AJC Games

Just Another Dev Blog™

[ajcgames]

Save me! (Then load me)

How are you? It's been a while! Let's dig in.

I've been hard at work refactoring a few parts of the structure handling in the game - mostly due to a need to allow the placement of structures that don't necessarily conform to a strict 1x1 or 2x2 footprint.

All of the machine currently fit into one of those two categories, and it's starting to create a kind of homogeneity in the look of the factory - especially when machines are very condensed together.

To this end I've been working on allowing non-square machine footprints to improve not only the diversity of machine designs, but also allow for more interesting layouts.

Saving progress

One of the bigger issues I had recently is a realisation that I wasn't saving the user's game properly. Up until this point, when you start a new game a file is made to track your progress. But it remains as one file and gets overwritten every time you hit 'Save game'. The issue here is that although this works in principle as a saved game, it's not really that sensible for this kind of game.

This game is made of individual scenarios, which have an associated map (level). When you hit 'save', what you're really doing is saving your progress for that specific scenario, not for the 'game', as such.

So when the user saves their game I need to change the save file structure to account for what scenario it belongs to, and the remainder of the data is effectively tied to that.

I was toying with the idea of having a game profille that you create on the main menu, and saving scenario progress against it. Seems sensible, right? But in reality this raises other spectres such as swapping out profiles, where achievements may be tied to and so on.

Instead, it's much cleaner to assume that any given save game file is effectively a snapshot of any player that is playing any given scenario, with no other data outside of that scenario taken into account. That makes it more straight forward to just treat the game as scenario-based rather than career based (which isn't something I wanted to do in any case).

I'll still have some work to tinker and change this around a bit, but hopefully I'll not run into any major problems.

Anyways, that's all from me today! Hope you're having a good one wherever you are, and as always thank you for stopping by and spending some time with me today, it's always appreciated. :)

Hope to see you in the next one! ❤️

[ajcgames]

Itemization

I'm back after many hours in Blender once again!

Today's tasks mostly involved finishing off the roster of items from my list, completing my cache of discoverable / manufacturable resources.

Balancing a low-poly aesthetic with character has been something I've been trying to achieve with most of the item models.

I'm finding myself flitting more and more between jobs - the very thing I was trying to avoid since I dislike task switching too often. For today, as an outlier, it has been helpful since I've been able to clean up a few lingering programming issues.

I also took some time to remake the machine selection pop-ups. The previous version felt like it took up a little too much screen real estate, and didn't really feel very connected to the object you'd actually selected.

You can see in this example above how the info panel is now displayed in-situ over the top of the selected object. I feel like this makes it feel much more connected to the object, and it retains its position as you move the camera around.

They keep their context-aware style, so will show information specific to the machine you're looking at. For basic machines you'll just see condesed readouts like the Analyzer one above.

More complex machines, such as those that do work on other items, they've also been condensed down to fit this new format...

It makes everything feel a little more neat and tidy, and reduces screen clutter dramatically. I'm hoping this will be the final iteration of this, as I quite like it how it's turned out :)

Anyway, I'll drop a video of all of this in action below so you can see how it's all progressing. Thanks as always for stopping by, I appreciate that you've taken the time to check it out.

Hopefully I'll catch you in the next one too. Hope you've had a great weekend! ❤️

[ajcgames]

All models great and small

It's been a fun day of 3D tinkering today, making a start on the final models for all of the various items you can create in your factory.

Up until now, to facilitate testing the game's various production chains, I've been using placeholder items like this with names attached to help me visualise what's-going-where.

Naturally the ultimate goal is to replace all of these with actual models. While I could build these on-the-go as I'm fleshing out other parts of the game, I prefer to dedicate blocks of time to similar tasks so that I can optimise myself into a kind of flow-state. If I'm making a 3D model and then jump back in to doing game logic, then start fussing about with audio, I tend to have a difficult time.

What the game looks like with the placeholder items trundling along the belts. Not great! But helpful in its own way :)

So with the item above (Cardite Salts), my typical process is to fire up Blender and create something that feels right for the kind of item I'm trying to make.

