hunger as well.
The Outpost has its own inventory system and stock that your character can interact with. Subsystems are tied to this. If you choose to not power the oxygen generator, you gradually use up the oxygen until you die from CO2 poisoning. If you don’t power hydroponics, you can’t generate food. If you don’t power the chargers, your suit battery won’t replenish, your rover will have to slowly trickle charge, and drones will be grounded. If you don’t power the science stations, research stops, etc.
Outpost Generator
Inventory
The power management system is a lot of fun. It was sort of inspired by Faster Than Light, a game I really enjoyed, where you can assign power to different subsystems.
A fun example would be when, if you need to scrounge every last bit of power to enable both the science station and the construction robot to finish something and you haven’t upgraded your generator, you could turn off the oxygen generator and sleep in the Rover for a while. It has its own limited oxygen supply. I’ve had one test run of the first part of the game where that made the difference between making a shipment or not.
The cool thing about this situation was that I never planned for it. I was just play testing and messed up a little so my character was in a tight spot. I figured ‘why wouldn’t the character be able to just sleep in the rover with the oxygen in the base turned off?’ Then I realized that the way I programmed it enables the player to do so. I surprised myself playing my own game. That was a terrific moment.
But I digress. Back to the update.
You start out without a broken hydroponics system so you’ll be relying on shipments of food when you arrive. Shipments are scheduled every month, with the methane freighters carrying supplies on their way to Titan. You can trade to have things added to these shipments. These are then airdropped from orbit.
Ship Arrives Cutscene
Here is a trade screen with the captain of the ship that brought you to the Saturn system. As you can see by Captain Phil's response, the conversant will respond to the choices you make in trading. To the left is the negotiation skill button, with which you can try to haggle. The empty space to the left is for speciality items (such as seen in the inventory screen above), which are unavailable for the shipment in this example.
Trading with Captain Phil
The player has to find the airdop landing site. This is usually roughly in the same spot near the Outpost, but occasionally a shipment lands a little out of the way so you’ll have to explore.
Airdropped Shipment
You can add systems, upgrade them, and eventually even erect new buildings and add people.
Then again, you can also bail on it all, join the Chinese in their digs and branch the story early. Speaking of which, I finished developing the Chinese base this week. I don't want to spoil too much right now, but here it is from afar:
Tuxing Liu
So in short, it’s a pretty full-fledged base management layer for an RPG.
An integral part of the game is running the Outpost: Meeting shipment deadlines, making sure you have enough oxygen and food to survive, managing the power generator, building and expanding the facilities, maintaining the space elevator, hooking up new lakes to the mining operation, etc. etc.
You will also need to sleep. If you're awake for too long, your character get a fatigue debuff. After a few of these, depending on the physical stat, you have a chance of randomly falling a sleep for fifteen minutes. This could kill you. Not eating will also debuff the character, and not eating for a couple of weeks (depending again on your physical stat) will kill you as well. These debuffs stack and have negative synergy, so if your physical stat is debuffed by fatigue, you'll die sooner from hunger as well.
The Outpost has its own inventory system and stock that your character can interact with. Subsystems are tied to this. If you choose to not power the oxygen generator, you gradually use up the oxygen until you die from CO2 poisoning. If you don’t power hydroponics, you can’t generate food. If you don’t power the chargers, your suit battery won’t replenish, your rover will have to slowly trickle charge, and drones will be grounded. If you don’t power the science stations, research stops, etc.
Outpost Generator
Inventory
The power management system is a lot of fun. It was sort of inspired by Faster Than Light, a game I really enjoyed, where you can assign power to different subsystems.
A fun example would be when, if you need to scrounge every last bit of power to enable both the science station and the construction robot to finish something and you haven’t upgraded your generator, you could turn off the oxygen generator and sleep in the Rover for a while. It has its own limited oxygen supply. I’ve had one test run of the first part of the game where that made the difference between making a shipment or not.
The cool thing about this situation was that I never planned for it. I was just play testing and messed up a little so my character was in a tight spot. I figured ‘why wouldn’t the character be able to just sleep in the rover with the oxygen in the base turned off?’ Then I realized that the way I programmed it enables the player to do so. I surprised myself playing my own game. That was a terrific moment.
But I digress. Back to the update.
You start out without a broken hydroponics system so you’ll be relying on shipments of food when you arrive. Shipments are scheduled every month, with the methane freighters carrying supplies on their way to Titan. You can trade to have things added to these shipments. These are then airdropped from orbit.
Ship Arrives Cutscene
Here is a trade screen with the captain of the ship that brought you to the Saturn system. As you can see by Captain Phil's response, the conversant will respond to the choices you make in trading. To the left is the negotiation skill button, with which you can try to haggle. The empty space to the left is for speciality items (such as seen in the inventory screen above), which are unavailable for the shipment in this example.
Trading with Captain Phil
The player has to find the airdop landing site. This is usually roughly in the same spot near the Outpost, but occasionally a shipment lands a little out of the way so you’ll have to explore.
Airdropped Shipment
You can add systems, upgrade them, and eventually even erect new buildings and add people.
Then again, you can also bail on it all, join the Chinese in their digs and branch the story early. Speaking of which, I finished developing the Chinese base this week. I don't want to spoil too much right now, but here it is from afar:
Tuxing Liu
So in short, it’s a pretty full-fledged base management layer for an RPG.
