EARLY ACCESS ROADMAP

Yesterday we met up and got a plan in place for what we need to do to bring Zpoc into Early Access!

HEALING / FIRST AID:  

Right now there is no way to heal an injured unit.  When a unit gets injured or sick, they should lay down in bed and rest until their HP regenerates.  

GAME OVER CONDITIONS:

When all of your units die, there will be a game over screen informing you of your need to get better at playing the game.  Maybe we’ll even include a restart button, if you ask really nicely.

Eventually if one of your units is just miserable in your colony, they might leave you for another colony or just strike out on their own.  This will hinge on a lot of work on feelings and relationships, which we plan on doing after we enter Early Access. Either way, if you have no members of your colony left, you fail.

FEELINGS:

We’re using the PixelCrushers Love/Hate plugin to manage relationships and emotions of every unit and NPC in Zpoc.  It uses some pretty awesome algorithms to process numeric reactions to “Deeds” committed by your units, but we have to tweak it a little bit for it to suit our needs.  

Today Sam implemented a basic system to differentiate between Deeds like “Emily punched Connor” and “Emily ate raw human meat”, so their moods will be affected differently by various events.  

If Emily punches Connor and then has to eat raw human meat to survive, Connor will take delight in her misery.  Emily can’t randomly go punch Connor yet, but it’s nice to know he has the capacity to hate her for it when she does.  Who knows, maybe he’ll even deserve it.

If Emily sleeps in a bed, she’ll be happier than if she sleeps on a couch.  But she’ll just be happy to not have to sleep on the floor. Eventually the amount of happiness gained or lost will tie in with the quality of the thing you sleep on/eat/satisfy any need with.

EMOJIS AND PORTRAITS:

It’d be great to see at a glance how your units are feeling and what they’re currently up to, so we’re going to make emojis display over their heads!  We also discussed having a sort of Unit navigation at the left edge of the screen where you can see all of your units, their portraits, and happiness levels.  Clicking on the portrait should send the camera to follow that particular unit around the map.

MOVING FURNITURE:

We’re going to make it so that you can move furniture around instead of having to scrap it and rebuild it.

CRAFTING UPDATES:

Right now everything you can craft is in one big list.  We plan to separate it into two sections, “Build” and “Craft”, so that “Build” button will finally be useful for something!  Crafting will be used more for items that you’ll typically only want to build one of, like machetes and traps. Building will be more for structures, and allow you to place many instances of a thing in the world to be crafted.  For example, if you’re building a long fence, it would suck to have to continuously hit “Craft”, “Fence”, “Build” for every wall segment so we’ll just let you place as many as you want until you right-click to clear the building selection.

This will result in many “proxies” or “ghost-items” in the world, which your units will then place resources in as they become available and then craft it when it has the resources.

GARDENS, TRAPS, AND RAIN BARRELS:

Aaron is currently tweaking the way containers work in order to pave the way for gardening, traps, and other items that will help your units survive.

Currently if your units eat all of the food on the map or drink all of the water, there is no way to get more.  Not for long! With the new rat/mouse traps, rain barrels, and gardens, your units can sustain themselves on rainwater, vegetables, and rat meat!  For now these items will generate at various intervals. We have no concept of weather, so you’ll have to suspend your disbelief temporarily as the rain barrels magically produce water.  Eventually we may have the traps require some sort of bait, but for now they will just rely on their winning personalities to attract rats for your colony to eat.

If you find seeds in the world, you’ll be able to plant them and grow a number of tasty vegetables.  Once we get a skill system in place, this will depend on your unit’s gardening aptitude. For now, all gardeners are created equal.

PLACEABLE HOME BEACON:

Don’t like the house we start in?  Now you’ll be able to “move into” any house you want by placing a beacon.  For starters, this beacon will draw in wandering units to keep them close to the home base.  Eventually we want to get a more elaborate system for defining a base zone, even marking specific rooms for specific purposes.

SAVING & LOADING:

Rod has heroically taken the reins on serialization, saving and loading, and is currently working on a way to deconstruct and reconstruct all of the data we’re working with.  This is a big job with many factors, so we can’t say for sure whether or not this will be ready in time for Early Access.