It has been an amazing year of progress for Mercury Fallen, and things are just getting started. I’m very excited about what the new year will bring.

At the beginning of 2017, my goal was to have Mercury Fallen on Steam by the end of summer, something I wasn’t sure I would be able to do. In April,  Mercury Fallen was released on Itch.IO, which was a great way to get early feedback about the game and resolve critical issues. After a few updates and patches, I started to migrate the game to Steam. Mercury Fallen is my first solo development project, and my first game ever on Steam. This process was rather intimidating, but Mercury Fallen was released on Steam on October 16. Since that release, I’ve been very busy working on new updates and building a community around the game.

I’m very excited and humbled by the positive response I’ve received about Mercury Fallen. It’s a really great feeling to have gamers playing, and enjoying, my creation. I have a lot of big plans for Mercury Fallen and your feedback and support has been very motivating. A huge thank you and a Happy Holidays to you all.

Here are some of the things I’ll be working on next.

Job Priority System

Priority control for colonist jobs has been a highly requested feature and is in development. The new system will allow you to set custom priorities for each job role per colonist, which range from 1 to 10. Jobs with a higher priority will be done before jobs with a lower priority, if that job can be done, of course. This allows you to have multiple jobs selected for a colonist, but still control which job will be done first.

Changes to the management screen and colonist info window have been made to allow for the new priority settings. Priority 1 is the highest priority and priority 10 is the lowest.

Planetary Expeditions

This is still deep in development and won’t appear in the next update, but I wanted to add some clarification to what planetary expeditions will entail. The goal is to allow expedition parties to be sent out on a planetary map. These expeditions are meant to explore, discover and expand the world of the game. The comm officer job role will play a part in discovering Points Of Interest (POI) on the planetary map, which can then be explored by  expedition parties. The planetary expeditions will serve as a large extension for acquiring new resources and making new discoveries.

The focus of development right now has been on setting up procedural generation for the planetary map, which will include various biomes, POIs and hazards. The biggest challenge right now is ensuring a good balance of focus between the primary facility and expansion/exploration on the surface.

Merry Christmas and a Happy Holiday to you all. I look forward to what 2018 will bring. 🙂

This update took longer than initially planned, but it’s packed with various new content, tweaks and fixes. I’m super excited to announce that Alpha 0.11 is now available on Steam.

Important Note:

Existing Save Games are not supported. Strongly advised to start a new game in Alpha 0.11.

Robot Construction

Colonists have figured out how to make their very own robots. Robots can be constructed using the new Robot Assembler, after the required research is complete. When constructing a robot you can apply points to increase the robots starting Smarts, Muscles & Athletics. With additional research you can increase the amount of points you can spend each time you construct a robot.

Robot Power Need

Robots will now require recharging, which works in a similar way to colonists requiring sleep. The new recharge pad is where robots will go to recharge their power need.

Deep Driller Bot

The new Deep Driller bot can be constructed at the Robot Assembler and is the only machine capable of mining the remaining ore in the floor. Floor ore tiles can be marked for deep drilling by selecting them and clicking the new Enable Deep Mining button. Ore floor tiles will be replaced with dirt after they are finished being mined.

Story Content

A new opening back story has been added to the game. In additional to this a new stasis capsule has appeared when starting a new game. This is the initial introduction of the planned story content for the Mercury Fallen. There is a lot more to come.

Note-able Changes

• Power/Water No Longer Limited By Distance
• Object Placement Is Now From Object Center vs. Object Corner
• Tiles Marked For Mining Are Saved And Still Selected Upon Reload
• Warning Icons Over Objects That Are Missing Power/Water Or Are Disabled

Release Notes

Features

• Added Robot Assembler for constructing new robots.
• Added: New Assembly Lab Floor
• Added Robot power need
• Added Charge Pad for recharging robots
• Added new Driller Bot which has the one job of mining floor ore tiles.
• Added warning icons over objects that are disabled, missing power/water
• Added 6 new data recovery projects to unlock robot construction, deep driller and attribute points.
• One robot charge pad included in starting facility
• Enable deep mining on a floor ore tile by selecting it and activating deep mining
• Ore tiles in the floor will become dirt after resources are mined by a deep driller bot

Changes

• Added: Lock Cursor To Window option which will confine the cursor to the game window when running in windowed mode.
• Added: Game intro story text
• Added: Mysterious opened stasis capsule
• Removed power/water conduit distance limit. Objects can now receive water/power at any distance as long as there is enough being generated.
• Added: Screen border and PAUSED text at top middle when game is paused
• Added: Tooltip info to attributes in colonist info window
• Changed: Engineering floor now called Refinery floor
• Changed: tutorial task font size to reduce screen clutter
• Changed: Mining tutorial task to include info on how to deselect tiles
• Changed: Various changes to tooltip text
• Changed: Object placement/rotation now based on object center and not object corner. Objects in existing save games may be missing or offset from original placed location.
• Changed: Colonists will now drop mined resources as they are mining instead of dropping all resources when mining is complete.
• Changed: Mining action will now be interrupted if colonist has a more pressing need
• Changed:Starting job performance has been decreased. Higher job level should now have more of a noticeable impact on job performance. Job performance is based on time between actions so higher levels should do the job more quickly.
• Updated: Tiles selected for mining should now save and reload.
• Updated: Different colonist types (Human/robots) now have different base movement speeds
• If robot power is less than 15% they will no longer work and seek out an available charge pad.
• If robot power is less than 5% they will receive the low power effect which will reduce movement speed by 25%

Fixes

• Fixed: Colonist getting stuck collecting items if only applicable location is blocked.
• Fixed: Colonists working at stations even if station doesn’t have power.
• Fixed: Data Recovery unlock tooltip text extending outside of frame
• Fixed: Tutorial text cut off on some resolutions
• Fixed: Colonist using incorrect items to craft with in some instances
• Fixed: Colonist actions getting incorrect setting data in some instances which lead to various misbehavior
• Fixed: Power generator providing power to a machine even if that would bring it over it’s max power output
• Fixed: Walls not updating when removing a door