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Shatterloop

Late-Game Notes

Posted July 27, 2021 by Xhin

Should hold all of those (and get them out of the way) until I'm ready to use them.

Page 1

  • Buffs Reference
  • Automation
  • Old Farming Automation Notes
  • Lore System
  • Genetics
  • Help Update
  • Old Potions Checklist

    Page 2

  • Terrain-based animal naming
  • Post Storage Generalization
  • Misc Late Game UX
  • Random Analyzer Note
  • Difficulty Increase Idea
  • Spriting
  • Combat Misc

    Page 3

  • Automation Engine Simpgrade

    Last Update: 8/16/2022

  • There are 16 Replies


    Buffs Reference

    It took a while, but I compiled a huge list of positive effects and debuffs. A lot of the work involved combing over six very different games and generalizing. There are also a lot of other interesting ideas which will make their way into other systems instead.

    Positive effects

    Given the large number, these will be split into food buffs and potion effects. Getting most of these implemented will require combat, but aside from some effects I'll work on later, this list is what I need to complete both Potions and Food. There will probably be some changes to the potion system as well so it's possible to actually find matching ingredients.

    Potion/Food effects don't stack, however their values and time limits can differ quite a lot depending on the materials used and your skill.

  • Restore Health -- Should be obvious.

  • Restore Mana -- Same.

  • Drunjk -- causes various stat tradeoffs depending on what you drink -- things like increased attack but decreased defense. Yes, the spelling is intentional.

  • Arrowsaving -- Helps you conserve ammunition for bows.

  • Bowologist/Magologist/Armologist -- increases ranged, magic, or melee damage respectively.

  • War/Peace -- Increases or decreases the enemy spawn rate in some capacity.

  • Perception -- Makes traps visible, assuming I implement that system (might scrap it)

  • Reflect -- A chance of bouncing magic attacks back at the caster.

  • Thorns -- Enemies take some amount of damage when they attack you in a non-magical way.

  • Projection -- Changes the behavior of enemies seeking or fleeing from you -- they'll seek or flee a different space rather than the one you're on.

  • Boost Stat -- Boosts some stat. Not sure what the stat system looks like yet.

  • Boost Health/Mana -- Increases your maximum health or mana.

  • Boost Health/Mana Regen -- Increases your health or mana regeneration rates.

  • Night Vision -- Improves torches somewhat -- you can see further or better.

  • Blindsight -- Allows for detection of stuff outside your vision radius in caves, assuming the torch doesn't already do that.

  • Fireproof/? -- Makes you resist various environmental hazards. Fireproof refers to lava, the others will depend on what those hazards actually are (mana crack specific)

  • Precision Strike -- Increases your critical strike chance.

  • Lifelink/Manalink -- Doing damage will heal you or restore some mana. Outside of magic, this will be fairly weak, but every bit helps.

  • Teleport -- teleports you to a random location at its distance. Useful for fleeing from hard enemies or bypassing cave clusterfucks.

  • Camoflauge -- Enemies can miss you sometimes. Basically an evasion boost.

  • Charge Strike -- Your next melee or ranged attack will have a multiplier attached to it.

  • Cure X -- Cures various debuffs. Outside of common debuffs, these potions will cure multiple things at once.

  • Health Soak / Mana Soak -- Absorbs some damage done to you as health or mana.

  • Lucky -- You find better loot in dungeon or house furniture.

  • Haggling -- Shop prices for buying and selling are better. Services are the same.

  • Unladen -- Increases your item carrying capacity.

  • Boost X Skill -- Boosts a certain skill some amount. Not sure what the skills are yet.

  • Melee Shield / Magic Shield / Ranged Shield -- helps you resist these types of attacks.

  • Clairvoyance -- A somewhat complicated effect that lets you see what items are in a dungeon, what items are in a piece of locked furniture, etc. Might split this off or randomize the effect or something. Might just scrap it.

  • Debuff X Shield -- Decreases your chances of getting various debuffs.

  • Telepathy -- Lets you see some information about an enemy that you might not know. Might scrap this.

  • Volatile -- You can shed some life to do some damage. This kind of attack doesn't use a turn.

