Adding Colony map

5 years ago by RobStaples

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Now that the game is live I wanted to look at polishing up the experience a bit. my goal was to have a visual representation of what is happening to ground you in reality. my pixel art isn't amazing but I think that I have come up with a good representation of the colony you are building,

Event system tools

I want to create a system to create events and technologies quickly. My idea is to create a node system for both the event system and the technology system.

Node system im using

I also built a custom tool to allow me to quickly change data files without having to locate them in the file system.

My Event database system

Colony map

Working on the colony map was both really fun and really hard. I'm so bad at pixel art but im slowly getting better. At first I had a sketched the pieces in my journal to get a clear draft.

My base

Drafting out all the set pieces

I then created the full image in photoshop using the pieces I already had for the tech cards and built more.

The photoshop representation of the colony map

To get the elements to show up only when they are built i had to rig up a colony manager. My first iteration is pretty sloopy but i got a solution going that should work at scale.

the multicommodity system on the mapmanger class

I finally added some animations to the drills and the fusion drive to add life I also added the spaceship animation, it does need a lot of polish but i really like it. I'm not happy with either the research station or the biofuel for different reasons so I'm going to work on them going forward.

Looking forward

I'm looking to add an ore system into the game so you can mine for different types of ore. I'm trying to to research into the most abundant ores on mars but i don't seem to be having much luck. I'm also looking into ore's from pop culture to drive story arc's going forward.

My new ore system

I'm also looking into refactoring the ship system going forward so I should be able to add as many commodities and ships as i want.

A screen to the ship panel so that it can scale better

This game is really starting to grow, and I'm looking to add some content in the coming weeks to add more life to the game. right now the game still sits at about 20 minutes of play but i want to get it up to a few hours and at least be interesting.

Finally if you want to support me I don't do this full time (im a software engineer) so kind words or a Ko-fi goes a long way with me :)