I try and balance the polycount with detail, but I'm honestly mostly interested in a decent silouette - something that provides a decent at-a-glance representation of something unique.

This game does feature a lot of similar-ish kinds of items. Ores, minerals, crystals and so on. So I have to try and do what I can to give these some unique character (within the bounds of my own creative limitations, of course). For now it's mostly a case of getting some decent made to replace the old placeholder cubes.

Once I've replaced the old cube-based version of the item with the new geometry, I make sure it's a good size on the belt and I can test it out in game to see how it looks when the belts are full of them.

I do some minor rotational variation when items are output onto the belt to break up the uniformity of items, which also helps to get a sense of how the item looks from all sides when in motion. If there are any glaring model issues, this is usually where I'd spot them.

So that's my process!

I have been pretty busy today making models. I've made 28 so far today, and I only have another 12 left to make. So I'm closing in on the end of this little job too.

Some bottles of Cryogen on their way to become something else!

This has been a pretty fun and relaxing task overall. I have a few more ancilliary modelling jobs to do yet besides the items, but I'll probably come back to those after doing a bit more game logic. I'm finalising my research tech tree at the moment, so I'll want to finish that before I move on to any other chunky tasks!

Anyway, that's about it for today! Thanks again if you swung by and took the time to read all these ramblings. Here's hoping I may see you again in the next one!

Much love, Ciao for now! 👋🏻

[ajcgames]

Appearances

I'm going to try and get back into the habit of more regular posting, so here's a little tidbit for today!

I finished up the final version of the belt / structure selection build pop up, now with handy categorizations for different build structures to make it less full-on.

Of course, where there's an opportunity to do a little bit of nice UI work, I'll try my best to squeeze something in!

That's all for the moment. I hope you're having a great day, and I'll hopefully see you in the next one! 👋🏻

[ajcgames]

Rogues Gallery

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.

Extractor

The extractor is where it all starts. Feeding raw minerals in from the surface of the asteroid through the input ports. Send them somewhere!

Pulverizer

Mashes up your ores until they're unrecognisable. An essential first step for most ores before they can be processed further.

Analyzer

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!

Collector

A large number-crunching supercomputer with the world's largest heatsink designed for one purpose - processing all that science data!

Recycler

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!

Packager

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!

Exporter

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!

Atomic Coupler

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.

Catalyzer

Provides special environmental conditions to change items into different forms. Not the fastest machine, don't let everything get backed up!

Centrifuge

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.

Chemical Lab

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.

Enrichment Chamber

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.

Fusion Lab

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.

Hydrator

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.

Kiln

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.

Small generator

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.

Large generator

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! ❤️

[ajcgames]

Of charts and changes

When I was a couple of weeks into this project and had a decent working prototype, I spent a while pondering where the game was headed. How many machines will it have? How many different items can the player make? Will I get sucked into the horrid black hole of scope creep?

All valid and easy questions to pose with any project, but good forward planning is great way to remove some of these concerns.

Measure twice, cut once

I made some early tactical decisions about the mechanics of the game that may seem restrictive, but actually help to narrow the scope of work in the long term.

These things might include steps such as:

Limiting machines to only accept items from belts, rather than other machines (so no butting-up of machines to other machines). This helps to remove complexities later on when I may decide to change or add slot types to machines, and don't want to have to rework all of that hand-off code.

Putting a hard-cap on machine placement size (1x1 or 2x2 only). This helps me understand layout ratios much easier, and allows me to make some assumptions about placement and input/output slot placements that simplifies the code.

Only allowing one item per belt segment. Reverting back to this was done to simplify the save-game state, input/output belt code, and actually to help de-clutter the visual noise in the factory, along with saving a few additional frames of GPU rendering.

There are numerous others, but sometimes imposing limits early on helps to avoid later problems.

Please wait, processing

One of the other big-ticket decisions was nailing down exactly what machines will be in the game, and exactly what items they produce. This is a little harder, because you have to plan both at the same time and it can get a little... messy.