  • Peripheral Vision -- Allows you to see invisible enemies. They're rare, fortunately.

  • Trap Shield -- Reduces the damage you take from Traps, assuming I implement those.

  • Remote Viewing -- lets you see adjacent screens. Helpful for finding resources or pathways. You can't see enemies.

  • Boost All -- Boosts all stats some small amount. This is a food-exclusive effect.

  • Stimulate -- Boosts battle speed to some extent -- gives you free actions or similar. Might scrap for balance reasons.

  • Uncurse -- A rare effect that will uncurse something in your inventory that's both equipped and cursed. Normally you need services, wands, or magic, which can get expensive.

    Debuffs

    These effects are applied from hunger (depending on what you ate last), traps, harder enemy attacks, or equipping cursed equipment. They might happen due to weather conditions as well. If I implement them, unknown potions can cause either potion effects or debuffs.

  • Sap Health / Sap Mana -- basically works like poison. Every turn you lose some amount of health or mana until the effect wears off.

  • Confusion -- You can't move correctly. You'll move in the wrong direction, will idle instead of moving, or will move on your own.

  • (name unsure) -- These effects prevent health or mana regeneration.

  • Dim vision -- everything gets rendered dimmer like the outer edge of torchlight looks like. Might scrap this.

  • Clumsy, Myopic, Mundane -- keeps you from dealing combat, ranged, or magic attacks respectively.

  • Nausea -- You can't use potions or food. If this is a food debuff, it'll be a temporary effect so you can actually fix it. Still annoying though. Might make more sense to just not have this as a food debuff.

  • Slowed -- Your movement speed slows down. Also prevents any movement speed buffs, including stamina stuff and mounts.

  • Poor Reflexes -- Slows your battle speed. Essentially this means enemies get more turns before you get one.

  • Withered Armor -- Halves armor defense.

  • Paralyze -- locks you in place until the effect ends. Good way to die. This effect can't be given by cursed equipment or anything else with no timer.

  • Petrify -- Starts as a progressively worsening slowed/poor reflexes that eventually progresses into a Paralyze. Does at least wear off. Might scrap it, but I like the concept.

  • Pain -- Take damage when moving or dealing ranged/melee attacks. Things like drinking potions or using magic are safe.

  • Incurable -- Prevents healing health from all sources -- potions, regeneration, buffs, magic, etc. Nasty effect if it's a cursed piece of equipment. Dying still refills your health to maximum, however.

  • (unnamed) -- These cause quantum effects outside of the quantum dimension. Will probably be associated with quantum enemies or items.

  • (unnamed) -- Makes it harder to collect resources -- they simply won't get collected some of the time.

  • Illiterate -- Affects your Journal and/or Map. This is probably too mean and will probably be heavily reduced or scrapped.

  • Incompetence -- Any time you pick a target for whatever reason there's a chance you'll pick the wrong one. Affects magic and attacks and similar systems. Does not affect building or shop services.

  • Narcolepsy -- A longer-lasting effect that occasionally makes you paralyzed for a short period of time. Mostly just annoying.

  • Hallucination -- Various effects like changing colors subtly (already implemented as a quantum effect) or materials/enemies showing up as the wrong thing.

  • Butterfingers -- An occasional chance of dropping something equipped in one of your hands and also wasting a turn in the process.

  • Doomed -- Causes death after some number of turns. There are a few ways out of it, but you're probably pretty screwed regardless. Like Paralyze, this can't be a permanent effect.

  • Recoil -- Magic and ranged attacks will hit you with some percentage of their damage. Melee is safe.

  • Withered Melee / Withered Ranged / Withered Magic -- reduces the damage that those types of attacks do.

  • (unnamed) -- Makes enemies invisible. The peripheral vision effect will override this but won't cure it.

  • Withered Stat X -- reduces a certain stat.

  • Withered Health / Mana -- reduces your maximum health or mana.

  • Withered Health / Mana Regen -- reduces your health or mana regeneration.

  • Blind -- basically the opposite of dark vision -- this will reduce your vision relative to torches. Worse versions of this will reduce your vision outside of caves.

  • Inept Strike -- reduces your critical strike chance. If it goes negative, your critical strikes will instead do *less* damage.

