Hello, We are down to 28 bugs on the forum. The last bugs are often the ones we have been putting off for a reason, they generally require some more meaningful changes and decisions. That is why this week we have a lot to discuss.
The many lessons learned from testing the new tutorial We have already pointed out, that we are trying to make a new campaign (FFF-245), and part of it is the core beginning, the NPE/tutorial. The tutorial is one of the very critical parts of the game, as if the first 15 minutes of a game feels shitty, there is big chance that the player will not play any further. I had this experience in many games myself. So the challenge could be articulated like this: "The current tutorial is okay, but can we make it great?" The approach in the current tutorial is to feed the player with the basic knowledge of how to control the basics of the game (the first mission and the start of the second mission) in the fastest way possible. The player is even given descriptive info like this, to diminish the chance of not understanding how the basic entities work. After few steps in the 2nd level, the player can start exploring his first self-feeding loop (make iron to make more iron). The tools used to this is mainly: The message dialog that stops the game and explains the player various things. Minimization of the amount of things the player can interact with to absolute minimum, so he can't start doing other things before the basics are clear. The possible drawbacks: The constant interruptions can get really annoying (typically around 22 message dialogs before the player starts to play relatively freely in the 2nd level). The possibility, that the player will mindlessly follow the step-by step tasks without understanding it, so he can become really lost later on, and the tutorial basically wouldn't help him to understand things. So the question is: Can we make a tutorial that makes these problems go away?, and alternatively, How big are these problems actually? The current direction of the new tutorial attempt is to never use the message dialogs, so the player can learn the game more fluently, and to leave way more things to explore, as learning things yourself has a better chance of success than force-feeding generally. We made a few tests of the new approach with a few people, the main takeaway, is that nothing is for free, and this approach created new drawbacks. If the player doesn't figure out something basic, it can be very frustrating for him to figure out what is going on when not moving forward for a long time. It might be possible, that some things are just not fun to learn by exploration, and it is more comfortable if they are force fed to you. I would compare this to a friend explaining you how to play a game for 5 minutes compared to 2 hours of trial and error. There are more possible outcomes from this, and we shall see how different tweaks of both strategies work in the testings. It might be interesting if you mentioned your experience with the tutorial in the comment section as well.
It’s been several weeks since we showed you the graphics for new high resolution circuit connector modules (FFF-202). However now is finally the time when we have them in the game. In this article I will briefly show you what was done both in the graphics and code, and what new benefits are there for you as players and modders. I find the 0.15 version of the circuit connector module has following “problems”: The wire connectors are different from the combinators. Wires sometimes completely overlap, making only one of them properly visible. Modularity - you can somewhat tell what is happening based on the LED states, but it could be much nicer. Connecting a belt always looks weird, while the yellow structure which holds the connector box could be made more specific. Some of the rotations are utterly useless. The Lua definitions are spread over every single entity, so revisiting them all is a big pain.
Hello, Today we want to share some exciting news!
Hello, we have shown some bigger things recently, so it is time to also show some smaller things, because the bigger things wouldn't shine that good without the smaller things working properly!
Statistics GUI Klonan, Oxyd The statistics GUI (electric network stats, production stats, etc.) is one of the GUIs that has been in the game for a very long time, and has had its functionality fleshed out reasonably over the years. It was not long ago when Twinsen added hovering and highlighting to the graphs. Given that, and the relatively short timeframe for 1.0 release, the update of the statistics GUI has really just been a style update, no new features or heavy logic rewriting. Oxyd has most of the work done, so we are happy to show some real in-game screenshots of how it looks: A notable change with the electric stats is that the Satisfaction/Production/Accumulator charge are next to each other in a single row, as opposed to each in a separate row. The label for the exact amount has also been moved to inside of the progress bar, which itself is much thicker. The production stats are pretty much the same functionality wise. One new button you might spot is the search button. However there are some problems with the search feature. As you can see, production and consumption frames have a different search box independent from each other. The main problem is when pressing CTRL+F to perform a regular search: How do we know which frame to open? Of course this could lead to different solutions like the use of a cycle for the focus of the search, in which the second time you press CTRL+F the other frame gets the focus. Or both of the search boxes open at the same time but only one gets the focus. Or only one frame gets the focus and the other one works only by pressing the button. But let's face it, these "solutions" are not solid at all and create inconsistency in the main design. To solve this issue we decided that the simplest way to go is the use of just one search box on the header of the panel. This new location works as a general feature for the entire panel. One single search gives you 2 results, one on each frame. This solution is used in the new character window -to come soon- making it consistent with the whole design of the GUI. You can also see we took this opportunity to integrate the Kill statistics in with the rest, instead of being its own window with its own hotkey. The Statistics GUIs will need a few tweaks and polishings here and there before it is ready for release, but unless something unexpected happens you can expect it coming out in a release soon.
Hello, the bugfixing period boringly continues, we got down to 159 active bug reports, so in few weeks we should be finally down with this burden. But at least the graphics department has something new to show:
Hello, the forecast today says it is going to be 36°C, I bought two fans to help us overcome the crisis, but it is still quite rough.
While all us minions and assembling humans are furiously working on 0.15, today I would like to present to you what I have been working on lately - new graphics for resources, of course including high res and the new uranium ore. In the second part of the article I will get to an old/new topic about concrete.
0.13 release is getting close. The programming guys are trying to finish the features so we can start internal playtesting and bugfixing next week. The art guys are working hard on the new trains graphics. In the meantime, here's some more information about the circuit network.
