The Gaslamp Games office is heating up.

Top Men sweat furiously, cursing script errors and crashes. Top Buttons are unbuttoned, frantic SVN commits hammered out. Meanwhile Daniel “Action CEO” Jacobsen blasts some Kenny Loggins to set the mood. In other words, we’re implementing a stricter quality control protocol for pushing test builds of the game as we get closer to the danger zone. People have been putting decisive, serious looks on their faces while they nod with their arms crossed.

So just this morning after a round of furious internal testing, we’ve fixed/added/unbroken:

Some kind of crash due to workcrews?

People no longer gossip with dead people

Food displays food value

People prefer to eat cooked food over raw food

Pathfinding error fixed

Fixed temporary tools not deleting themselves when dropped (and weapons no longer delete themselves, because they shouldn’t).

And there’ll be another round this afternoon set to “Eye of the Tiger”. The product of this frenetic development will then get sent to our “lucky” testers (who are super patient and wonderful people and good looking) for additional beatings. As shall become the Weekly Tradition, our changelog for the next testing revision is as follows:

FIXED: Tables causing script spam, then exciting animation errors

FIXED: another memory leak in gameSimRequireModule::RequirementMet

FIXED: beacon crash

FIXED ( ? ): rendMachine crash

TEST: For now, colonists will summon any tool needed to do a job out of thin air. The tools will disappear upon drop. This does not apply to weapons, which will be limited to what you start with and must be crafted to gain more. Basic tools removed from gamestart.

Character tooltips now display if a character is not assigned to a work party (B. Orel)

Alert icons will now display over characters if they have something you should deal with, Banished-style. BANISHED STYLE. (B. Orel)

FIXED: More table script spam, leading to a console that is 135 megabytes long

FIXED: holy crap, oneSecondUpdate in citizen.go was deactivated. No one starved, got tired, etc. It’s now reactivated, so people can suffer again.

Food value is now pulled from the “restorative” field from foods in edb ; this is used to reduce hunger.

Food is going to become really, really important now. Eating anything no longer completely resets hunger; bread is now 1/3rd as effective as before, you cannot sustain a colony on raw cabbage. Colonists can go 3 days without food before dying. Good luck!

increased starting fog of war reveal radius a little

FIXED: Colonists will no longer target corpses for gossiping

FIXED: somebody eating, or otherwise mutilating, the corpse of an overseer will crash the work party menu

People now prefer food tagged “cooked_food” over “raw_food”; no accommodation has yet been made for the raw food diet.

tooltip for food will now show a numerical food value

So, basically we added a bunch of starvation so that player’s colonies can become Blasted Famine-ridden Hellscapes.

Now I’d like to take a moment to discuss two Game Design points that have come up in the last few days: Tools and Starvation.

Tools, the problem with

We have been treating tools as discrete objects on the map that must be crafted then picked up and wielded for a worker to do certain jobs. What happens if a work crew of six workers takes on tree chopping jobs and you only have four axes? Right now, two workers are left idle and the player isn’t told why. This obviously isn’t good as the player is not given feedback that provokes them to solve the problem, they just see people not doing their jobs and get mad at the loafers (as they should be). There’s a lot involved in making this work correct, just for a start we should have workers attempting to do a job query idle workers who are holding the required tools, and there should be UI helpers stuck to everything so that the player knows this is going on, and knows when it fails and why.

So while the solution is clear, it’s really complex to implement. We’re juggling a lot of feature developments so it’s impossible to implement every solution at the same time right now. So, janky hack: I removed tools from the game and made them spawn from thin air when a worker requires one. When they drop the tool, it disappears. This is good enough for now even if part of the game economy is removed because other more pressing issues/features must be resolved for players to really appreciate the game economy enough to want to worry about how many axes they have in the first place.

Game development triage, in other words. (Though don’t worry, tools as discrete objects will be back when the systems are in place to support it.)

Food, why we need it

Up to this point colonies have been running happily by eating tons and tons of raw cabbage. No longer! Each type of food will now provide a certain amount of nourishment, with cooked food being significantly more nourishing than raw food. This should encourage players to build up a more complex production system rather than grubbing about with raw cabbage forever.

Starvation also now works again and people will definitely die if left without food for a few days. They will also make more macabre choices about what to eat as they get hungrier; when a certain threshold is reached, well, if it can be eaten it’s food right?

While testing the game this morning I watched a woman hoe a field of cabbage and think about death.