I'm really proud of how the new suite is turning out, so here's a screenshot. This is probably the look I'm going to go for in 0.1 (though I might end up adding ceilings). Most rooms have more wall-like walls, but I wanted this to pop like the office of an maniacal overlord should.
I also finished the bulk of the dialog engine port from St...
2021-08-28 18:10:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Something that always bothered me about the original Stationmaster setup was the claustrophobic corridors. They didn't really fit the image of your station as a place of obscene opulence, furniture had to be pretty small to fit the vertical space constraints, and lighting was always pretty wonky (Unity's lighting engine wasn't really happy with ...
2021-08-20 14:05:14 +0000 UTC View Post
The character engine from Exalted is now integrated into Stationmaster 2 (though I'm still going to do a couple tweaks to improve lighting and the hair shading), and the you can now travel between the main station view and this panel. I'm now working through designing the new inspection UI (It's not where I want it yet, but this seemed like enou...
2021-08-14 21:02:59 +0000 UTC View Post
I can finally post an image of the game!
I'm trying this new thing where I actually design the UI instead of evolving it from a placeholder over a period of years. I can't even list all of the improvements that I've already made, but some of the highlights I've already implemented are numeric/text filters on the slave list, collapsing pane...
2021-08-06 15:00:07 +0000 UTC View PostAside from performance and animations, the most common thing people asked for in Stationmaster was individual interaction with your people. In Stationmaster 2, you'll be able to single out individuals for personal attention instead of normal assignments, and you'll have opportunities to talk to them at intervals. If you complete their training, ...
2021-07-30 14:46:01 +0000 UTC View PostI've been re-architecting almost everything about how this game is put together, and it presented an interesting opportunity.
I'm thinking of replacing the "conditions" panel of the rules assistant with a window where you can enter a query like "Weight > 30 and age < 35 and age > 25."
I figured I'd ask beca...
I've learned a lot since I built Stationmaster, and one of the biggest benefits of starting from scratch is the ability to implement those lessons from the get go.
This screenshot shows a stress-test with 10,000 AI's and 20,000 furniture items running at 120 FPS. While there will be other things going on in the final game ...
2021-07-22 12:10:11 +0000 UTC View PostI don't think I need to wait very long. The response to the poll was pretty overwhelming.
I have quite a bit more thinking to do, but I've been sketching out some design, and come up with the basic path I want to follow. This is the time to make major changes, so if you have any feedback on core stuff you think could be improved on, this w...
2021-07-19 19:37:37 +0000 UTC View PostFactions
More AI and diplomacy around the other factions in the game, as well as distinct leaders and "dates."
Clothing
So other people don't have to be naked all the time. Will include strip/clothe support in events.
Skills
Adds structures that will improve your su...
2021-07-18 17:04:36 +0000 UTC View PostIn the last month, I took a bit of a break from the normal feature cycle to experiment with some more cutting-edge technologies. My results are listed at the end, but there's something more important to discuss here.
I've also used the time to think, and decided to add a more radical option to the next poll. Exalted has been out for ...
2021-07-18 17:00:25 +0000 UTC View PostI've been primarily focused on basic research in the last month or so (most interestingly VR setup and and co-writing events with GPT-3). While I've made progress, I don't quite have anything from there ready for prime-time yet. I'm trying to avoid one of the mistakes I made with Stationmaster, which was pushing experimental stuff into the build...
2021-07-10 12:30:12 +0000 UTC View PostIt's all set! Version 0.4.0 adds five new buildings and a new resource type (food), as well as pathfinding and numerous little improvements.
I've finished the art for the four new buildings. From left to right:
The Essence Pool will be where your Exalted eat. Without Essence to drink, they will become catatonic.
The Food Trough satisfies more or less the same purpose, but for captives.
The Training Field is where your soldiers go to prepare for deployment, as well a...
2021-05-15 21:27:15 +0000 UTC View PostThose of you who have been around since the beginning may remember that I had always planned to give a percentage of the revenue from Stationmaster to charity.
