Posted by Lanze Games Jun 30, 2019 View on Kickstarter

Hello, everyone! We are still working on the new system I've vaguely described in the last update. We really wanted to show the prototype of the 'Sector Board' scene in action today, but it turns out that we need some more time. I estimate that we'll have a video clip ready at the end of this week. Fortunately, I've been pretty successful keeping the scope of the sector board down in order to avoid a massive feature creep which could have come to pass very easily. I'll just drop a few WIP screenshots before I get back to work.

Internally, we call this the 'sector board'. Think of it as a map showing the entire region (sector). It's still missing the main objects such as settlements.

If you look closely, you might notice that these two maps share the exact same shape, but a different geography on them. The game reads the map at the start of the game, and decides how to place the different areas across the map.

(Another alternative would be just implementing an unguided random generator for the sector board which would decide on the number of areas in each map, their types and the position of connectors. However, if you are a fan of the roguelike genre, you might have noticed that a random generator is actually bound to throw out results that all feel very similar to each other - because you are still putting in the exact same algorithm, however simple or complex it might be.)

Here is an undead army as seen on the sector board. Thanks to this big change to the sector map design, we can now finally implement hostile armies roaming around the sector, causing harm and taking over important production centers - without making an enormous effort to design a complex AI which would take extra processing power, calculating the distances and trying to find optimal routes.

Dozens of AI-controlled actors on a vast map would also cause optimization issues. If you've played Civilization V, you might know that its hundreds of AI-controlled units cause massive slowdowns, forcing you to wait longer and longer between turns as the game drags on. It's a problem that we don't have to deal with, now that we've opted to this simplified board view. (Phew!)

I'll get back to work now. If you wanna know what I'm doing right now while the programmer is writing codes: I'm writing events and prepping materials so that the other writers can help me out. Random encounters are a whole stack of work on their own, but luckily I can delegate them to the other able people... unlike game design, character design or illustrations.

Talk to you again soon!

-Hepari

음머어어어어어어어!!!!!!!