*Psst* Over here. No, here, in the Fizzberry shrub. Ah, there you are. Chay ho. I wanted to let you know we are in thick of it. We’re creating and connecting the game’s basic planetary survival mechanisms. This means we’re defining and detailing two big picture gameplay areas: health and harvesting.

Granola Bars Don’t Stop Bleeding

Jun and I have begun creating the “life” parameters for gameplay – the ways to measure how much energy, sanity, and fitness a character would have. There’s a little more fine-tuning we have to do, but we’re avoiding the traditional depictions of health points as a bar that goes up and down based on, well, for example, getting scratched by a Galactelope. Rather we’re shooting for a little more depth. Health will be tied to a set of “conditions” that need to be addressed, and a specific part of the character’s body will be affected. Poison in the stomach, punctured lung, etc. Each condition will have a specific level of severity. A scratch will be a minor condition, easily patched by a bandage or it will simply heal on its own. But a laser shot to thigh is serious, which causes major blood loss – too much bleeding and you’re done. This style of life management, we imagine, lends itself to a more intimate experience with the simulacra you will control. Here’s a little diddy of our prototype health monitoring info screen as we generate character names:



Health Parameters and Name Generation – Indie DB

Smacking Things for Stuff

We’re not re-inventing the wheel with harvesting. It’s your familiar progressions of approaching an object, seeing if the harvest option appears, and then smacking the object with your multitool until it yields the resources you need.

The one wrinkle we are adding is the ability to harvest gasses in the atmosphere via a nifty tool called the Chugboy. As it’s name suggests, this little sucker vacumes the “air” or liquids of a certain area, creating canisters full of the element harvested. For example, you can wander into a Nitrogen-rich patch of planet and harvest it for crafting.

All that said, we’re pretty pumped with how the game is starting to come out. It was nice speaking to your from this shub, but I really must get back to my jungle fort. Oh… I should tell you about building capabilities. Meet me back here in four moons.



Harvesting, Mining, etc – Indie DB