  • Quantum Decoherence -- Randomly teleports you every so often. Similar to teleport, but outside of your control.

  • Burdened -- Reduces carrying capacity.

  • Withered Skill X -- reduces a certain skil.

  • (unnamed) -- Makes you weaker to melee, ranged or magic attacks.

  • Spontaneous Combustion -- Like volatility but outside of your control.

  • (unnamed) -- Prevents you from using stamina-based effects.

  • July 27, 2021
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Shatterloop Automation

    This is definitely brainstorming instead of detailed systems notes. Nonetheless I've worked out a lot of the core concepts.

    Basic Stuff

  • Automation is a set of systems that allows you to passively create items or wealth for yourself. It therefore ties into those core systems and gives you yet another way of accruing them.

  • The automation system involves a lot of exploration, experimentation and strategy, all of which are core gameplay mechanics.

    Components

    The Automation system has three components to it:

  • Inputs -- These are items that enter your base storage somehow, or items that are already there.

  • Manipulation -- This is a set of actions that ultimately turn items into some other kind of item. This is the main core of the automation system.

  • Outputs -- This is what ultimately happens to the items you've created.

    I'll cover each component individually.

    Inputs

  • Your base storage. This is pretty basic -- any automation that targets this is probably going to pick up on you storing items manually or via mount animals.

  • Shops -- You can buy things from shops remotely, provided your base is "linked" to them. This takes some extra steps somewhere to handle cross-dimensional shops (due mainly to technical constraints on my part). The money used here is money that's stored in your base. Uses a "Delivery Node" fixture.

  • Farming -- Products that come from the farming system (semi-automatically or automatically) can enter into general automation.

    Manipulation

  • You can link an automation chain up to any fixtures you already have in your base -- such as forges or crafting stations.

  • You should be able to do more complicated things like create potions or fracture magical ingredients into starshards.

  • There are also some new ones designed explicitly for this system that would otherwise be in your personal menus like extractors and crafters that do what you'd expect.

  • Items can also be fed back into base systems that require them, such as fuel refineries or terrariums. Assuming this isn't done automatically already.

    Outputs

  • Items can just be stored in your base. This is useful if you want to generate a lot of items for armor or backpacks or whatever.

  • Items can be atomized -- this will either get stored internally (or maybe in some specialized atomizer fixture that has useful bonuses I'm thinking about adding) or will go directly to your aether.

  • Items can be sold through similar means as them being bought. The money then enters your base. This allows you to generate wealth passively. If you skip the manipulation step you can even theoretically trade passively.

    Timing

  • I'm transitioning Shatterloop into a real-time system rather than a turn-based one since that makes a lot of the time elements work better. Turn-based stuff is still in play for non-engaged combat, buffs and anything explicitly tactical.

  • Given this, automation happens in real time provided you're actually playing -- you're not going to quit playing and then have millions of dollars when you play again.

    Miscellaneous notes

  • Automation chains will allow you to set conditions on them working so you don't accidentally pull everything out of your base or interfere with other automation chains. I'm not fully sure how this works yet.

  • I believe the Automation Station will be the fixture that actually lets you create automation chains. It makes more sense to just handle everything from them rather than forcing you to go around and link them to fixtures you have. Fixtures also shouldn't have limits as to how much automation can target them -- I believe both of these ideas would make the system too complicated, and I mostly want to focus on the management and experimentation aspects rather than the logistics.

  • The Terminal fixture (previously known as a Desk) will allow you to monitor the status of automation chains and also other time-based systems (like agriculture or mining). You're therefore able to manage and track things remotely. I'm not fully sure what this system looks like yet.

  • July 27, 2021
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Important Fix

  • Automation is going to be a fully separate thing that ties into all the completed systems and will probably use pylons to carry "signals" -- heavily simplified and uses an existing system, which is always a good thing.

    Old Farming Automation Notes

    Automation

    Automation in this system will do two useful things for you:

  • Automatically pull in items from your base to use as "Fuel" (and related terms).

  • Automatically push harvests to your base inventory.

    This allows you to farm without manually going to collect harvests every time. Automating a farm can be quite expensive, but is definitely worthwhile.

