Week 30

Hello Everyone,

This week we made some significant changes to how resources work and are looking into hiring some outside help for UI and narrative. The journey towards an AI that can use platforms and surgers properly continues in the background.

For resources, we've made a couple of major changes. Firstly, we've added a limit to the total amount of energy you can get from any one resource node (reactor core). We're hoping this will encourage expansion throughout the game, and help avoid protracted stalemates. We're also adding a burst of productivity to Nanite mines just after they're created. Experienced players can use this by carefully ordering early game mine construction for rapid expansion in the early game.  Ideally these changes together will encourage expanding rapidly and taking resources from the enemy in the early game (when that's most fun) and going straight for the kill late game (when that's most fun), but we'll need lots of playtesting and balance passes to see how much of that happens.

The AI is getting better at building platforms, but nothing to show off just yet.

For outside help, we're currently talking to a writer about making a story for the game. Now that we've got the vast majority of the game's mechanics in place and a system for displaying some narrative content to the player we feel a lot more comfortable looking for help, now that we can really let them know what they're going to be working with. RTS UI/UX is really hard to do well, so we're looking to get some expert help on that front as well. For the moment we're commissioning small bits of work for both narrative and UI/UX to see if we work well together for something larger and longer term. We're still at the stage of showing people "what we've got".

but we're excited to work with some new people and make the game even better!

Thanks for reading,

Tucker Bane