Factory games are great in that they get you to think both spatially and strategically. Making layouts in a factory is fun, placing machines and laying down belts is satisfying. But so is coming up with that super-optimised layout that shrinks your setup by 25%.

I'm not sure how much of the latter this game is aiming for, but there will be factory obstacles and things you need to work your factory around, so it could provide for some interesting layouts.

I came up with a definitive 'machines' list a while back, but didn't back-fill it with the items I needed them to produce. So it took some re-working to get everything decided.

To that end, this horrendous diagram was born:

It's a chart of all of the machines that actually process items (some aren't shown that just move or change item positions). It's a kind of tech-tree, if you will, showing all the ways items get processed, and at what process 'stage' each one sits at (i.e. how many machines it has been processed by at that stage).

This diagram, although maybe a little confusing, is the precise map I need to fill out the rest of the game's content. It tells me what machines need to be made, and what items I need to create. Also, crucially, what machines do what with which items.

Try saying that a few times quickly.

This kind of forward planning helps me to stay on track, gives me concrete development objectives to work towards, and also gives me a good roadmap of how to get to the next major milestone - all game machines created, and all items made. A pretty hefty milestone, to be sure.

I'll be working the above up into my prototype project before porting it over to the main game. I want to test the flow and make sure that the complex, sometimes 8-deep processing stages work flawlessly and don't get wacky in the save game file for some reason. I think I've built a decent foundation, so I'm not especially worried about this.

We're done for now!

Anyway, that's about it for today. Sorry for the long rambling post, but it's still important (to me) to catalogue my journey on this project so that I have something to look back on to understand my thought processes, and what challenges or difficulties I had to tackle during development.

But as always I really appreciate everybody who's swung by, left a comment or a heart, and hopefully I may see you again in the next one.

Keep being awesome! Much love ❤️

[ajcgames]

Under the hood

There’s a lot going on over the next week or two as I start doing some under-the-hood changes to the game. Up until this point, I’ve been mostly focused on the vertical slice - which I managed to achieve - and am now looking ahead to the larger picture.

I’m very happy with how the game has shaped up, and aside from a few tweaks to how items are managed I’m more or less set on the game’s structure and core gameplay loop. That’s not to say that I won’t change things, but any major changes to the game flow will now be moved to a much later stage in the project.

My plan now is to finish the last optimisations I want to make to the game’s logic, cleaning up the save / load game system, remove some of the unnecessary overhead code from my early machine logic, and remove some unused and duplicated content from the very early iteration of the project.

I’ll then be drafting out what I could effectively call the game’s ’item tree’. A lot of all the game’s obtainable items, what machines process them and what they turn into. This will give me a kind of master list of objects I need to sit and model in Blender (and their resulting UI sprites), along with any additional texturing requirements and so on.

I’ve also added two new machine - the Kiln and the Atomic Coupler. Both act on items to produce new things, and I’ll show these two machine soon!

Anyway, that’s about it for today. Thanks for swinging by, and I’ll hopefully see you in the next one! ❤️

[ajcgames]

Thirsty work

A quick update this evening!

I decided to work on the first machine that makes use of the new pipes system, the Hydrator!

It's also the first machine that uses multiple inputs to produce something. In this case, transforming the otherwise mundane pulverised rocks into something much more interesting!

I'm hoping to tweak this a little more over the weekend, but I'll leave this one here for now.

I hope you all have a great weekend, and I'll see you again in the next one!

[ajcgames]

Pipes Part II

More work at lunch today on the burgeoning pipes subsystem. It's now been integrated into the game proper, with yesterday's prototype work have successfully survived a rigorous stress test! I also made sure to fully implement all three pipe-based inputs (water, oil and gas), which will be needed for different factory machines here and there.

Here's a look at how it all works. Note that access to pipes (in their varying forms) is locked behind research, so the player will need to progress a little before gaining access to it.