    Automation is accessed through the Infrastructure menu, which is added to the Farming menu once you unlock that package.

    All of this will probably change when I build it out or afterwards.

    Infrastructure Menu

    This menu contains three buttons:

  • Place Transceiver -- Lets you place a Transceiver in the world. Transceivers cost 200 aether and are the main connection to your base. They can only be placed in a dimension if you've built a base outpost there, since they work on overland portal technology.

  • Place Conduit -- Lets you place a Conduit in the world. Conduits cost a lot less than Transceivers and are less restrictive, so they're a good way of linking together large collections of farming fixtures.

  • Link -- Lets you link farming fixtures with conduits, conduits with other conduits, or farming fixtures/conduits with Transceivers. More on the linking process in the next section.

    Linking

    When you first click the button, you'll be able to pick a fixture on screen. You can then pick another fixture on screen to link it to.

  • The only requirement that conduits have is that both the conduit and the thing linking to it have to be on screen.

  • Meanwhile, to link anything with a transceiver, it has to both be on screen and have a direct "line of sight" to it where every tile along the line is the same type, whether that's solid, water or floor.

    The goal of linking is to link a farming fixture to a transceiver, either directly or through a conduit. When you have a valid chain, the farming fixture will automatically pull fuel and push product to your base.

    Interacting with Conduits

  • You can turn them on or off -- this blocks automation to anything along that pipeline. Deactivated conduits appear differently.

    Interacting with Transceivers

  • Transceivers will let you rename them.

  • Once the transceiver has been named, if you have a Farming Station in this dimension, you can use the transceiver to warp directly to it.

  • You can turn a transceiver off much like a conduit and block all automation to everything on the circuit.

    Farming Station Fixture

    This fixture has several uses:

  • You can name Transceivers by interacting with them. The Farming Station will let you warp to transceivers (and back again) so you can adjust your farm, manually turn off fixtures, or whatever.

  • The farming station will aggregate all of your farming data somehow, so you can see what your overall inputs and outputs are. This might be grouped by transceiver chain or by resource type.

  • July 27, 2021
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    And on and on we go..

    Lore System Notes

    I've thought about this a lot. I want a system that's flexible for the player but can still randomly introduce new topics. I think I have what I want now:

    Articles

    Shatterloop's Lore is organized into a variety of public-facing articles. Within each of those articles are hyperlinked words or phrases that can lead to other public articles, or more likely they lead to hidden articles. Hidden articles can also lead to additional hidden articles.

    Both public-facing articles and hidden articles are locked away via Tomes and Books, which I'll describe next.

    While you'll have to explore these information webs yourself, you will at least get some kind of counter that tells you how much you have left to unlock in an article (and its subarticles) in the main Lore menu. This will help you remember what you haven't learned yet.

    Tomes and Books

    Shatterloop has two lore-related items:

  • Tomes -- These open up new Articles. Tomes will open a specific article, like "Tome of Chimera" would open up the Chimera article, however you can also have a "General Tome" which when used will open up a random article -- it will only target articles that aren't gained through named Tomes unless no other articles are left.

  • Books -- These open up hidden articles. Each book will open up exactly one hyperlinked word of your choosing, so you get to explore the lore you're interested in deeper.

  • Named Tomes are found in specific contexts. They do therefore add some extra incentive to exploration, interaction, and experimentation.

  • Books are more common than Tomes and can be found as quest completion items, part of completing puzzles a second time (like the entropic plane), as loot, etc. They can't be farmed/crafted, you have to earn them by completing challenges essentially.

  • Three Books can be crafted into a General Tome. Since Books are a renewable resource this means that you can eventually unlock all the lore in the game without exploring everything, though it would take a while.

  • August 4, 2021
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Genetics Notes

    Pulled off the old post, and updated to match the new farming system.

    Basic Stuff

  • The farming lab has a "Genetics" package.

  • This has a variety of effects but also unlocks the Genetics Station and the Radiation Station.

    Radiation Station

  • This produces a base stat known as Radiation from a variety of underused materials such as dungeon salts, elemental sinkcores, etc.

