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[Epitaph64]

Yeah, that artist seems to have more than just good technique going for them.

[MalcolmLittle]

The summer is well under way and the game goes on. You wouldn't ever had thought that making a game can take so long. We’ve tweaked the game’s resource production and added some new goods for the market to make production more robust and diverse. I'll write more about it soon.

The best part of the summer is that our artist Caroline Breault is creating the illustrations for the game. I thought it would be nice to show off some of her work.







The last two images depict a few of the attack houses we have in the game (the Psych Ward and the Casino). It's been a blast writing the in-game description texts for the buildings and than see later how Caroline envisioned them. Lots of fun after months of coding and writing.

[MalcolmLittle]

We have a (semi-?)final list of producible goods in the game now. There are basically three types of goods produced: resources (goods for either construction or upgrading buildings), consumables (goods that can be consumed by players' workers) and papers. Papers are not created by any special house; all production buildings will have a percentage of its goods be papers. Papers have two uses:

• You can spend papers on Research & Development (R&D)
• They can be used as money in the game

We had an earlier system in which a player slowly amassed a pool of points could be spent on either developing new buildings or new upgrade levels. Such a system like that was just too game-y and tired. It had no connection to anything else in the game and it was strange to ask players to observe their inventory _and_ a separate system which just happened to collect R&D points.

We also decided against having a traditional monetary system. It felt, among other things, good that everything could be gathered in your inventory.

As for the papers' fluff; the Coalition (the people who sent the player volunteers to the disaster area) has deemed it necessary to collect as many valued documents as possible from the ruins of the city. Stocks and bonds, property deeds, government and municipal records, monetary bills and the like is now widely coveted by the higher ups at the UIC. The thing is that the UIC have been very vague with what kind of documentation they desire. People in the disaster area have therefore begun to accumulate all kinds of papers: company spreadsheets, printed letters and emails, newspapers, practically anything with print on it.

It isn't a very modern explanation (wouldn't everything important be saved on off site servers?) or even a very realistic one. We just thought it would be fun.

The resources are:

• Building Materials: used for the construction of new buildings
• Tools (region specific): used to upgrade buildings’ Quality Level
• Lamps (region specific): used to upgrade buildings’ Protection Level or Storage Level
• Plants (region specific): used to upgrade buildings’ Contentment Level
• Batteries (region specific): used to upgrade buildings’ Efficiency Level

and the consumables (all used to raise a building’s Contentment):

• Alcohol
• Food
• Relics
• Smokes

Many of the resources are specific to different Neighborhoods to stimulate trade between them.

We hoped the names of the goods are simple yet flavorful enough to be usable by players. We planned earlier to have different kind of metals as resources but that was really dull and very unwieldy (why use steel to raise Contentment?) and we just figured we could go wild and do whatever we want. It was still difficult and took a few meetings to work out though.

[MalcolmLittle]

We have from the beginning decided that there needed to be a cap in how much resources you could have in your inventory. We didn't want people to be offline for weeks and log on and find that they now had an amount in the millions. We hadn't done anything about it because we didn't need it in the testing but we have now realized it was quite hard to implement. The ideal would be that you could only have a total amount of all your goods in your inventory, and have any amount in any ratio (2999 Tools and 1 Plant, 3000 in total). Keeping track of how much we would have in people's inventory and in turn switching off production when the total cap was reached turned out to be a total pain so we just decided to have a cap for every individual type of good. Simple is good enough sometimes.

So we now have a building upgrade called Storage. The Storage Level indicates how much of each good you can have in your inventory. So if you decide to invest in upgrading your building's Storage Level you will be able to raise the maximum number of goods you can hoard in your factories. Players will have one inventory per Neighborhood (so they won't have to keep track of which goods are in which buildings: boring!).

Our great artist Caroline has published some glimpses of work shes done for us on her blog. Check them out!

She has also drawn some standard avatars for us (to use before players upload their own images).

[MalcolmLittle]

We had a meeting last week, our first IRL in a long time (at least with all three of us). It was decided that we are going to attempt the daunting task to finish the production and the distribution of workers in our game (at least until we do some large scale testing), plus start to make a system for the game's achievements (we want to make them relative to other players' progress and in that way add competition). 

Because of an increase in work-related obligations we have also settled on relieving some of the workload from our beloved programmer and hire someone to do the more front-end-kinda stuff like getting the game's market up to snuff. We might find someone we know to do the work but if not we'll post an ad here on the forum.