We have been working on the tech demo for about 13 weeks now. Discuss this update or the game in general at the community here. I will be posting weekly updates from now on (instead of bi-weekly).
Finishing work from the previous week, we did some changes on the Storm mode, changing the values for the scale of the waves, restricting time compression and fixing the camera focus. We also smoothed out the wind direction changes for them to look less abrupt especially on this scene.
Next up, we started adding some subsystems to make this a playable game. We added a general “notifications” system to show events to the player and implemented a test “Fish Caught” event which increases the supplies a little bit.
We made expedition members go hungry and consume food from the expedition supplies, based on the settings for ration size and the number of daily rations. This included calculating and displaying the remaining days of supplies in the UI.
We also added a system to affect the morale of the expedition members on an individual basis and integrated this with the Hunger system (so the get increasingly depressed when hungry). as well as other things such as being away from land for too long, and outcomes from the “Man overboard” event. We are also displaying the average morale value on the UI.
In order to implement these, we did a refactor on the events system so that the passing of the time of day is handled by a single component, which then defers further checks and effects into the specific components (such as the Weather controller or the Expedition object)
Finally, we integrated a batch of art into the cutscene for Captain Cook’s campaign.
We also had some discussion about future gameplay modes, including additional campaigns that are not strictly historical but rather include fantasy elements and plots, battling with monsters, dialogs with NPCs, all this keeping the focus on expedition management and navigation.
I also created a simple landing page for the game, and linked it from Slashware’s homepage.
