Hey, you! It's been a while! What have I been up to, eh?
In short, a lot of time in Blender. There has been a pretty hefty list of things-to-model for the game. Most complex of these have been the machines you can place down in your factory.
But words are easy and talk is cheap, so let's dive right in with an absolute bumper update. Grab some snacks!
A veritable smörgåsbord of tinkertoys!
Let's run through them quickly, shall we?
Running down the left-hand side of the screen shot are the various mergers and splitter variants.
I didn't get too far into developing the game before I realised that having a splitter or merger force the user into one orientation (either left or right) was a terrible idea, and I made sure that both devices have a left and right variant. That should make belt organisation much easier!
Now let's get into the actual machines.
The extractor is where it all starts. Feeding raw minerals in from the surface of the asteroid through the input ports. Send them somewhere!
Mashes up your ores until they're unrecognisable. An essential first step for most ores before they can be processed further.
Science is the currency of the cosmos. Items can be funnelled into this machine to be analyzed, and science data accumulated. Your data can be processed into actual science points, but you'll only get data as good as the quality of the items you're throwing in here!
A large number-crunching supercomputer with the world's largest heatsink designed for one purpose - processing all that science data!
Everyone accumulates a bunch of junk from time to time. Stop your belts from backing up and dump your excess into a recycler. Your waste will be shot into the sun at the earliest convenience!
Valuable items need to be shipped back to Earth, but you can't just throw a bunch of rocks into a rocket. Get them packaged up neatly in the packager before you send them off for export!
The exporter provides you with the means to ship your deliveries back to Earth. Fill the pod with your items and it'll get launched via an electromagnetic delivery system. Hopefully someone will catch it at the other end!
Bombards items with high-energy radiation, known to provoke strange changes in their material properties. With any luck, they'll be much less irradiated by the time they get back home.
Provides special environmental conditions to change items into different forms. Not the fastest machine, don't let everything get backed up!
Somebody once decided to spin things really fast in the name of science. The centrifuge gives you the opportunity to do the same for your factory! Toss some items in, spin 'em fast, watch what comes out.
Sometimes you just can't get the right items without a little bit of help from other parts of the periodic table. Subject items to a dip in the chemical tank to get some interesting new flavours out of the other side. Do not drink.
It looks like a rejected theme-park ride, and the safety of its contents are equally of dubious origin. However, the beneficial item-altering effects of this tumbling enigma cannot be argued.
Supercolliding superconductors were once all the rage. Until somebody minutarised one and now everybody has one. You're not cool unless you have one. At least that's what all the trendy kids are telling me. What is undeniable, however, is that items tend to come out of this machine more potent than ever.
Thanks to the large chunk of ice at the core of the asteroid, you're able to feed in water to your factory. Lay down some pipes and connect up this machine to use the power of good old H20 to help change and alter your items for new purposes. This machine is not a shower.
Make things hot. Really hot. Then discover if you've reduced it to little more than a pile of ash, or something surprising and delightful.
It's probably going to be ash, though.
Machine don't run on wishes and enthusiasm. They need good old-fashioned electricity. Yes, it's still cool - even in 2024. These machines will provide factory-wide power. Power lines are so 1884.
Thankfully your factory is remotely managed, so nobody will have the urge to 'lick the battery', as it were. Especially given that this will provide a substantial power boost over the smaller generators. Give yourself some juice!
So there you go - a good look over what I've been up to recently! I am working on a number of UI improvements and updates, so hopefully I'll be able to share those soon.
I'm now fully in the phase of turning this into a final game. There's a lot of road still yet to go, but completing final models and such is a great way to 'see' progress happening, and helps build the enthusiasm to keep chugging away with the more menial tasks.
Anyways, that's all I have for today. As always, thank you so much if you stopped by to read my rambling development missive, and doubly so for any likes or comments you throw my way. It's really lovely to be able to share all of this with everyone.
Hopefully I'll see you all in the next one, and until then I hope you have a great one! ❤️