It was a petty response to a ban wave, but a promise is a promise. I'm not going to say the specific organization for anonymity reasons (it's local to me), but I've just ...
2021-05-09 10:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostI'm pretty excited about this because I've been writing events for two weeks, and this means the code is finally going to get some love.
New Mechanics:
I upgraded my build system to let me port bugfixes and quality of life features from the latest build into older versions. This version has all of the bugfixes of 0.3, but not the new world events (Soldiers will get those in two weeks).
This is an experiment, so let me know if this is worth maintaining or if you'd rather just wait th...
2021-05-02 17:24:10 +0000 UTC View PostThis version adds random events to the world map, allowing you to have more personal interactions with the inhabitants of the plane you're conquering. Some of them have interesting toys, others are praying for help, and still others are just helpless.
I've also upgraded my build system quite a bit. I'll now be offering MacOS and Linux native ...
I'm getting pretty close to done with the events update, which means it's finally time to open up voting! Thanks everyone for your patience while I got the core of this game nailed down.
Factions
More AI and diplomacy around the other factions in the game, as well as distinct leaders and "dates."
Living...
2021-04-26 02:03:44 +0000 UTC View PostIt's time for a new update! This one adds a bunch of new writing, updates to training, and, most importantly, replaced animations for pretty much everything!
Ani...
2021-04-03 21:54:09 +0000 UTC View Post
After a bunch of experimentation, I think I'm going to use custom 2D backgrounds for events. While part one will focus on residents of your cathedral, many of them involve entering their various mindscapes to interact with their personalities more directly, and this method means that they can be a bit more diverse than if I had gone with full 3D...
2021-03-26 15:55:07 +0000 UTC View Post0.2 is coming along, and will probably be separated into a couple parts. The first will contain primarily new character events and a redesign of personalities. I'm also working with an artist to redo my placeholder animations, and the first of those should show up in 0.2 as well.
Part of the reason this is taking some time is that I'm rede...
2021-02-25 05:05:02 +0000 UTC View PostYou all missed some pretty harrowing alphas, but things have calmed down a bit now.
Windows
The last build broke spectacularly when you started a new game through the main menu instead of the Unity editor, so I went ahead and fixed that. Hopefully this will be the last frantic hotfix.
Download:
... 2021-02-09 01:35:40 +0000 UTC View PostI'm pushing this out because I got reports that saves weren't working. In addition to the bug fixes (most importantly saves, but also quite a few around sounds), this patch adds the framework for slave events (but not many are written yet, so they're a bit repetitive).
Download:
Edit: It has come to my attention that something went h...
2021-02-06 01:45:45 +0000 UTC View PostHey all!
Now that 0.1 is out (and break time's over), it's time for me to get started on 0.2. I ended up pushing events out of 0.1 to fix some more urgent issues, but they're coming in 0.2. Once that's set up, I'll open up voting for new features.
Draft Design:
I envision three types of events in all:
It's ALIIIVE!
Thanks everyone for your patience during the pivot. My next priority is getting events and faction leaders into the game, but once that's done, democracy will resume as well.
I was all set to release tomorrow, but then I ran into this little bug that causes the top halves of all characters to just T-pose and stare at you, while the bottom halves animate normally.
It's the second-to-last thing that I'm planning on fixing before release, but it looks like it's deep in the animation engine, and it's probably going...
2021-01-23 21:47:17 +0000 UTC View Post
It's really close. Gameplay works, menus are wired up, and the placeholders are purged.
Animations are almost ready to go into the game, pending some work with the animation package's developers (I decided to use some high-tech beta software, which is incredible, but occasionally has workflow-breaking bugs). Once those are in, it's basical...
2021-01-10 01:48:54 +0000 UTC View Post
It's probably time for another status update. I'm down to about 60 tasks, and most of them are smallish, so 0.1 is probably about a month away (as always, timelines can vary substantially).
I'm going with a "model village" approach for the construction UI. When you place structures on that table, they appear in full scale around you. That ...
2020-12-21 04:08:17 +0000 UTC View Post