The new colonist behavior system has been a lot more work then I originally thought it would be. I’m not entirely sure why I thought I could rebuild the entire behavior system in a short amount of time, but I tend to be a bit too critical of my own abilities. The new system is coming along great and I wanted to share a bit more information about it.

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Started work on more of the utility items for Mercury Fallen. This week so far I finished up the power generator as well as a custom animated shader for cool throbbing power material. The shader uses a mask texture as well as using the internal _Time variable instead of using a script to animate the UV offsets.

The new utility room floor has also been added. I had originally planned on having a dedicated power room, but instead am now having power, water and oxygen generation machines all put in to the same room. I didn’t see much benefit to separating those in to separate room types.

I still have to get power/water and oxygen systems actually generating said resources as well as being used by existing machines, but one step at a time.

So far I’m pretty excited about the look and feel of the game and the progress that I’m making. As a solo developer the development takes time, but it’s a lot of fun to work on.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on some new world generation as well as a new crafting system. I can’t seem to make up my mind when it comes to the world generation, but it’s a pretty important aspect related to the starting conditions of the game.

Starting Conditions

After reviewing a bunch of information related to what I have and what I originally intended, I realized that my initial plan for starting wasn’t going to work. The game has just naturally evolved in a different, and better, direction than where I started with my design document.

I originally wanted the game to start with only 1 colonist and grow from there, but given the way professions, and the new crafting system, work, it would mean a lot of micromanagement juggling on the part of the player. While the initial part of the game should be fun and exciting, I don’t think juggling professions is what I had in mind. This means that the starting condition will need at least 2 or 3 colonists as well as basic starting supplies. This is fairly standard for this kind of game and, after evaluating the other aspects of the game, is not a place I need to be unique.

World Generation

I keep poking at the world generation code to make it a bit more configurable. I did finally add in a world generation screen so that I can test various seed values. I keep bouncing back and forth between heightmaps and cellular automata. The latest iteration of the world generation is using layered cellular automata which I’m using for ore distribution. There is now iron ore, copper ore and anthracite in the map. There is also a nice mix of caves, but I still have to add water back in.

Crafting

In an effort to better unify the crafting system I re-wrote the whole thing. After setting up crafting for the cook station I realized that cooking and smelting worked differently. Ideally I wanted a better way to handle crafting in general that was more consistent across all stations.

The new system is more simple and straight forward, but allows for more management. Each craft station has recipes that can be queued up for crafting. Once a recipe is queued for crafting the appropriate colonist, based on profession, will gather the materials and craft the item at the station. The colonist will repeat this for however many is in the crafting queue for that station.

This means all craft stations work the same, but have different recipes. It also lead to a new profession. I’m also planning for additional recipes, for existing stations, to get unlocked via research.