  • Since it uses homogeneous materials, the amount you get should be pretty fixed for balance reasons.

    Genetics Station

    This fixture allows you to create new types of crop, animal or fish. Each species has various starting stats associated with them -- their Breed Time, Seeds Yield, Materials Yield, as well as some more interesting ones like Potion Ingredient Extraction Chance, etc. Depending on the species' Genetics, you can get Crops that function differently or yield better products. I'll cover everything this actually affects in the Genetics section of this post.

    You have two ways of altering a species' genetics:

  • Mutate a seed's genetics randomly, forming a new subspecies.

  • Breed two seeds of the same species together, forming a Hybrid of the two.

    This system is essentially the same for Fish or Animals as well, except you're doing it with Fish Eggs or Animal Eggs respectively. For the sake of simplicity, this part of the post is going to assume we're talking about Crops/Seeds.

    Mutation

    To mutate a seed (or any kind of embryo), access the Mutation menu of the Genetics Station. For the cost of Radiation (the amount needed depends on its Genetic Stability stat), you can then Mutate its genetics randomly. You can do this to the same seed as many times as you want, but there's a good chance of getting less than favorable outcomes and wasting radiation in the process, so it makes more sense to mutate Seeds incrementally, then plant them and mutate a big batch of seeds and select the strains you like the best from that.

    Mutation Catalysts

    Radiation has an equal chance of upgrading or downgrading any particular stat equally. If you're looking for a faster way of getting the Seeds you want, it makes more sense to create Catalysts.

    The genetics station unlock adds catalyst station functions for the properties seen here and then also imports the new catalyts{} widget.

    In this system they each have a procedurally generated probability matrix for all the different mutational stats and their directions, giving you something better to work with. You can attach catalysts to a Mutation Project easily and see what the combined effect of them does (assuming you know it).

    Creating Hybrids

    Through a separate menu, you can combine together two Seeds of the same subspecies into one seed of a new subspecies that combines their genetics together. This also requires radiation (depending on Genetic Stability again). You can also use the Catalysts seen in the system above which will make certain stats of the first seed more dominant or recessive, which will allow you to combine together seeds in more favorable ways than just averaging them.

    Agriculture IV: Genetics

    This section will document the genetics of Seeds (Crops), Fish Eggs and Animal Eggs that you can control for. This is where the Breeding system gets interesting, and allows you to do some really advanced stuff near the end of the game.

    Global Genetics

    These apply to all types of Embryos.

  • Potion Ingredients Chance -- increase the base likelihood of getting a potion ingredient from the material.

  • Magical Ingredients Chance -- increases the base likelihood of getting a magical ingredient (catalyst) from the material when successfully extracting it as a potion ingredient.

  • Breed Time -- Increases or decreases the amount of turns it takes until you can harvest the Crop. In the case of Aquariums or Terrariums, this determines how often their breeding cycle is.

  • Genetic Stability -- Determines how much Fertilizer the seed/egg needs when Mutating it or turning two of them into a Hybrid.

    Crops-specific

  • Yield -- Determines how many raw products you get from each Crop when harvesting. This stat is in units of a hundred as partial probabilities, so if you have, say, 200 you get two raw products every time whereas if you have a value of 170 you get 1 raw product 30% of the time and 2 seeds 70% of the time. This is an internal value though -- for UX purposes it might look like (1 + 70%) or something.

  • Reproduction -- determines how many seeds you get from harvest. Same system as the above.

    Animal/fish-specific

  • Breed Chance -- determines how likely you are to get eggs or fish eggs during a breeding cycle.

    Extractables

    Normally, each raw material only has a certain amount of products you can extract from it -- fiber can always be extracted from grasses, but beans aren't always automatically extractable. You can get around this with shop services, but products are grouped into the type of raw material you get it from (you can't get branches from grasses, for example). Additionally, there are certain materials you can't get from raw materials period.

    The breeding system will however let you get around this by altering the genetics that makes those possible. You can get a crop type to make something in its section (like getting a grass to produce beans) fairly easily, but getting stuff outside of its section takes a bit more work.

    Below, I'll list each agriculture type in the game, what normally can be extracted from it, and what can be extracted from it if mutated enough.