One interesting foible of developing the pipe system was making sure that pipes of different kinds could not interact with each other. Originally I had planned to use a generic type of pipe, with the fluids kind of 'fighting' for priority if joined together.

In the end, simplicity and ease of implementation dictated that it was better to just simply have three different flavours of pipes for each of the resource types. It also gives me an excuse to have three different pipe colours, making factory organisation easier to understand at-a-glance, but also look a little nicer too!

Anyway, that's about all for now. Hopefully I'll see you again in the next one! ❤️

[ajcgames]

Pipes

This evening it was time to start writing the foundational work for the new pipes subsytem. I managed to get something pretty decent put together in just a couple of hours, which I was quite happy about. All in all, the code came in at just under 500 lines.

A veritable smörgåsbord of pipes!

So there were a couple of interesting challenges to overcome with this. I wanted to achieve two goals - a freeform, non directional pipe laying system that automatically respected neighbouring connections, and a method to fill the network with fluid that wasn't frame-rate bound and performant at any scale.

The video probably does a better job showing how it all works than I can describe, but I was chuffed to have this running at hundreds of frames per second, and consuming less than 2ms of peak CPU time.

Some technical stuff

So, this will probably only really be interesting to anybody thinking about implementing their own system like this, but this is how it works:

Input pipes

The map can have any number of input pipes. This is where the fluid flows from. These are always considered 'fluid filled' - much like Minecraft's water source blocks. It's also where the algorithm that looks for connected pipes start from (a new search is done at every input pipe).

Pipe map

The entire surface of the map is represented by a 2-dimensional array of true/false flags. If a square is true, it has a pipe, and none if false.

To create the correct pipe shapes, I simply loop over all of the squares, and look at each square's 8 neighbours. There are only so many combinations of neighbours a square can have (16 in total), so it's just a case of telling the code which pipe shape needs to go in each space depending on these combinations.

When you lay or remove a pipe segment, I mark the entire pipe network as invalid, meaning it needs reprocessing again to determine what's filled and what's not. Marking it as invalid is just a process of marking all pipes as empty, ready for processing.

There's no guarantee that any piece of pipe is actually connected to a pipe source input, however, but that's where the next element comes in to play.

Flood fill

In order to fill the available, connected pipe network with actual fluid, I need to make sure everything that has a direct connection to the source is detected.

Starting at each input source, I traverse through every conncted neighbouring pipe segment and mark it as needing to be filled. I don't actually 'fill' anything at this stage - just add it to a list of 'things to fill'. This is important for speed reasons.

Network validation

If the pipe network needs validating (filling), I run through a loop about 50 times per logic frame (this is a number I can easily tweak). Each time I run the loop, I check the bottom item in my 'pipes to fill' list. For each of these, I mark it as filled, and again check the neighbouring squares for connected pipes - which get added to the end of my 'pipes to fill' list.

Eventually, over the course of several logic cycles (for large networks), the entire network is validated, and I can mark it as such. I can also do things like draw icons along the way for additional visual feedback if necessary (like in the example video, helping to show what's connected and what's not).

Why does this matter?

Doing this work in isolation from the main game allows me to check performance without having other parts of the game affect my results. I can also tweak and improve other aspects.

For instance - from the outset, I made sure that pipes could support different liquids. The basic mechanics of flood filling is exactly the same, but owing to the nature of how the algorithm works, connecting two separate fluids together in the same network will ultimately lead to one fluid occupying one part of the network, and all others losing out.

There are are ways to combat this - doing it as a flood-fill allows me to keep track of the network size and radius from the source, giving me a way to restrict fluid from propagating beyond a certain distance, which could help. It could also be gamified owing to it needing 'pumps' to be including in the network to make the fluid go further. That's not really something that fits with this game though, since the map sizes aren't Factorio-like :D

Either way, making sure performance is solid is a key aspect for me in this project. If it ever becomes a polished, releasable thing, I want to make sure I've done some due diligence in making it perform as best as I can make it, and things like this are important steps to that goal.

That's all for now!

