Week 6

Hello Everyone!

This week we did a lot of planning. After the substantial effort to push out the playtesting demo, we are now looking to the future. The primary focus is to determine our next milestone and all the deliverables that we will need to reach it. In addition to the added features for this milestone, we are also removing some existing mechanics that players did not find engaging while playtesting. We intend to keep the features behind "feature gates" so that we can enable them again in the future if needed.

Another major achievement this week was to wrangle some of our growing technical debt. In our push for the playtesting demo, some technical design decisions that we wanted to change were side-lined in favor of getting everything working. This week we addressed the largest of those issues being how commands and buildings work in code.  

Now that these systems have been unified and cleaned up we were able to easily implement some UX features such as click + drag to have buildings rotate toward the dragged location.

Through playtesting we also decided that we are adding a build queue mechanic. This system will queue build and command actions and use the compute when it becomes available to complete the action. This will give players a buffer of actions that will execute once the "compute" resource becomes available. They will still reserve the energy requirement upfront, but the compute will trickle in to complete the constructions in serial. This is an experimental feature, but one which we hope will address some of the issues observed in the playtests. We hope to show this exciting feature in action sometime next week!

Hope you are having a great day,
Micah Rust