    Type Always have Can have Can get with breeding
    Grasses Fiber Beans or Berries (not both), Flowers Quartz
    Shrubs Branches Nuts, Leaves Fat, Feathers
    Trees Wood Sap, Bark, Tubers Metal Ores
    Animals Hide, Fat Meat, Bones, Wool, Feathers Rocks, Scales
    Fish Meat, Scales Fat, Bones Wool, Precious Metal Ores


    Alternately, allow for melange materials (any itemgen whatsoever with specified exceptions).

    Alchemy Modifications

    This set of properties will alter the procedural generation of the actual extractables (including potion ingredients and magical ingredients). So for example you could breed a Grass whose Beans have higher satiety than normal. I haven't fully worked out the ramifications of this (or the amount of structural work it needs), but it's been in my notes from the beginning. It might make sense to only let you mutate one section out of the three above at a time so you can keep up with alterations better. This is something I'll work on more when I get there. Structurally speaking, it's making more sense to list out properties of each item type somewhere in a fixed, centralized way (rather than letting systems generate them on the fly), so I can work with them better.

  • August 8, 2021
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Help Update

  • Fishing Journal -- pulled this out of the fishing project; makes more sense to do all the help/UX stuff at once.

  • Terco help (ties into the above).

  • Materials indexing/wiki'ing so you know where to actually find the materials you need.

  • January 24, 2022
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Old Potions Checklist

  • Lootable ingredients should really be reflective of the ones in the world 90% of the time, but that is a much later project.

  • Maybe palettize the lootable ingredients instead -- would offer a larger selection but would still promote learning.

  • Saving successful recipes for later use. Delaying this because it's more of a polishing thing really.

  • May 12, 2022
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Terrain-based Animals naming / modifying

    Moving this here as it's too complicated to have as part of the Combat project proper. I may use it during the late-game phase and may not.


  • Nests surrounded by 5 or more water tiles will get a water movement upgrade (hydrophobic --> paddling --> swimming --> aquatic).

  • Nests surrounded by 5 or more solid tiles will get a solid movement upgrade (grounded --> burrowing --> climbing --> grappling)

  • Nests fully surrounded by water tiles will increase water movement by 2, while nests fully surrounded by solid tiles will increase that title by 2.

  • Nests fully surrounded by floor tiles will downgrade water or solid movement capabilities.

    These upgrades alter the enemy's movements but also change its name (Ex -- Flying Shortpig) and thus will give different materials from its corpse. This update should also alter the type of mount animal you get from it,

  • May 23, 2022
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Post- Storage Generalization

  • Need to have a single function for the storage event and the retrieval table if one doesn't already exist.

  • Dropped items should go on this system -- each dropspace entity should be a separate inventory entity that can have stuff put into or pulled out of.

  • Look into other kinds of object-based storage like bags of holding or literal furniture. May not be necessary in the late game, but might still be relevant.

  • June 1, 2022
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Misc Late-game UX

  • the inventory should let you Use anything in it directly -- collaborate with the Use item and pets/etc menus.

  • Allowing you to equip stuff makes sense as well if it's that instead (I don't think an item is both Use and Equip, thankfully).

  • You should have way more inventory options like filtering stuff and seeing properties by default, etc).

  • Beef up the UX/wikification of module-unlock-specific crafting so players can see they need to get into the Combat Lab, build a base for that, etc. Will need to explore this as part of the overall UX update, which is a very late-stage thing.

  • Mob debugging should be an in-game feature that lets you create them / inspect them (without the property list) and maybe some lite movement too, so you can test weapons and their effects and train yourself in combat without actually getting into dangerous encounters.

  • June 12, 2022
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Random Analyzer Note

    I have no idea where the rest of my Analyzer notes are -- probably in the deprecated post. But anyway:

  • The analyzer could legitimately look at all inputs into the recipes{} object and determine what materials are going to do there. This is an easy fix, but doesn't fix every part of what the Analyzer does.

  • June 25, 2022
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Difficulty increase ideas

    These are ideas for the roguelike portion of the game, via deprecated notes:

  • Walking from solid to solid or water to water makes you eventually Cold which makes your hunger deplete faster. Same deal with lava areas and being Hot (drains water). Can be fixed through consumable "clothing" items -- prevent that a certain amount of times before being used up.