Anyway, that's about it for the moment. Thank you if you made it this far, hopefully there was something interesting in here for you to read. Otherwise, I hope you have a great evening, and I'll hopefully see you in the next one! 👋

[ajcgames]

Clunk

One of the primary mechanics for pushing the main objective forward (along with making money) is the Exporter. I wanted to make sure that using it felt better than just clicking a button and that was all there was to it.

So I finally added an animation to it, along with some suitably clunky sound effects to give it a bit more of a solid feel.

The exporter now gives some feedback as it launches your payloads into space!

I've done some remedial work on a few elements of the game, tidying some bits and pieces off that got left over the last couple of features I worked on. I should be now mostly clear to work on the pipes system - a veritable beast! Or at least, has the potential to be. We'll see how it goes!

That's all for this mini update. Hopefully I'll be able to make a start on the pipes system soon, so when I do I'm sure to share some more details on here. Hopefully I'll see you here when I do! :)

[ajcgames]

Credited

I jumped into some game dev first thing this morning - always a nice complement to my morning coffee - and managed to finish off the credits system.

Pay for things!

I tweaked the design of the information pop-ups in the tech panel to show the cost of each machine. Belts and belt equipment (splitters and mergers) are 100% free to build. It just feels like unecessary friction to make players pay for things that they're going to need to use constantly.

I'm just using some cost numbers I've plucked out of the ether for now, I'm not sure I'll keep these. I'll have to balance out the pacing between how many credits you start the game with, how often you need to purchase and place down machines, and how quickly you can start earning money via the Exporter. This will likely become apparent as I continue to playtest.

So, taking a look at my current working list of main tasks, here's how it looks so far:

Main objectives view

Packager machine

Exporter machine

Research tree

Technology upgrades

Money / credits system

Structure descriptions (QoL)

Audio refinements (QoL)

Main menu screens

New pipes subsytem

I'm almost at the end of this one! Just a couple of items left (one, the pipes system, admittedly being a larger piece of work). Here's hoping that I can further this progress toward the weekend!

Anyway, that's all for now. Thanks again for swinging by, and I'll hopefully see you in the next one!

[ajcgames]

A place to learn

A quick update on a new inclusion - the Codex.

I've wanted to have some place in the game you can go to in order to learn what you can do with newly-unlocked or discovered materials.

Since this game will have a fair selection of machines with which to process items with, it seemed like a good idea to give players a guide on what machines can process what items.

The scrolling background of the new panel doesn't translate so well through compressed video, try to full screen it if it's looking a bit jarring!

For now the limited number of items makes this panel look a bit sparse - but it'll quickly fill out as you unlock new items and ways of processing them.

That's about all for the moment, but I'll hopefully be back again soon with some more updates!

Until then, have a good one! :)

[ajcgames]

A late lunch level-up

I had a bit of a mad morning at work today, so it was nice to finally take a break over lunch and spend some time tweaking and improving the audio system a little.

I've added many more idle machine sounds, along with some additional work on the exporter machine. You can now actually export things! And what's more, you'll get some credits for the value of what you exported (along with fulfilling any export-related objectives you have on the go).

Here's a look at how everything's shaping up so far:

I've also tweaked a lot of the animations since I discovered to my horror that they were tied to the frame-rate, rather than the frame time, so that's all fixed now and things are running at the correct speed!

The result is a delectable hustle and bustle of machines and processing that feels really nice to just sit back and watch.

I'm hoping to spend some more time later on implementing the credits system into the wider game. It'll mostly be for structure purchases at the moment. I've already set the game up to give the player a starting wad of cash of 10,000 credits, so I'll see how that goes.

Anyway, that's all for now. Hopefully I'll be back on later with some more progress. Until then, have a great day! ❤️

[ajcgames]

What's in a name?

Up until now, the game has remained (mostly) nameless, besides a brief stint as 'Supply Space' - a name cribbed from an older project of mine which never got past the prototype stage.

I spent a little while chatting with some friends of mine about what might sum up the combination of prospecting and factory-building with the overall space theme, and we collectively came up with something I think is pretty neat, and will now be the name of the game moving forward!