  • Certain biomes will increase heat or cold as well, with heat being more likely. None of this happens in the starting area.

  • Fire elemental dimensions are *all* hot. Same deal with ice dimensions and cold.

  • Swimming in lava will make you hot way faster, traveling the Void sea will make you cold way faster.

  • All of these effects (as well as normal hunger and thirst) are paused during engagements -- you've got enough to worry about.

    This gives Drinks more variety -- spirits will prevent cold, while teas will prevent heat.

    Poisonous foods can also impact Heat, Cold, and Malaise effects (impacts both).

    Heat and cold can be removed by walking in areas that don't trigger them, going down a point each turn. They both max out somewhere so you don't go too far. Resting and sleeping also help.

    You should be able to distill your own spirits and brew your own teas eventually.

    With this change I'm adding Thirst satiety and changing it so that only food combinations can potentially cause hunger or thirst satiety. Keeps that mechanic in advanced cooking where it belongs.

    In the Consumables tab, clothing and permanent armor pieces are probably combined into an "armor" tab.

    Overall these changes should improve the immersion of the game a bit without turning it into another stupid annoying survival game. The changes should also give materials more use, and add more depth to Food without making it stupidly complicated (it actually simplifies it a bit with the effects on satiety).

  • June 29, 2022
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Spriting

    One wild idea for sprites that are more visually descriptive is to make a custom font, the same way material icons work. This would then allow it to be used in a variety of formats and more importantly a variety of colors.

    Font awesome looks doable for a heck of a lot of stuff -- could expand it or maybe shop around for other relevant free icon sets. Nevermind @ FA, costs money to have lots of pageviews.

    I also want to start shopping newgrounds for music -- looking for ambient, vaguely weird stuff.

    Maaaaybe sound effects -- need kind of a blend of sci-fi and fantasy here.

    July 12, 2022
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Combat Misc

  • You should be able to hotkey different weapons -- will be highly useful in the fast-paced part of the game, but the UX is going to take a bunch of work to pull off, particularly the properties lists. Re-equipping should also impact Flow or other beneficial states detrimentally.

  • August 4, 2022
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Automation Engine Simpgrade

    This update does two things:

  • Makes fixtures more of a consumable thing than a place-once thing.

  • Heavily simplifies the existing automation structure so bases aren't confusing messes, and also chaining automation makes way more sense.

    Basic Stuff

  • The Automation Station operates on fixtures you have in your inventory and turns them into a compact Factory.

  • Basically the way it works is you pick somw kind of input and then various functions in base fixtures in your inventory and the Automation Station will chain them together into a compact input/output format.

  • This Factory can then be placed.

  • Factories cost base fuel per use, and one of the higher-tiers most likely, however the fuel refinery is itself automatable so this isn't hard to get around, particularly when coupled with going aleph on base fuel if you can attain it.

  • Factories can be used manually, or with a target item depending on what exactly their input is. They can also be set to run on a timer -- this is never instant but its speed is maybe upgradeable somehow.

  • Factories can contain Factories, including Factories formed from other Factories.

  • Factories can be broken back down into their components. The factory recipe will however save so you can reuse it later (unless you delete it). This will also work with any Factory inside it.

  • Factories allow you to set their sym to whatever you want without requiring anything -- probably the only system in the game that'll do that. This helps with base organization so it's worth making it free.

  • Factory speed is improved with Pylons -- they do however lock the pylons in place if you use them in this way, to prevent cheating.

  • Honestly maybe *all* speeds are improved with pylons rather than base fuel. Base fuel is instead used exclusively as a currency for fixture actions. This would make pylon placement extra important for now like 4 separate reasons, which is a good thing.

  • August 11, 2022
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Post Caves v2

  • There should potentially be passageways to other caves. The best way to do this is to scan out in lines horizontally and vertically with a defined min and max, and if you hit a cave within whatever the range is, there'll be a link. Will be tricky with multiple floors but it's still technically possible. Scrappable

  • August 29, 2022
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Reply to: Late-Game Notes

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