I love the double riff here of both the setting and the type of game this is. Even if I don't stick with this name until the end (though this is a really strong identity I think!) it now at least gives me something to build the game around.

Aside from this little bit of identity ideation, I spent a little while this evening putting together a new front end menu system to replace the ugly older placeholder stuff I had in some weeks ago.

Combined with the new logo, it all feels much more gelled-together now. You can see that most of the front end menu is empty right now - it's mostly because I spent most my time building out a modular system to make moving between any number of different menu screens easier in the long run for me (programatically speaking), so a kind of 'do the work now to make the later work easier' kinda deal.

I'm still taking it fairly easy for the first few days of this week as I had a pretty heavy bank holiday weekend of programming. A little under a week and a half ago I had around 4,300 lines of code in the game. Today it just went over 7,200. So it's definitely been a busy application of my spare time!

Anyway, that's all for this evening. I'm going to go and catch up on some TV shows and enjoy another day's break from programming to recharge the batteries, and I'll be back again soon with some more progress to share.

Thanks again for taking the time to swing by here and especially if you found it worth reading to the end. I'm grateful for your likes and time, and I hope you're having a great week wherever you are!

Hopefully I'll see you in the next one! Until then, see you soon! 😊

[ajcgames]

The first 14 minutes!

I spent a little while noodling around this evening, and decided to wipe my save game and play for a short while to see how everything felt. I mostly wanted to make sure everything felt cohesive and gelled together, and I'm pleased with how it came together.

Anyway, if you fancy checking it out, it's linked down below, and gives a good overview of everything that's in the game so far.

Have a great evening!

[ajcgames]

The Big Weekend - Part 2

It's been a pretty intense weekend of development. I'm really happy with the way the project is shaping up.

Every now and then I clear my save game and just play through what I've got so far, enjoying it as if it were my first time playing. It feels tactile and clean as an experience, and is really starting to feel like a game now. I couldn't have hoped for this to go any better so far, so I'm still full of zest and ambition to take it as far as I possibly can!

The list of things

I started most of the 'big weekend' work late on Saturday (after I'd spent the time doing some remedial work on some bugs and other project errata). Since then I've probably clocked up somewhere around 26 hours of development on the project. My main goals - implementing working versions of both the technology upgrade and research screens - were complete as of about a couple of hours ago.

So now it's worth taking a look at my last 'big list' and where things are now sitting:

Main objectives view

Packager machine

Exporter machine

Research tree

Technology upgrades

Money / credits system

Structure descriptions (QoL)

Audio refinements (QoL)

Main menu screens

New pipes subsytem

That's 60% of my list taken care of, and leaves some interesting new developments ahead.

The money system will probably get delayed until I've worked on other things. It's going to be tied into other parts of the game, and I need to find a good way for the player to generate money besides just science conversion. I'll likely have to add some form of shipping remuneration to the Exporter mechanic.

Structure descriptions is mostly just a quality of life issue for the UI, and I already have the descriptions (you can see them in the Research & Development screen). This will just be adding them to the build selection panels.

Main menu screens are pretty self-explanatory. Now that the game has much of its aesthetic already defined, I'm now in a better place to work on this. It'll be perfunctory to start with, and I'll invest more time in it at a later date when I need to do things like keybinds, video options and suchlike.

Then there's the pipes system. This will be a much bigger bit of work, but one I'm looking forward to tackling. This will require me to dive back into my building / placement code, but I've hopefully set up enough convenience code to make adding another class of buildable object fairly easy. Maybe I will have jinxed the entire thing by saying that, but I'll remain optimistic for now!

Into the new week

That's it for the big (bank holiday) weekend! It's been a lot of fun, and some big strides have been made. I'm going to rest up for a day or so now and find something else to do whilst I plan out my next developments.

Thanks again for stopping by my ramblings here. Hopefully you found something of interest in here!

Have yourself a great evening, wherever you are, and hopefully I'll see you in the next one! 😊